Kate Tempest: ‘We live in crazy times. You can’t tell a story without it feeling political’
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Version 0 of 1. The day after I meet the rapper Kate Tempest she sends me a long, eloquent email explaining her strange mood during the interview. It all started with the appearance of her remarkable debut album, Everybody Down, on the Mercury music prize shortlist last month. She was flattered, of course, but also surprised. When I say the bookies had her pegged as the favourite weeks in advance, she shakes her head, baffled. “I don’t know how they managed to think that was a likelihood.” Tempest is no stranger to acclaim. Her 2012 “spoken story” Brand New Ancients won the Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry. Her debut play Wasted was praised as “electrifying” and “ingenious”. She has just been named a Next Generation poet by the Poetry Book Society. But poetry and theatre are small, secluded worlds compared to the floodlit arena of pop. After the Mercury announcement, she was suddenly semi-famous, the subject of newspaper profiles and online comments, and “it spun me out”. When I meet her in the back of an otherwise empty pub near her home in south London, she looks slightly hunted, chewing her lip and picking at the fabric of her armchair. She is as thoughtful as she is on record but so much quieter. She worries a lot about “sounding like a wanker” (actual wankers don’t worry about that) and tackles head-on the absurdity of covering a life in an hour. “I’ve lived 28 years,” she says. “I don’t want to sell my experiences to validate or justify my stance. People want to know the story but I think the story’s the work. So it’s a bit of a strange time. I don’t want to be famous or anything like that. All I want to do is write and put it out.” As if to complicate matters, Tempest has just published her most personally revealing work, the poetry collection Hold Your Own. Bracketed by a retelling of the myth of the blind prophet Tiresias, the Childhood section describes with visceral candour her painful schooldays (she dropped out at 16) and encounters with homophobic bullies. “I’m fucking petrified,” she says. “It’s different, it’s raw and it’s vulnerable. I didn’t realise what I was doing until I suddenly saw the proofs and was like, ‘Fuck! OK.’” Her publisher, Picador Poetry, asked her to record an audio version, in the hope of reaching new Tempest fans who don’t usually buy poetry (“I don’t know who buys poetry,” she admits), but some poems were hard to read out loud. “They live on the page,” she says, describing them as her first proper poems, not just lyrics without music. Hold Your Own both invites nosy inquiries and prematurely answers them. More than once, she replies to a question by wrinkling her nose and saying: “It’s all in the book.” Tempest can’t quite see why the breadth of her output – songs, poems, plays, a novel – is notable, because it’s all about writing and performance. “It’s not like I’m an acrobat. I’m not doing anything wildly surprising.” Even seeing her hyphenated career summed up in a few words makes her itchy. “It just sounds shit,” she says glumly. “If you say, ‘This is Kate Tempest and she’s a poet-rapper-playwright,’ it sounds confusing and ridiculous and a bit naff. But hopefully the strength of what I’m doing is that this is not contrived. This has never, ever been anything other than a real burning passion.” In a way, everything is happening backwards. People might assume that Tempest is a poet who turned to hip-hop but she’s always wanted to be a rapper. She lights up when she’s discussing hip-hop, especially MCs who can sustain a narrative such as Slick Rick, Kendrick Lamar, André 3000 and Klashnekoff. “When they were telling stories, fucking hell!” she says. “It was so exciting and exhilarating and absorbing. So when I started writing, I just wanted to make a hip-hop record.” She made her live debut, aged 16, at the London record shop Deal Real, under the name Excentral Tempest. I ask her to spell it for me and she says, “Exactly! That’s why I had to change! Nobody knew what it was.” She was obsessed and eager to a fault. “I had so much to prove, y’know? I couldn’t just watch another MC at a rave; I had to be right up in that MC’s face, trying to get on the mic. Hip-hop was real to me. It was alive. It didn’t feel like I was appropriating a culture from America. The only thing that was weird was being a girl, I suppose, but I’ve kind of made my peace with that.” But British hip-hop was a crowded field and Tempest couldn’t get a record deal. In 2006, a friend suggested she appear at a poetry slam. She hadn’t read much poetry – just Yeats and Blake, because “they’re the best, aren’t they?” – and had never seen it spoken aloud but she won the £100 prize. Soon, she was a big fish in a small pond, getting paid gigs in libraries, pubs and community centres. “It was always really strange,” she says. “I never thought of myself as a poet. It just happened that I was doing more poetry gigs than other gigs. The same lyric that I could do with my band [the trio Sound of Rum], I could do without music and people would listen in a different way.” She says the great thing about not making her solo debut album earlier (though she released one with Sound of Rum in 2011) is that only now does she have the narrative chops. When she hooked up with producer Dan Carey, who has worked with Franz Ferdinand