Kae Tempest: The Bold Future
Fresh from his powerful appearance at Glastonbury, and having just dropped his affirming new album ‘Self-Titled’, Kae Tempest is feeling reflective, excited, and lucky all at once. Most importantly, though, he’s feeling himself.
Midway through a packed tour schedule, Kae Tempest is running around a Paris hotel lobby and attempting to find a quiet corner to chat – profusely apologising as he goes. The poet, playwright, rapper, and recording artist has misplaced his glasses amid the mayhem of “life in transit”, so is (begrudgingly) wearing his shades. “I’m so sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “They’re prescription! I’m not trying to be, like, a cool rapper…”
Today, Kae’s speaking to DIY just a couple of days on from his electrifying appearance on Glastonbury’s Park Stage, which culminated with a powerful acapella performance of ‘Self-Titled’ opener ‘I Stand on the Line’.
A defiant celebration of hope, joy and resilience in the face of ignorance and bigotry, it reflects on the peace Kae has found, and the strength he takes from queer community and legacy. “Please, we have to keep living. Please, keep living. Please, keep living through it,” he urged, visibly fizzing with anxious, potent energy.
“I knew something was going to happen,” Kae reflects. “I knew I was going to be lifted.” Attempting to explain exactly what he felt from the crowd that day, he moves his hand around to trace the shape of an infinity symbol: “The energy that I felt coming back from the crowds… it was just this constant thing, everything felt so charged and alive. I kind of made that decision in the moment to finish acapella, and as terrifying as it was, I also knew that it was important.”
Kae explains that he also felt keenly aware that the set was being filmed and televised, which further emboldened him to take his top off during the performance. “It could actually have saved someone’s life,” he says, “seeing me on stage saying, ‘please keep living through it’ with my scars out, looking healthy, and well, and smiling. If I’d seen that, it would have done something to me. As many fears as I have about upsetting people, or getting a big backlash from people who think that my body is a mutilation or whatever, I also know that it’s very important. It felt right. I felt comfortable, clear, connected, in community. There were loads of beautiful trans people in the audience,” he says, “and then it was just like, fucking tops off!” he laughs. “Let’s go!”
Though he felt a sense of responsibility ahead of that particular performance, Kae adds that writing and recording in the studio is a different beast. “When it comes to being in the studio making work, it doesn’t really come into my head – the idea of having a responsibility to a community. That is important to me in my day to day life, but when I’m in with the ideas, I’m not thinking at all, ever, about the end point. I’m down in the fucking engine room. I’m making the work.
“All I’m thinking about is: what does it want from me? What does it want to be? How do I give it what it needs me to give? How do I receive it? How do I facilitate it? And then there is a moment, once the idea is finished, that you realise what it is you’ve made. Then, you do get this sense of thinking, ‘maybe this will be important for somebody, because I’ve told my truth’. Maybe it will allow somebody to connect more poignantly with their own. I hope it doesn’t feel like it excludes anybody. I desperately want people to feel kinship with it, who have been through similar things. But I also would hope that people who’ve never been through what I’ve been through resonate with it in some way, too.
“As James Joyce says: ‘In the particular is contained the universal,’” Kae adds. “The moment the song’s finished, the experience that it came out of is kind of irrelevant. Now it’s a song, and then you’ve got no control.”
DIY last spoke to Kae Tempest at length once before, a long time ago, ahead of the release of his second album ‘Let Them Eat Chaos’. Kae was thoughtful and reflective company that day, gladly discussing what he called “the mythology of the everyday” over a pint, but he also seemed slightly uneasy whenever talk turned to his own life, or his personal achievements as a highly-acclaimed artist working across the varied mediums of music, spoken-word, written poetry, prose, and theatre.
A decade on, you can’t help but notice a distinct shift in Kae now, which also carries right through into his music. Rather than narrating and exploring the lives of other people, Kae himself is often the central narrator, voice, and figure in both ‘Self-Titled’ and his previous album ‘The Line is a Curve’; although he is still holding up a mirror to the world in tracks such as the jazz-infused ‘Til Morning’ and the juggernaut rap track ‘Statue in the Square’, Kae’s outline more frequently appears in its reflections.
