Photo: Danny Payne
Happy Bloctober everyone. It’s been a long while, and the world is now a very different place. As Bloc Party take to the factory floor of the Warehouse Project, can they still deliver in the dying industry of rock?
Looking back through my rose-tinted spectacles to the sepia-stained glory days of 2005, it was quite the explosion when Bloc Party arrived.
Nowadays, guitar bands don’t event ‘explode’ anymore – they fizzle beneath the surface of the mainstream. As Manchester son Morrissey once asked: “has the world changed or have I changed?”
The answer is: both. Bloc Party’s evolution from indie hipstsers to dance-rock connoisseurs is reflected in tonight’s crowd alone. As their lazer light-show illuminates the faces of Manchester’s raving revelers, you can see that the Kele and co have become the everyman band (even down to his Timmy Mallet-esque shirt).
All walks of life are here –and they came here to dance.
It’s way past midnight before they even take to the stage to open with a fully- charged outing of hit single ‘Octopus’, but Manchester could go all night.
It’s fitting that Bloc party are curating the Warehouse Project as tonight really does showcase their standing as a hit factory. Kele is pumped on cocky showmanship and the band are as tight as they’ve ever been.
In their own words, they really are running on bravado. Now they’ve got the brawn to match the brains.
As if the crowd weren’t under the influence enough, ‘Positive Tension’ still jerks with as much infectiously intense urgency as it did way back when but it still sits comfortably alongside the dance-rock Odyssey of ‘Flux’ and the ferce electro of ‘Ares’.
A few formulaic moments of new album ‘Four’ seem to pass the majority by entirely, but it’s not long before fat Mancs are ripping their shirts off and erupting into circle pits for a frantically frenetic outing of ‘Helicopter’.
Not what you’d expect from the guys that Noel Gallagher once referred to as "a band off University Challenge". But that’s just what they do: defy expectations and stalk the scene like chameleons. So rock is dead? Fine, whatever. Long live Bloc Party.
