The unshackling of Kae Tempest

Or, he taps into a more universal mode, embodying our shared unease through direct and affecting monologues on the state of the world, where the collective matters more than the individual. His fifth record, Self Titled, comes two decades into a career that’s spanned poetry collections, plays, albums and a lifetime of performance. He’s never sounded so confident.

“I was thinking about other rappers I love, and the moments that really get me are when someone tells their story,” Tempest tells me, sitting on a curb outside the studio where he’s rehearsing for Glastonbury. “It didn't feel daunting. It felt like I'm ready. It's time. I had the right beats. I had the right feeling. I was in the right place.”

The album is the most direct hip-hop record Tempest has made so far. Systemic failures are still tackled, from state-perpetuated transphobia to the atomisation of cultural life, but it’s all done through a personal lens, with a thread of hope. He honours the love he’s been given by his partners, friends and his wider community. He’s blunt and unguarded. As with his best poems, many lines jolt out like your own thoughts reflected back. This is especially powerful as a trans listener, since this specificity of perspective is rarely given space on record.

In its directness and sound, he says it’s the album that he would have made back at the beginning, if he was given the opportunity. Self Titled first took shape when Tempest met with Dave and Stormzy producer, Fraser T Smith, hoping to shake a creative block while working on another idea. He didn’t expect an autobiographical record to be the result. Smith encouraged him that the timing was right.

“He said to me, ‘who else can tell your story?’” Tempest says. “‘Who else writing lyrics in the UK, or in the world, can tell the story that you can tell? Nobody. Only you can tell your story. So tell it.’”

Tempest began obsessed with lyrics, motivated by the rap artists he’d heard as a kid. He was energised by the character it helped him become when, eventually, the lads who doubted him on first impressions passed him the mic. “I started writing raps. I’d go into like cyphers, open mic nights - I was a rhymer,” he says. “Nobody wanted to do it as much as I did. All my friends were DJs or beat makers, and they just could not keep up with my energy. I was obsessed. They just wanted to hang out, play computer games, get stoned, whatever. I did not want to do that. I wanted to make music.”

More than just a source of expression, Tempest says that as a trans kid, performing gave him a reason to exist. “I wanted something that made me exceptional, because the thing that made me exceptional was dangerous, like the fact that nobody knew whether I was a girl or a boy. It stood me out for the wrong reasons. It could mean that I would get in fights. My physical being tended to upset people. Once I had music in my life, it wasn't like that anymore.”

As a teen, Tempest and his close friend producer, Kwake Bass, thought they could change the world with their music. Tempest played wherever he could, busking at bus stations, or convincing bouncers at festivals and venues to let him in by rapping some bars until he won them over. That drive took him to some unexpected places. It’s surprising to hear that he fell into spoken word, given the many accolades that have followed his poetry, like being named a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society just a day after being nominated for the Mercury Prize for Everybody Down in 2014. Back then, he saw it as just another avenue to have people hear his lyrics. He attended his first slam after being told about an event where he could make some money by reading out his rhymes a cappella.

“I’d never fucking heard of a ‘slam’ before,” he says. “I didn't want to be a poet, and I didn't know anything about it. But I went down there, did my lyrics, won £100. Bearing in mind, I probably had never made £100 for music. I'd been making music for about fucking six years by this point. It was at that time when you had to pay to play, so you would pay a promoter to put your band on at [places] like Madame Jojo's in Soho. Anyone who came in to see you had to put a little mark next to your name, and then you'd get a pound back. Fucking hell, it was such a racket.

“Anyway, so I won £100 for doing my poem. I got seen by a load of people who were poets. They started booking me, so then I was just doing it. I never wanted to do it. I was never excited by spoken word. I fucking hated it. I thought it was really embarrassing. Then people would come up to me and be like, ‘All this shit I'm hearing all over the place, it's your fault.’”

And what did he spend that £100 on? “Maybe a fucking bag of draw, my rent and a couple of pints.”

“I have this direct route back to that person because the lyrics, they're all in my head still somehow,” Tempest explains. “Something might bring it to mind, and I'll just find myself suddenly two minutes into some fucking lyric I haven't thought of for fifteen years.”

“It can be fairly complicated thinking of myself at different times,” Tempest says. “I went to creativity because life outside was so confusing and painful. When I'm in communication with the lyrical part of myself, it doesn't feel quite as painful as when I'm thinking about everything else that kid was going through.”

That self chronology first came to Tempest as a teen. At a crossroads in his life while staying in a friend’s caravan, he felt as if he’d been visited by the voice of his older self, who gave him the guidance to move forward. “It came into my head and basically told me to choose creativity over destruction, to just keep going, to keep writing and to find myself. And not only did that voice give me the path, it also gave me the lyrics. I understood the lyrics that I was being given were guidance and counsel from an older or a higher self. As I got older in my life, I was like, ‘well, it's not me going back. So who the fuck was that?’

