Kele Okereke webchat – your questions answered on protest music, Pixar films and #GrimeForCorbyn

Thank you very much for letting me into your comment section! I hope it was as much fun for you as it was for me. Peace out bitches!

I don't know. I hope it hasn't. I'm angry. And I'm still angry six months into the Trump administration. It's odd with me because Fatherland was recorded in the summer of 2016, so although there were rumblings on the horizon I didn't think that we would be in this position. I didn't think he would actually become president. So it feels slightly odd to release Fatherland now because the vibe is quite chilled, but I don't feel chilled. I feel the opposite of chilled. What I'm working on now is going to very much express that anger.

I feel this is still true and worse now. With A Weekend In The City, I think a lot of people were down on that record at the time because they thought it was super critical. But I feel that the perspectives on that album have more than been validated recently in the last few years. I was very worried as a young person about the West lurching to the right. And I think it has quite spectacularly in the last few years. It still makes me sad when I think of where we are right now but I am hopeful that this period is the end of something rather than the start of something. I hope people will come together to carve out a new way and a new path. That's what I really, really hope happens.

Has the music scene changed for the better? I don't know so much about the current scene, I live in a bit of a bubble. I have my corner of the world and I'm allowed to do what I want to do. I don't go to gigs much anymore. If I go out it's mainly to clubs where you're surrounded by people who look and think like you. So I couldn't say what the boardrooms of labels look like - the ethnic make up of the people who make decisions about who to promote. I imagine it's still very much a white boys club. It definitely felt like that at the start of our career and I imagine not much has changed but I might be wrong.

I've never been a fan of it at all. Not the taste and not the process. So I don't know how it ended up in the song.

You know what, it's funny you're asking me this. We're moving house at the moment and I'm putting all my life into boxes at the moment. I came across this picture of myself with my best friend and Vanilla Ice. I can't remember the experience I was so, so wasted at the time. But I do remember somebody filmed it and that's the only reason I know it happened.

When I get drunk I feel like I can do quite good impressions. But only when I'm drunk. Am I better at them when I'm drunk? It's more that I think I am. It's not famous people I impersonate, more people that I know.

Sandcastles. Because I'm not really a big fan of snow. In fact I hate the cold. Whereas sandcastles are made at the beach and it's likely to be warm. That's a more pleasurable environment for me.

I haven't spoken to him since the "incident" [they once had a fight in a Shoreditch bar] but I saw him at an awards ceremony in Germany. He was presenting an award to someone and I won an award for something. Sadly he wasn't presenting it to me – that would have been amusing. But I don't wish him any ill will. I'm surprised he's still alive actually.

It's changed over the years. With every album it's different - certainly for the first three Bloc Party albums we made I used to have pages and pages of notepads filled with lyrics. And when we were writing music I would find lyrics and try to shoehorn them into the musical structures. Over the years I've started to feel dissatisfied with that process. Nothing would really scan properly. So when I started making solo records with the Boxer I took a different approach. I started to have a much freer approach. Just using initially little phrases and then writing the songs around that rather than trying to shoehorn ideas into these musical structures. I found that rewarding, and it kind of evolved through the years. It's my preferred way of writing now - to let the music dictate how the song is going to work. I have a notepad on my phone so whenever I have a lyrical phrase I write it down so I don't forget it. Whenever I'm writing a song I bring the notepad up and see if there's anything on there that will work. There's an element of spontaneity.

Yes I do remember it. I bought it from the music shop on High Street North in East Ham where I lived with my parents. I think it's a chicken shop now. But yeah, it cost £80 and it wasn't like a fancy guitar in the slightest. I knew nothing about guitars. I just liked the colour - it was sleek and black and had a red scratch plate. That was the first one I bought but it wasn't very good. I think it was a Yamaha ... an Argos catalogue guitar.

I think it was a combination of things. After making my last solo album Trick I spent a lot of time in clubs, DJing and playing electronic music in very sweaty packed spaces. It was incredibly enjoyable connecting with people on that level but there was a point where I started to miss the intimacy of just performing by myself. I was starting to miss the guitar. You have to be careful with dance music because you can start to think it's the only way to make music. The style came to me when I thought it would be nice to make an album full of lullabies for my daughter. That was really how the album started - I wanted everything to just be my guitar and a voice. As the project went on it got bigger, I worked with other musicians. But I wanted to make songs that I could sing to her easily.

I'm definitely not sceptical. I'm definitely pro-Corbyn. When the right wing newspapers kept saying they felt he was unelectable I remember feeling frustrated because it felt like they were shaping the narrative for their own ends. Look at how they destroyed Ed Miliband. It's not right. So it feels incredibly validating that Corbyn has resonated so strongly with the youth. Because young people are the future. He's clearly in it for the right reasons. I've become used to ignoring or viewing what the media says with a form of scepticism. Did music make a difference? I'm not so sure. That kind of thing, of course I see the appeal but I'm also reminded of when someone like Tony Blair met with Britpop musicians in the 90s just for cool points, so I'm somewhat sceptical of that as well. It feels like every image these days that we see has an element of spin about it so I'm still wary of those sorts of things. But I feel it's good, ultimately, if it encourages discussion and debate.

Great. I feel very lucky I was able to work with him because I'd been a fan of his band and him really for a very long time. I remember reading something that he wrote about the use of pronouns in pop music for gay artists that I thought that was very perceptive and intelligent – just that the use of pronouns was the last frontier for gay artists. There are lots of gay acts that avoid using the term he when singing about same sex desire. It will just be a neutral term, whereas Olly understands from what I read that there is a long way to go for gay musicians in being able to describe love and desire authentically. So I was very happy to sing a romantic duet with him on my album, because I couldn't think of a precedent of any out gay musicians singing a love song to one another without having to hide behind codes. It was nice to put that all out there.

This is probably a question about the mechanics of the industry and whatnot but I feel that I can't really answer it. I can only really speak about my particular journey and as a creative person and because we were lucky at the start of our career, to have an element of success, we've never struggled to make records. The only struggles we've had is the personal struggle that any artist has. I feel that the music I'm making now is different to the music I was making ten years ago, but that's to be expected.