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Artist News
Bloc Party searching for new singer
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 28 September 2011
Bloc Party guitarist Russell Lissack has confirmed that the band are looking for a new vocalist to replace Kele Okereke.
As previously reported, Okereke recently told NME that he’d spotted Lissack while in a restaurant in New York and had followed him. When he got around the corner, he then saw all three of his bandmates go into a rehearsal studio together. “I hope I haven’t been fired”, he said. “I don’t really know what’s going on, because we haven’t really spoken recently and I’m a bit too scared to ask”.
Asked to confirm the story on Twitter, Lissack said: “I expect they [NME] will be announcing the auditions soon”. At the time, most took this to be a sarcastic comment, though a week later that is exactly what has happened.
In an interview with the music weekly, the guitarist said: “It’s not really a secret because Kele’s been pretty busy doing solo stuff and it looks like he’s going to be doing that a bit longer. The other three of us wanted to meet up and make music. We were talking about just doing an instrumental thing, but now we might get a singer as well, to properly put some music out and play some shows”.
Confirming that there had been no contact with the band’s former frontman, he added: “I haven’t spoken to Kele for a couple of months, I guess since the festivals when I was doing stuff with Ash. But there’s no bad vibes”.
Of course it’s possible there might be now. But hey, Okereke is due to release a new solo EP, ‘The Hunter’, on 31 Oct, so that’ll keep him busy. And it’s not entirely clear if the rest of the band intend to work without him under the Bloc Party banner or set up a separate group while they wait for him to return.
