Bloc Party’s ‘Silent Alarm’ Tour Made Us Wish It Was Still 2005
"A middle-aged man decked in tie-dye climbs his mate's shoulders. Ecstatic, he sings each and every word."
“G’day, or should I say Good Evening?,” Kele Okereke asks an eager crowd at Sydney’s Hordern Pavillion. “We are Bloc Party, from London, England, and tonight we are going to take you back to 2005.”
We’re one song into Bloc Party’s set, a reverse play-through of their seminal debut album Silent Alarm. They’ve just played ‘Compliments’, a somber closer, which, in this context, slightly throws the crowd: they scream as the four piece arrive on-stage, then fall into a quiet admiration.
It doesn’t last long. Talking to Music Junkee ahead of the tour, guitarist Russell Lissack said the band plays Silent Alarm in reverse so as to build to a crescendo — and given that the anthemic ‘Luno’ is third on the list, it climbs quick.
As songs slide into one another, sounding as urgent and frenzied as they did at release, the crowd becomes increasingly animated. It is as if they, like me, soon realise it’s likely the only time they’ll hear Silent Alarm played through live, and strip inhibitions with each song as we climb towards the end.
Full disclosure: in 2005, I was 11. But, thanks to a burnt CD from my sister’s boyfriend, I spent that year (and many others) listening to Silent Alarm on repeat — it was my gateway into a world of indie-rock and ennui (and, thanks to Okereke’s ambiguous lyrics, a latent queerness).
Four years later, my first proper concert would be Bloc Party, at the same venue they were playing now. On the way home, I’d spot on Instagram that the friend I went with in 2009 was there in 2018 too, dancing and screaming just fifty-or-so people away.
A middle-aged man decked in tie-dye climbs his mate’s shoulders. Ecstatic, he sings each and every word.
Sorry to indulge myself, but it was a night of indulgence. Anniversary or throwback tours like this are sold on nostalgia: the crowd arrives carrying a sense of who and where they were back when. As to be expected, punters leaned late 20s onwards; less expected, they were respectfully going wild, where revisiting glory days wasn’t an excuse to dominate a space.
During ‘Price Of Gasoline’ — an anti-Iraq war anthem dressed down in Indie-rock aggression — a middle-aged man decked in tie-dye climbs his mate’s shoulders. Ecstatic, he sings each and every word.
Mid-way, Okereke promises a “present” before the band launch into ‘This Modern Love’, prompting the first mini-surge to the front of the night. Broad in its brushstrokes, the song is emblematic of early Bloc Party’s appeal — cocky enough to assume they could define a generational malaise, talented enough to allow people to believe it. Confetti explodes as the song does; across the Hordern, punters grab their friends around the shoulders, screaming the lyrics.
The crescendo arrives with Silent Alarm opener ‘Like Eating Glass’, its frantic minute-long intro riling up the crowd. Before the tour began, critics sneered, doubting that Bloc Party’s new members — drummer Louise Bartle and keyboardist Justin Harris — could capture the original recording’s intensity. They were wrong.
When the band leaves the stage, there’s a general sense of confusion among the crowd. What’s next? Upon return, Okereke addresses the awkwardness in a way befitting of some of his more endearingly awkward lyrics.
“G’day, again. We’re already played Silent Alarm, and we’re not going to play it again,” he laughs. “So we’re going to play some songs for the real fans.”
While the ‘real fans’ taunt was definitely tongue-in-cheek, it turns out that playing a trio of songs from their first EP was possibly a little too indulgent. Pockets of the crowd went off, but mostly, the crescendo fell flat — though A Weekend In The City highlight ‘The Prayer’ livened things again, as did two recent hits.
It echoes the same, somewhat unfair question that Bloc Party’s faced since releasing perfunctory albums Four and Hymns: where to from here? As the punters pooled out of the Hordern and order Ubers, 2005 becomes distant again.
Bloc Party’s ‘Silent Alarm’ tour continues in Sydney (sold out) and Brisbane this weekend.
Feature image by Mark See, via Secret Sounds Facebook page.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.