Bloc Party is a British indie rock band, composed of Kele Okereke on vocals and rhythm guitar, Russell Lissack on lead guitar, Gordon Moakes on bass guitar and Matt Tong on drums. Their brand of indie rock has been compared to bands such as The Cure, Gang of Four and The Strokes.
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Bloc Party is a British indie rock band, composed of Kele Okereke on vocals and rhythm guitar, Russell Lissack on lead guitar, Gordon Moakes on bass guitar and Matt Tong on drums. Their brand of indie rock has been compared to bands such as The Cure, Gang of Four and The Strokes.
The band formed at the 1999 Reading Festival by Okereke and Lissack. They went through a variety of names before settling on Bloc Party in 2003. Moakes joined the band after answering an advert in NME magazine, while Tong was picked via an audition. Bloc Party got their break by giving BBC Radio 1 DJ Steve Lamacq and Franz Ferdinand's lead singer Alex Kapranos a copy of their demo, "She's Hearing Voices", which was later released as a single.
In February 2005, the band released their debut album Silent Alarm. It was critically acclaimed and made NME s Album of the Year list. The album was certified platinum in the UK a year later. The band built on this success with the release of their second studio album, A Weekend in the City, in 2007. The album reached a peak of number two in the UK and number twelve in the Billboard 200. In August 2008, the band released their third album, Intimacy, with little promotion apart from the preceding single "Mercury", released digitally via their website. The CD version is to be released in October.
Formation and rising popularity (1999–2004)
Russell Lissack and Kele Okereke first met in 1998 in Essex. Lissack had attended Bancroft's School, while Okereke attended Ilford County High School, then Trinity Catholic High School, Woodford Green for sixth form. They bumped into each other again in 1999 at the Reading Festival and decided to form a band. Bassist Gordon Moakes joined after answering an advert in NME, and drummer Matt Tong joined after an audition. After going through a variety of names, such as Union, Superheroes of BMX, The Angel Range and Diet, the band settled on Bloc Party in September 2003, a play on block party. The band has said that the name was not intended to be an allusion to the Soviet Bloc or the Canadian political party Bloc Québécois. However, the band's bassist, Gordon Moakes, said on the group's official Internet forum that it was more a merging of the eastern "Blocs" and the western "parties", in the political sense. Moakes notes that the name was not driven by politics, but rather it "looked, sounded, seemed fine so we went with it."
In November 2003, Bloc Party had their track "The Marshals Are Dead" featured on a compilation CD called The New Cross released by Angular Recording Corporation. They then released their debut single "She's Hearing Voices" on the then fledgling record label Trash Aesthetics.
