KATE TEMPEST
Ahead of a performance in Cardiff this month, Chloe Edwards caught up with Kate Tempest to chat socially conscious music, working with legendary producers and why she’s excited to be back in the capital.
It’s not surprising that after four studio albums, several published poetry collections, and a sprinkling of revered industry accolades, Kate Tempest is an eloquent and articulate conversationalist.
Her first poetry book, Everything Speaks In Its Own Way, was published in 2013 and preceded a career carved out of her ability to skilfully verbalise the intensities and difficulties of life in the 21st century. Tempest doesn’t shy away from tackling equally heady issues on her latest studio release, The Book Of Traps And Lessons, with the song People’s Faces describing the last few years in the UK as being “a pivotal historical moment we just went stumbling past”. In turbulent times, can it ever be cathartic to verbalise these themes?
“There’s some element of that. It’s not like, ‘if I write these songs, it’s going to give me some catharsis’. It’s such a close process to me, and my whole life, and the whole way that I experience the world. Writing is as much of a part of how I see and feel as anything else! It’s just a natural thing that happens because of how I interact with my life.”
Reflecting on the themes that Tempest’s work reflects, it appears she currently has a wealth of inspiration readily available.
“Sometimes! If it’s not there, I try not to push it. In that moment of staring at the blank page it’s important that you don’t push yourself too hard, because that’s when you become a parody of your previous voice. When there’s no oxygen in your ideas, it’s best to just to break the moment – to go for a walk, to listen to an album, take the pressure off.”
Regardless of whether or not the inspiration is always flowing, in recent years there’s been a rise in the ways in which artists have been trying to drive positive change through their work. The protest-song trope previously associated with the likes of Bob Dylan has been adapted and remodelled on Childish Gambino’s This Is America and The 1975’s Love It If We Made It, both released to critical acclaim last year. With her work so often intertwined with the state of the world today, does Tempest feel that art is something that can change minds for the better?
“I think it’s definitely reassuring to see yourself in somebody’s work and to feel your hopes articulated by an artist. It’s galvanizing. It gives people an outlet for pent-up feelings that they might otherwise not have had the opportunity to connect with.
“As consciousness evolves, as new generations develop a new awareness, music and the awareness within it also evolves. I’ve always been the kind of person who listens to very engaged lyricism, music that’s full of information and has at its roots something to say. But I think there’s definitely something to be said for the advances in sharing ideas that’s meant other people’s expressions and opinions have been made more accessible to us, which is fantastic.”
Yet with so many different artists today aligned with socially conscious music, it could seem that it’s harder than ever to break into that scene, when there’s so many other pressures they have to consider.
“Is there a socially conscious scene? When I was desperately trying to be heard, I felt that every scene I encountered was restrictive and limiting. As [friend and poet] Polarbear says in one of his poems, ‘they call it a scene because it’s not real’. I’ve never been interested in aligning myself or my work with other works or artists that sound like the thing I’m trying to do, because I’m trying to listen to it and direct it.
“Until you just said that, I’d never really thought if there was a socially conscious scene. I think that there are rightly artists that are seeking to express deeper truths, that’s what they’re for.”
Tempest’s music has a knack for always feeling particularly relevant and contemporary, most notably on last album’s tracks Firesmoke and Brown-Eyed Man, which stand out as being especially important in 2019.
“Firesmoke is just a simple declaration of a very important feeling, which is love. We made that song for my partner and I think I’ve never really written so simply, it felt like a real turning point. In all of my work over the years there is so much about intimacy, desire, relationships, love – it’s pretty much the main current through my novel (The Bricks That Built The Houses). It’s in everything, it’s in [2012 spoken-word play] Brand New Ancients, and as much as people read them in a certain way, for me they were always love songs. But they were also necessarily disguised, underneath everything else that they were trying to express. With Firesmoke, it was like – suddenly I had this access to those feelings so I could write about them in a much more simple and open way, and musically it’s just a beautiful beat.
“Brown-Eyed Man is one of the songs where it took a long time to find the right music to accompany that poem. Lyrically, it’s a description of state violence against an individual and it’s about how that violence is felt by that individual and the people around who are privileged enough to not feel it first-hand. It’s a song that I wrote in the style of old English folk songs, because I was trying to think about where in other forms there’s a lyric as forward-thinking as [producer] Rick Rubin wanted it to be on this album, and I thought of folk music. You can do different things with that kind of storytelling mode.”
How best to articulate that, however, is a whole other matter. One trait that sets Tempest apart from her contemporaries is that it spans multiple platforms and formats. In addition to her four studio albums, Tempest is also a playwright, novelist and poet. How does she decide which format suits which project best?
“It’s different every time. Sometimes it’s about the deadline I have the following week, or sometimes it’s because of the environment you’re in – if I’m in a recording studio then I’m definitely writing music. Other times an idea just approaches from the wilderness of consciousness and you just have to work out what it is and what it wants you to do with it.”
For The Book Of Traps And Lessons, she worked with Rick Rubin, producer of names as varied as Johnny Cash, Justin Timberlake and Linkin Park. How did Rubin and Tempest initially get to work together?
“It began many years ago, in 2014 or 2015 – he saw me on television reading one of my long poems, was impressed with the performance, tracked down my phone number and called me up. Because of time commitments and everything else I had going on – and how much of a big deal it was that Rick Rubin was on the phone – I didn’t want to rush into anything, so it took a few years to make something happen.
“Also, because of the nature of what he was keen for me to make, it was quite a challenging process and one that I wasn’t ready to fully commit to until I’d done preceding work. This guy has made music with legends! You can’t imagine how much of a revelation it was to just suddenly think that these people who have made these albums that I’ve loved are just real people who are just making music.”
Tempest is currently touring The Book… after a string of festival appearances this summer, which she has reflected upon as “really enjoyable to feel the response to kind of heavy language at 10 o’clock on a Saturday night. It’s been amazing – challenging, but really rewarding, and it’s given me a lot to think about. I’m extremely excited to play some headline shows because it gives you permission to indulge more heavily in the language, when you’re not trying to catch people as they walk through but when they’re there, happy to go on that journey with you.”
Tramshed, Cardiff, Wed 13 Nov. Tickets: £22 (sold out). Info: 029 2023 5555 / www.tramshedcardiff.com