“And then in the studio with Fraser making ‘Know Yourself’, all the hairs on my body stood up. I had this real sense that this is the moment. This is when I'm going back.”

Tempest is a stunningly open writer and performer, but he admits that he had been protective about sharing parts of himself publicly until now. After coming out as trans in 2020, it’s been a process of shedding that fear and embracing himself as he’s being embraced by community.

“Being closeted — not just in the world, but from yourself — feeling dysphoria all your life, feeling shame and hiding all the time, it's not a great place to stand in your body and say ‘here's my story,’ because there's a whole part of you that you can't acknowledge as being real, because you just don't want to.” he says.

“There was a whole part of my experience that I had locked. I was going into a different place, of the imaginative world and character. I was looking out to people, and I was trying to connect with the real-life truth in myself as I saw it, but there was a part of myself that I didn't have access to because it was too dangerous.”

Self Titled has a new energy and confidence, in both its recording and surrounding performances. Tempest is embracing the role of frontman. He has swagger on stage. He took up space in the studio, buoyed by five albums' worth of making, but also by the freshness of creating with someone new after many years of working with one producer, his mentor Dan Carey. “Fraser and I are building a new relationship,” he says. We’ve got to set new rules, and are working each other out. Dan and I have been working together for ten years, and maybe there was some part of the fact that Fraser wasn't attached to who I'd been before.”

Tempest says there’s no intimidation in working with a ‘hotshot producer’ like Smith. “I’ve queered him up, basically,” he jokes. “I’ve brought Fraser into the experimental weird music-poetry world. We just get to play and there’s no pressure.”

“I'm very glad that I made all the records with Dan. Those albums I made, I feel close to them, and they're absolutely fucking mad. That's the foundation. Because I did all that, I can do an album like this and there's no danger in it.”

That ease and playfulness extends to the trio of music videos made for the release, directed by Boy Dykes (Juliette Larthe, Jess Kohl, Lydia Garnett and Jesse Glazzard), who have allowed Tempest to feel comfortable in front of the camera. “Making these videos has been incredible,” he says. “Everyone's queer, everyone's trans, everyone's safe, everyone's fucking cool. Everyone is vibrating at a frequency which I understand. And everyone's mental — like an absolute bunch of fruitcakes everywhere. People are taking care of each other.” In the video for "Diagnosis", Tempest stands alone, staring down the camera with this new attitude. You can see that even more clearly in the video for "Know Yourself", framed as a queer party which takes over a barbershop. Tempest grins throughout, soaking it all up.

“In the videos, I suppose I'm enjoying the fact that I don't feel so much pain in my body anymore, and it's okay. And that the person looking at me down the camera is queer, like me. Somebody is looking at me and seeing me as beautiful, so I can be beautiful. In the videos I'd made up to this point, every single time I've been on camera it's been uncomfortable. That's been about where I've been at in my life, and also about who's looking at me down a lens, because what they're seeing is something ugly, whether they know it or not.”

Tempest transitioned with the pressure of public scrutiny. There was real fear that changing could leave him abandoned by a fanbase he’s worked hard to cultivate. The album’s first verse on "I Stand on the Line" lays bare the weight of that decision. Later, on "Breathe", a six-minute freestyle recorded in one take, Tempest embodies the panic and pressure of the last few years, and the wider weight of his life story, telling of the chaos surrounding him when he wasn’t on stage. Here, he recorded his thoughts down quickly, got into the booth and let it out. “I was almost in tears by the end of the recording, it was so intense,” he says.

The record leans on his gift of uninhibited performance to convey these knotted feelings. Performance gave him a path forward when he was young, but the stage had similarly become a place of scrutiny. “I had this thing that I was desperate to do, and I was given this gift with my life, which is access to creativity,” he says. “I was so grateful to be on stage, but at the same time it was really painful.

“Actually being on stage was the time when I left my body behind, and I could go into the spirit. But when you're being filmed, you can't leave your body behind because the camera's like fucking sticking you in your body.”

Throughout the making of Self Titled, surrounded by bandmates, contributors and friends, there has been encouragement and support. What is essentially a record about the self was made through an outward-looking process. As well as old friends Kwake Bass and Smith, there are contributions from contemporaries such as Young Fathers, heroes Neil Tennant and Chemical Brothers, and smaller names such as Tawiah. All of these contributions have surprising origins. On "Bless the Bold Future", a song about the guilt and uncertainty attached to bringing kids into the world, Tawiah decided to record her vocal take while listening to the song for the first time, reacting in the moment. Here most directly, you hear how Tempest’s candid and personal reflections tap into a shared malaise.

