Interview “There was never an intention to make a statement” - Sons of Kemet talk ‘Your Queen Is A Reptile’

I think your surroundings create you. As a musician, the only way that they wouldn’t sculpt how you operate or sound is if you were creating within a set framework. If you were making salsa or bebop and just playing it as it’s always been presented, then maybe it doesn’t matter where you’ve grown up, because the stylistic mould has already been set. With our music, one of the defining traits is that we still try to see how far we can push it in terms of getting our experiences into the music, and how much we can get the different aspects of our lives that influence us to come out in the sonic tapestry.

It’s true that we’re trying to break down the boundaries that genres present, but we are still jazz musicians. That’s the music that we studied, and it’s something that’s influenced us. It’s not the only thing within that sphere of influence - we still have other forms of music that we’ve experienced and that have shaped our sound - but for me, the Impulse! connection is something that anchors our music to a certain era of the past. What we’re trying to do is change people’s perception of that. You look at Pharaoh Sanders or John Coltrane or Alice Coltrane come through the Impulse! family, and then you see us, putting our record out with them, and you see the trajectory of where history leads, rather than where it stops.

There was never an initial intention to make a statement. I don’t like going in and actually making a concerted effort to do that. We started making the album because we wanted to write and we wanted to record. These issues were around at the time in our minds, so some of the energy of these ideas - the stories of these women, and of the monarchy - they were beginning to influence the way we were writing and performing. We dedicated the songs to those messages.

Probably not. They gradually wound their way in, I think. We’d been contemplating them for a while, but they seemed to reach fever pitch around the time of the making of the album, and that’s for many reasons. The referendum result was one of them, but also trends on social media that seemed to amplify the patriarchy, and then of course the whole #MeToo movement. We were all thinking about the role of the patriarchy in shaping our reality, and the fact that women’s voices, both past and present, have been relegated to the peripheries.

Yeah. For one, because it’s an outlet of visibility, and that’s one of the things with ideas that come from outside the mainstream - you’re always wondering how you can put them in front of more people than are currently thinking about them. I was reading a lot about post-colonialism, and the record felt like a way for me to take these ideas from people like Frantz Fanon and Paul Gilroy and, even if only in a very watered-down state, present them to a wider audience. That’s an important aspect of artistry - the ability to take whatever message you choose and relay it to people that might not have come into contact with it within their regular lives.

I’ve been playing with him for a few years - if he’s performing in London and I’m around, I’ll usually do that. I’ve done some shows at festivals with him, and played at KOKO. I went up to his studio in Ramsgate to work with him on his own record, and then he reciprocated by helping us with ours. I’ve not been asked a lot about it, but there seems to be this sort of rolling engagement between jungle and jazz that hasn’t been above the radar so far. The way he’s used my band within his own music is quite revolutionary in a way, but not a lot of people have mentioned it in relation to the record.

There’s a broader importance to the nomination, above and beyond the fact that it’s nice to be recognised, because this award is one of the few spaces where jazz artists like us can be in the same room as somebody like Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen. For me, that’s a completely different world, and one that doesn’t have the same priorities as our world, so if we can bring them closer together, it can only be a good thing for music. What I mean by doing that is one, those artists being aware of what’s going on at the other end of the creative spectrum and two, having their audiences be aware that there are different types of music that they might be into out there.

Sons of Kemet have been shortlisted for the 2018 Hyundai Mercury Prize. For more information on this year’s Prize, head to mercuryprize.hyundai.co.uk/.

Brought to you as part of our media partnership with Hyundai.

The 2018 Hyundai Mercury Prize Awards Show is on Thursday, 20 September at the Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith featuring live performances from many of the shortlisted artists. Tickets are available here: bit.ly/2018HMPTickets

Tags: Sons Of Kemet, Features, Interviews