and Bat for Lashes, she had the stamina and experience to tell the story of three struggling twentysomethings, Becky, Harry and Pete, over 10 riveting songs. “I think it could only have been made at that time in my life,” she says. “My whole brain had changed.” The recording was interrupted by Carey’s other commitments, giving Tempest time to flesh out the trio’s lives in such detail that the challenge became what to leave out: the first draft of the four-minute Lonely Daze was three times as long. Some of that additional information will appear in her debut novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, which picks up just after Everybody Down’s thrilling finale. (This might be the first album since the Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free that requires spoiler warnings.) She calls the album “fiction that comes from a very real place”. The characters live in her neighbourhood and face the obstacles her friends face. She designed the choruses to connect with listeners who weren’t following the complicated story. “It’s kind of a relief when you stop the narrative for a minute,” she says. “Thank God for that! I know that it’s quite a demanding listen, the album, so I’m amazed how well it’s done.” She says the album’s key theme, “constructing a selfhood that you can be proud of”, also informs Hold Your Own: “acknowledging all the selves that you’ve been and want to become. I’m desperate to articulate how important it is to know your space and fill it.” Tempest is wary about discussing her background. In her email she explains: “I honestly wish that I could talk about my work and not my life. My family, my relationships, my personal history and the difficulties I’ve faced all go into my work, but they’re not things I want to talk about. Because it feels disingenuous and also invasive.” Just the basics, then. Born Kate Esther Calvert, she’s the youngest of five and grew up in Lewisham in south London. Her dad was a builder who retrained as a lawyer so her upbringing was relatively comfortable but the area around her was diverse and complex. “I’ve seen so much in London, almost too much,” she says quietly. “Everything it’s taught me somehow emerges in the work. It’s a direct response to south London.” Around the time of the G8 summit at Gleneagles in 2005, Tempest had an intensely political phase. She devoured political science texts, took evening classes at Goldsmiths college, and performed at protests and fundraisers, but became disillusioned. “I couldn’t see how it was going to work,” she says. “It’s such a difficult blow when it feels impossible to implement any kind of change, and everybody was bickering. So I just decided to throw myself into my music. And actually, it was the best thing that I could have done, because I’ve managed to meet people and become much more educated about things than I was then, when you were just talking to people who already feel the same way.” Hold Your Own contains some witty and ferocious political poems: Progress, in particular, should be prescribed reading. On Everybody Down, socio-political issues are more subtly woven into the fabric of her characters’ lives – members of the precariat class who feel, like Tempest, “terrified and ignorant and powerless”. “I didn’t want to make overt political statements,” she says. “But because we live in times that are so mental, we can’t tell a story without it feeling political. Obviously, everything is fucking crazy.” Tempest is in a unique position. She’s performed her poems in bookshops, theatres, prisons, universities, music festivals and schools, where teachers have used her work to introduce their students to Greek mythology. As well as preparing for her next hip-hop tour, she’s trying to finish her latest play, Hopelessly Devoted, the mention of which makes her grimace with stress. “Some people might say, ‘You’re doing too much. You need to give yourself some space,’” she says. “But I feel like I’m in this crazy electric moment and I just have to make this stuff and then breathe for a bit and think really carefully about what comes next.” She finds the prospect of actually winning the Mercury “a really scary thought. Because it’s like a rocket-launcher under your bum. I’m quite into this slow and steady pace that I’ve developed. That, for me, feels like the safest way of progressing and not burning out.” It comes back to concentrating on the work and ignoring everything else. She writes whenever she can, “just to keep the muscles active. If I haven’t written in a few days, I wonder why I can’t quite work anything out.” Tempest’s work is so commanding because she is trying so fiercely to work things out, digging into the meat and guts of life to make sense of the world and her place in it. I ask her if she agrees with the critic who called Brand New Ancients “beautiful but unutterably bleak” and she looks taken aback. “I thought Brand New Ancients was really uplifting! But I suppose there’s a bleakness to it.” She sighs. “It’s life, isn’t it? Life is pretty fucking bleak but it’s also extremely beautiful. It can be so bleak and so hard, and you can slave all day and you’re coming up with nothing, and then suddenly one tiny little thing happens and it’s like you understand.” • Everybody Down is out now on Big Dada. Hold Your Own is published by Picador Poetry. Kate Tempest’s Everybody Down tour begins at Oxford’s O2 Academy on November 7. katetempest.co.uk/shows |