“I don’t feel like this album is more or less revealing than any other, but maybe it just feels more direct?” Kae wonders. “Maybe because… just where I’m at in my life, or what I’ve been through – like, transition is a huge thing – and this is just what’s come out of the last few years? That’s what albums are: it’s the way I process chunks of life, it comes out in what you make. This is just a part of this moment, and everything about this feels right, it feels good, you know?”
Still, he remains wittily self-deprecating about certain aspects of his career. “I really don’t like spoken word,” he laughs at one point, reflecting on getting his start as a slam poet. “I fucking never liked it! I just ended up doing it anyway.” We double take and almost choke on our coffee at this particular revelation.
“I was rhyming and making music, and it’s really, really hard to get anywhere with it,” he explains. “This was back in the days when you had to pay to play: you’d get a gig, but you’d have to pay to be on the bill. Every time somebody came through the door, the promoter would ask people who they’d come to see, and if it was you, you got a pound,” he laughs. “Anyway! My friend said, why not go to this open mic thing in Ladbroke Grove, it’s like a slam, and you can just do your lyrics, and if you win, you get £100. I won it – probably more money than I’d made in six months of music – and started getting booked.
“It was weird. It was never a scene that I was attracted to,” he admits. “None of the scenes that I’ve been involved in have ever felt nourishing or expansive enough,” he adds. “I’ve always felt limited, because people are infinite, and creativity is even more infinite than personality. What my creative imagination wants to do… it doesn’t make any sense to put it into a form that’s got nothing to do with how it feels.”
We think back to him being a near-permanent fixture of an old south London local The Birds Nest, where – pre-big mainstream breakthrough, and ahead of the release of his Mercury-shortlisted debut – he would often perform poetry for a packed, and honestly, mostly distracted, pub. “That place was like my house. I was probably trying to impress one of the lovely people that works behind the bar,” he laughs.
“The honest truth of it was that I could get 50 quid for doing a poetry gig. I decided if I do, like, three gigs a weekend – poetry gigs, in libraries all over the country, weird things in the foyers of museums, standing in this really busy pub where nobody wanted to hear poetry – then I’d pay my rent. And then,” he laughs, giving a comedy sigh, “everyone thinks that you love spoken word.”
For his new track ‘Sunshine in Catford’ – a joyful, infatuated moment of pure happiness from ‘Self-Titled’ – Kae plucked up the courage to get in touch with Pet Shop Boys legend Neil Tennant, having been encouraged to aim big by his producer Fraser T Smith. “It was fluent and wonderful, and I think I felt like I had his hand on my shoulder,” he says. “It’s a beautiful offering. If you think about those [Pet Shop Boys] songs back in the day, [spoken word] is what he’s doing,” he says. “That’s the original speech-rap, the original acapella. It was everywhere in the ‘80s, you know, the spoken interlude.”
As well as Tennant, Kae’s former Big Dada labelmates Young Fathers, singer-songwriter Connie Constance, and alternative soul artist Tawiah also feature as guests on ‘Self-Titled’. “I’ve always wanted to collaborate [before], but the process before has been quite insular,” he says, “or I haven’t had the capacity to, like, open up and ask.”
Rather than appearing on the tracklist as traditional featured artists, Kae’s collaborators are instead woven into the fabric of the album, ready to stumble across. “That was the dream of it all. It’s more exciting that way!” he says. “It reminds me of before, when you’d go and look at the vinyl notes to see who the players were. Listening to a John Coltrane record or whatever, and being like, ‘who is in this quartet?’ - you’d have to go and find out. And it makes you feel a part of it somehow. Not to compare myself to John Coltrane,” he laughs, “but that just came to mind because I was thinking about John Coltrane yesterday.”
