Niamh Redmond

A weekly post with my choice of a cool tune for a Friday.

This week’s cool tune is “Hunting for Witches” by Bloc Party.

“It was, thought Kele Okereke, good to be home. Bloc Party had been away, on tour, for almost two years. It had been a long time and a long way, but it was all great stuff: one million people had bought the band’s debut album Silent Alarm. British music weekly NME made it their Album Of The Year in 2005. It was in the UK album charts for a thumping 69 weeks. It wasn’t just the London-based four-piece’s home country that fell hard for their agit-jitter guitar pop.

Bloc Party - Okereke, Russell Lissack, Gordon Moakes, Matt Tong - had received similar plaudits across Europe, and in Japan. They raced up the charts in 17 countries. In America, they were the only Nu Skool Brit guitar band who could sell out 8000-capacity venues. With success like that, who wouldn’t be happy?

Nonetheless, Okereke was tired: Bloc Party’s frenetic pace - on stage, within songs - had propelled them, fast round the world, but it also meant their frontman felt ‘too many songs were at the same emotional pitch’. He was creatively frustrated: why couldn’t this mad music fan make beats and sounds like Timbaland could make beats and sounds? And Okereke was hungover: he came back to East London and partied hard how else to cope with all the changes in his life, and that the 25-year-old witnessed going on around him on the streets that he hadn’t walked in so many months? And yet, and yet… When, in early 2006, it came time to call a halt to the touring and begin work on their second album, Bloc Party’s frontman and lyricist was inspired - rather than suffocated - by what he felt inside, and what he saw going on around him.

All the joy + pain + freedom + chaos + success + tension + cocaine + nutjobs + racism + headless hedonism that swirled around him,, and the clubs, pubs, and pavements of his Bethnal Green home. Kele Okereke took that positivity, that negativity, that energy, and trammelled it - forced it - into a bunch of new songs.

The result: an album that is an electrifying and staggeringly direct chronicle of post-millennial Britain. Okereke’s bold, honest lyrics are set to ear-meltingly invigorating music. It’s guitar rock, but not as we know it. It’s Bloc Party, but not as we know them.”
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Lyrics:

I’m sitting on the roof of my house
With a shotgun and a six pack of beer
The newscaster say’s “the enemy is among us!”
As bombs explode on the 30 bus
Kill that middle class indecision
Now is not the time for liberal thought

So I go hunting for witches
Heads are going to roll
So I go hunting

1990’s, optimistic as a teen
But now its terror, airplanes crash into towers
The Daily mail say’s “the enemy is among us!”
“Taking our women and taking our jobs”
All reasonable thought is being drowned out
By the non-stop baying, baying for blood

So I go hunting for witches
Heads are going to roll
So I go hunting

I was an ordinary man, with ordinary desire
I watched TV it informed me
I was an ordinary man with ordinary desire
There must be accountability
Disparate and misinformed
Fear keeps us all in place

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 6:44 pm and is filed under cool tune FAF, video, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.