Kele Okereke is an Olympic-standard misdirection artist

Remember all that stuff last year when Bloc Party and Kele Okereke were supposedly falling apart?

It was all a ker-azzzzzy stunt:

Bloc Party's frontman has something to confess. In 2011, a little over a year after Kele Okereke released his solo record, The Boxer, the singer-guitarist impishly suggested he was worried about being given the axe by his bandmates Russell Lissack (guitar), Gordon Moakes (bass) and Matt Tong (drums), after he randomly ran into them outside of a New York City rehearsal space. "I don't really know what's going on," Okereke said at the time. "We haven't really spoken recently and I'm a bit too scared to ask." This, folks, is what magicians call misdirection. "We were making a record, but we weren't really letting anyone know," Okereke says now, speaking on the phone from a tour stop in Honolulu, Hawaii. "I was just joking and it kind of was taken out of context and became this huge story which was quite funny." Now with the impending August 21 release of their fourth studio album — straightforwardly titled Four — the band is ready to come clean.

Without wanting to be too tart, Bloc Party could have quite happily beavered away in the studio on a fourth album without anyone noticing with or without an elaborate misdirection stunt.

In fact, at the time, the idea that Party had got rid of Kele was a bit like when one of those notices appear in a shop that hasn't opened for a while announcing the landlord has taken back possession; it's just a little further out of business.

The purpose of the stunt was probably less about making people look the other way, as making people look, and it sort of worked. I'm not sure it did much to create desire for another album, though...