Nobody could accuse Kele Okereke of standing still. Following the release of his acclaimed 2017 solo effort, Fatherland, he’s spent the second half of this year on a sold-out international tour with his band Bloc Party, who are revisiting their beginnings by performing their seminal debut album, Silent Alarm, in its entirety. Meanwhile, he’s somehow found time to co-compose the score for the highly anticipated new musical Leave to Remain, which opens at the Lyric Hammersmith in January, with songwriter Matt Jones.
And while his professional life continues to metamorphosise, his personal life has also taken on a new dimension as he, along with his partner, welcomed a baby girl into their lives. They called her Savannah. When I interviewed Okereke for Attitude magazine last year, I reminded him that he’d once proclaimed that his solo album came about because all his bandmates wanted to stop and have babies, but he wanted to wait until he was 35.
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“Did I say that? Wow!” he said. “I’ve always wanted to be a father, but as a gay man I didn’t know if it was possible.”
While being a gay parent in the UK these days isn’t exactly a revolutionary act, back in the mid-noughties a queer black singer fronting an indie rock band was nothing short of extraordinary. This was a scene dominated by straight white men where a certain type of swaggering masculinity was the default, yet here was a softly spoken, soulful gay man whose band was leading the race.
Even though Okereke himself didn’t formally come out until his solo career took off, during Bloc Party’s reign his queerness was hiding in plain sight. He was never a flamboyant performer in the Freddie Mercury mould, and he didn’t openly embrace his sexuality the way a new generation of queer singers including Olly Alexander, Troye Sivan and Hayley Kiyoko would come to do. But his tender masculinity and softly coded lyrics spoke volumes.
For Okereke, it was always about the music first and foremost, not his sexuality, or his colour for that matter. However, in an interview with Butt magazine back in 2010, Okereke set the record straight and explained that it wasn’t as simple for him as suddenly deciding to be a visibly queer musician, saying: “My parents are super-Catholic and they came from a culture in Nigeria where there weren’t any visible gay people who were out and who were happy.” Things were rough when he did come out to his parents but he has reconciled things now. Speaking today, as part of the Guardian Labs and Google Pixel 3’s Tales of the everyday extraordinary series, he says one of his most cherished possessions is a gold chain his mother gave him – a normal object that makes him look at the world differently every time he picks it up. “It gives me a strong connection to [my mother]. Even when I travel, I still feel like I’m with her,” he says.
As a young, gay, indie music fan myself, who was many years away from landing the job of deputy editor of Attitude, I can attest to the importance of seeing someone like Okereke up on stage back then. And even though he might have been deliberately singing ambiguously, when Okereke launched into I Still Remember, from sophomore album A Weekend In The City, the queer intent was clear. The song is about two teenage lovers, both too afraid to make a move (“You should have asked me for it/I would have been brave”). Here was someone who saw the world differently, here was someone like me.
Fast forward 11 years and there’s nothing coded about Okereke now, or the songs he sings. On Fatherland he duets with Years & Years’s Olly Alexander, on a track called Grounds for Resentment. “It’s the first time I’ve ever sung a romantic duet with another boy, and that’s important,” he says. “I feel, as a gay singer, you can fall into the trap of thinking we’re not really allowed to express desire. That as a gay man singing about love and desire, everything has to be coded.”
That trap has opened wide now and Okereke can proudly count himself among a legion of queer musicians whose sexuality is everyday, yet still extraordinary.
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Okereke’s boundless musical curiosity has since seen him move into theatre as he scores a highly anticipated new play, out early 2019. Leave to Remain tells the story of a gay couple whose marriage forces two very different families to come together.
While it’s clear that Okereke’s not short of projects to give his attention to, his primary focus for the foreseeable future is his own family. When I asked him if he has any doubts about raising his daughter as a gay parent he’s firm in his response: “We’re going to do all that we can to make sure she has the strength to stand in her own convictions,” he says. “That’s how I’ve lived my life. I’ve had to go out and be myself in spite of what everyone was telling me.”
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