Many artists, either at the start of their careers - or midway through at a significant turning point - use the concept of the self-titled album to make a statement: it’s shorthand for arriving at a destination, creatively. For Kae, it also has a second layer of significance: he chose his own name.
“It’s a nice, pleasing little joke, you know, for those that know,” he smiles. “I thought it was perfect, because generally speaking, your self-titled album is the arrival, isn’t it? That’s when people are like, ‘this is the album that sums me up’. Usually, that might be the first or second record that people put out, and obviously, for me, this is album number five. I thought it would be quite bold in that sense, to be like: ‘this is a beginning, as well as a continuation’. I also thought it was a bit tongue in cheek, because we are self-titled people.”
Musically, ‘Self-Titled’ is bold and scattered with punchy melody hooks, all teased out on the piano in the middle of Fraser T Smith’s studio. In the lead up, Kae was listening to Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘HISS’ on repeat, along with the progressive hip hop artist and Run the Jewels member El-P. “I went into the studio and just said to Fraser: “I want massive, huge music. I want everything to feel like it’s coming from the same musical source, and the same lyrical source. I want it to feel like a band could be in a corner of a club somewhere playing all this music live.”
The pair mostly recorded together around the studio piano, over an intense period of just a few months. “It just felt like a total escape from everything else that I was going through, and working on, and what was happening in my life,” Kae says. “It was like jumping into cool water on a really blazing fucking day. That’s what it felt like, every time I got there. It just felt refreshing and exciting, healing and powerful. It meant that I could work in a constant state of animated, intense joy.”
This feeling courses through the album, which draws on clever, playful devices such as Kae conversing with his younger self in ‘Know Yourself’. “I used to tell myself that you mustn’t ever write backwards,” he says. “When you’re making new work, you have to write forwards into the blank page: otherwise, you might attach yourself to the idea that your best work’s behind you and you won’t be able to keep going. That was the superstition I had developed,” he says.
“But after I made ‘Know Yourself’, I realised that actually it’s okay to write backwards into previous lyrics, and bring them forward into the present. I have been thinking about older work,” he adds.
“There’s going to be a new edition of Hold Your Own, which is a poetry book that I published 10 years ago. I’m going back into that manuscript at the moment and trying to refine it. Everything at that time: [Tempest’s first play] Wasted, Hold Your Own, everything… I was under so much time pressure. I was trying to do too much, and a lot of the writing was sloppy, rushed, forced. There was so much energy underneath it, but I didn’t have time to finesse or to finish things properly.
“There’s a rawness and a rush to it that I think is useful. It’s good. And I think it connects with people of a certain kind of age. Going back to Hold Your Own, I’m trying to make editorial changes that don’t inflict the perspective I’ve learned in 10 years onto the mind of the person who was trying to write it. I wouldn’t have written those poems if I wrote them now, they wouldn’t exist in the way they did then.”
On ‘Diagnoses’ he cracks a standout joke about turning down an MBE for fear of adding even more letters to his name. “I feel like the cringiest thing a person can do, if they’ve turned down an MBE, is talk about it,” laughs Kae, when we try to draw him further on this lyric.
”I just feel lucky to be in existence,” Kae reasons, pondering why ‘Self-Titled’ feels so effortlessly centred in joy. “It’s not easy to go through what we have to go through here – and I don’t mean ‘we’ as in trans people, I mean ‘we’ as human beings. There’s so much that can hurt a person and can go wrong. So I just feel really, really fucking grateful for a moment that feels so beautiful. By that, I just mean literally right now, this very moment, sitting here in a funny downstairs… I’ve no idea what this floor is for,” he confesses, laughing and looking around for clues.
“There’s a bar? There’s a pool table, and paintings on the wall of people, and roller skates… anyway! I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it’s wonderful to just wake up in the morning and be able to get on with whatever it is you’ve got to get on with. It sounds fucking trite, and it doesn’t make any sense to say out loud, but the feeling within me is very real.”
‘Self-Titled’ is out now via Island.
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