Former Bloc Party bassist Gordon Moakes on his exit: “I thought drummer Matt Tong was the heartbeat of the band”

Former Bloc Party bassist Gordon Moakes has spoken about his exit from the group, citing the earlier departure of drummer Matt Tong, who he called the “heartbeat of the band”.

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Moakes joined the group in 2002 when they were still called The Angel Range after responding to an ad placed in NME by frontman Kele Okereke and guitarist Russell Lissack. He remained a member until 2015, playing on their first four studio albums.

Original drummer Matt Tong departed the band in 2013, quitting during an extensive tour, and as Moakes recently told The 22 Grand Pod podcast, Tong’s departure proved to be the catalyst for his own decision to leave the band.

“Matt quit, I wanna say about 20 shows from the end of that tour, they were all festivals,” Moakes said. “I was very sympathetic to Matt’s position on that.”

“When Matt left, I more or less knew that was me done, because I didn’t think the band was…I thought Matt was kind of like the heartbeat of the band, effectively. And I didn’t feel like there was a version of the band without Matt that I could probably do.”

“I wasn’t very fun that summer, for lot of reasons, but the main one was that Matt wasn’t there for me. And when I say Matt wasn’t there for me, what I mean is Matt wasn’t there. It was so critical for me to play off Matt, to look over to see Matt…so a little bit of me just dropped out of that band at that moment. I was just like, let’s just get through this, do these shows, then I’m done.”

Speaking about his final appearance as a member of Bloc Party at Latitude 2013, Moakes said that he was “taking a little bit more alcohol on stage than I might normally have”, recalling having a row of shots lined up on stage. “Yeah, I was probably a bit sloppy,” he added, “but the door was open and I was ready to walk through it.”

“And by the way, you know, there was plenty of sloppy playing on all corners of the stage at various times, I wouldn’t say I was any sloppier than anyone else had been at one time or another.”

In a 2015 NME interview, Okereke suggested that “deep-seated issues” led to Tong and Moakes’ departures, saying: “I can tell you it was about someone doing cocaine and someone not being into it. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Tong himself responded to these claims last year, telling 22 Grand Pod: “It’s come to my attention very recently that, you know, a lot of people actually have inferred that maybe I had a drug problem. Which I didn’t, at all.”

The drummer made clear that he found Okereke’s comments “frustrating”, adding that “it had nothing to do with me and Gordon”. He went on to say that he remembered feeling there was not “anything else I can gain, really, from being in this band”, adding that Okereke was not “cultivating a happy working environment”.

In the new interview, Moakes also chimed in on his and Tong’s mindset during the 2013 tour. “I feel like, actually if we’d done only 80 per cent of the shows we did on that run, we might have got through it to the end,” he said. “But we’d done too many shows, we were together much more than was healthy for that band at that moment.”

Responding to the Okereke’s drug comments, he added: “To be honest, whatever Kele said, and however that was reported, I thought was really clumsy and I didn’t appreciate it. Because it implied something that was not true at all. Especially anybody who actually knows me, I’m not really interested in that kind of stuff.”

“So for those of us who left the band to be tarred with this very idea that someone had a drug problem, I didn’t take kindly to at all, but I more or less shut the door on that.”

“It was a misleading thing I didn’t really appreciate, and it wasn’t true,” he added.

Elsewhere in the interview, Moakes reflected on the current incarnation of Bloc Party who are touring their debut album ‘Silent Alarm’ in full. “The positive for me is that I still earn [money] off the songwriting for that record,” he said. “So if the band are playing that record, and people are listening to it and buying it or streaming it, then that’s good for me.”

Moakes added: “In terms of whether they’re doing it justice, I couldn’t say.”

At the start of last year, Moakes launched a new band called The None – who would later release an EP, ‘Care’. They headed out on a UK headline tour in support of the project too. He is also a member of Young Legionnaire, whose second and most recent album was 2016’s ‘Zero Worship’.

That 20th anniversary tour of ‘Silent Alarm’ takes in a show at Live At Leeds in May and two huge shows in Manchester and Brighton in July. Before that, they head to the US for a string of shows that would have seen them playing alongside Metric, however Metric recently pulled out of the tour, alleging the Bloc Party team had “made some sudden production decisions” that broke an agreement between the two bands.

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