Communal connections are also clear on songs like "Statue in the Square", and "I Stand on the Line", where Tempest celebrates the resilience of trans people in the face of hatred, shifting the perspective from his own experiences with transphobia, to a wider community experience. (“They're ten a penny, we're rare / And when we're dead, they'll put our statues in the square / They can shake their heads in despair / But we’ve been here from the start, and we ain't going nowhere”).

For him, that community has been vital. “I was so, so long without it,” he says. “I was so starved of that nurture, of that nourishment, and I did not know why I was so depleted or unwell because I'd never known it. I didn't grow up around queer and trans people, and there weren't many people in my immediate circle.

“My only connection to community would come through my lovers, and they would try to bring me into contact, but I was closeted, and in a lot of pain, and I wasn't ready. I've had this incredible few years since finally coming out where I just want to fucking show up.”

And Tempest has been showing up through his performance. He ended this weekend’s Glastonbury performance with just a mic, shirt removed baring his chest, using every word to find the most direct route through to the people listening. He finishes by looking on an eternal scale: “I stand on a line that goes back / that goes back to the dawn of my kind / before that / to the dawn of all time that extends, that extends / to the end where it all begins again.”

These lines speak to his wider philosophy of performance. Every time he’s on stage, he sees it as a conversation with the thousands of performers who’ve touched him and encouraged him to perform, too. “I developed this technique to ground myself in the notion that it's not about me,” he says. “If I can just get out of the way and transmit, then something beautiful can happen. Connection can happen.”

“I position every single person that's ever reached me with their lyrics and their writing, novelists who've changed my life or poets and musicians whose lyrics have absolutely rendered me human again; I put them on that line and I feel them…Because I have received that, I can also give. Somebody in the audience will receive from me, who's receiving from all the people behind me too.”

Tempest’s work grapples with hard and heavy themes, even if it’s just the strife of everyday life. But his darkest material still features songs like "People’s Faces" or "Hold Your Own", which have this undying belief in humanity. That optimism has never faded. “If you're a creative person, I don't think apathy can come into it, because making music is so energising,” he says. “The process itself is so exciting, enlivening, enriching and connective. Apathy isn't invited.”

In some ways, Tempest is still that fourteen-year-old with the drive to change the world. Now, he aims to do it through small interactions. “I live in a city, and I'm encountering a lot of people every day. There's opportunity there for me to connect and ask someone how they are.” he says. I know it seems small fry with what's happening is happening out there. But underneath all the fear and the like horrible terror that's being like spread, there's a deeper resonance.”

That apathy includes a capacity to humanise those who won’t do the same for him. “Just because a person's not decent to me, it doesn't mean they're not decent to someone,” goes one line on "I Stand On A Line".

“It's very easy to forget that,” he says. “We can all be guilty of viewing someone in a really shallow way and not acknowledging that that's a full person with capacity for goodness.”

“But the thing is, how possible is it for you in your life to learn lessons? It's really fucking tough. Maybe we can spot our bad behaviour, maybe we can spot our neurotic impulses, but to actually change them on an individual level is such fucking hard work.”

I ask how he keeps hope, when it’s so hard for individuals to change anything about themselves, let alone whole systems. “There's a hell of a lot that we can do just in our own space,” he answers. “We're just taking care of the people in front of us, like really taking care of people that you encounter every day.”

“I have to be really careful not to judge people and just to try and meet people where they're at. Some people might think that I should be dead just because I'm alive. That can be scary. What I'm trying to do is to just love into that regardless, because nobody can do me greater harm than the harm I was doing to myself before.”

Tempest at any one time has five projects on the go. As well as making Self Titled, he’s just finished writing a second novel (“You are going to love it,” he beams. “It's for you. It's for us.”) We come back to that teenage ambition to change the world, and whether he still thinks in that sort of scope now that his weeks are filled with deadlines and responsibility. “Actually, now what I realise is that music does change the world,” he says. “It gives us access to actual reality, the other dimension, where I go when I'm playing music or making music or listening to music, where I'm in touch with my sensations”

“I come out of an experience where I'm connected with music more human, more open, more likely to remember to be empathetic. So actually, we were right as kids to have that ambition.”

Two decades later, Tempest presents a record about a man who’s still figuring himself out in some ways, but more solid and resilient than he’s ever been. “Everything happened at the right time,” he smiles. “There's a part of me that mourns for the years I didn't know. But look at how good this feels: I'm alive. I can't be mad at how I got here. It's so perfect because I'm here now.”