Bloc Party, O2 Southampton Guildhall, review: A return tinged with identity crisis

A new line-up and a trio of bizarre support acts – the band haven’t quite lost their charm, but they are missing something

At times Bloc Party were near faultless, but at others they didn’t quite know who they were anymore

It’s difficult to pin down the current state of Bloc Party. After four albums and the departure of half the band, many would’ve have thrown in the towel.

But that hasn’t happened. Instead, remaining original members Kele Okereke and Russell Lissack recruited a new drummer, Louise Bartle, and a new bassist, Justin Harris, and pressed on with a fifth album, Hymns, released last week, and returned to the stage at the NME Awards Tour with Austin, Texas.

And this is where the problem begins. Grime MC Bugzy Malone, Rat Boy and Drenge provided what was, quite frankly, a trio of strange support acts. Some would praise this as a line-up only a magazine as diverse as NME could produce, but in reality it felt clunky to a Southampton Guildhall a long way from full capacity.

Sound Of 2016 nominee, voice of ‘disaffected youth’, and Jamie T rip-off Rat Boy was an understandable addition to the bill, although his love for chaos and idiocy is surely nothing more than a façade to impress fans who were barely able to talk in 2005 when Bloc Party’s debut Silent Alarm was released. Sheffield based Drenge, on the other hand, didn’t need the bravado of Rat Boy; chaos is a certainty wherever they go.

But something didn’t sit right; the diversity of the crowd, from the teens Rat Boy pulled in to those in their twenties hoping, for just an hour, they could be care-free again, led the evening to something resembling an identity crisis.

It was the same for Bloc Party themselves; it’s hardly surprising given the recent line-up changes. Opening with ‘The Good News’, the latest single from Hymns, which is far different to any previous Bloc Party album, it was clear this wasn’t what the crowd wanted to hear. But immediately after came ‘Mercury’, from 2008’s largely electronic Intimacy, and a switch had been flicked, the Guildhall was hanging onto frontman Kele Okereke’s every word, and it was evident why so many people had fallen for Bloc Party’s charm. Classics such as ‘Banquet’ and ‘One More Chance’ met with the same reaction, and Okereke didn’t need to sing the first verse of ‘Helicopter’, it was sung at him like it was the mid noughties.

Maybe it’s always difficult to tour a new album just days after its release, especially when you probably know that any album you release will not have the same impact as earlier works. Yet, it wasn’t just that fans, old and new, didn’t know tracks from Hymns, it was the fact they didn’t seem to want to know them. It all felt so familiar, yet so drastically different at the same time.

In previous years, the NME Awards tour has been a showcase for guitar bands on their way to their peak, which made Bloc Party’s appearance all the more frustrating. At times they were near faultless, but at others they didn’t quite know who they were anymore.