Brand New Ancients

Kate Tempest’s captivating spoken word piece about the epic potential of the everyday steals its truth from her own transformational stage presence.

She has the sick flow of a South East London slam champion, the musical catch of a Southern preacher aflame with inspiration, and the physical empathy of a true storyteller. The live band snap, crackle and soar with her metre.

There are echoes of Marie Phillips’ ‘Gods Behaving Badly’ and ‘The Streets’ ‘Weak Become Heroes’ in this Ted Hughes Poetry Prize-winning tale of modern day pain, love and struggle, where the villains smile “like a dog turd in the grass” and the romantic hero has “eyes like Kahlua”.

But Tempest’s subversion of the hubris of hip hop into something so inclusively inspirational feels fresh, and deeply personal. In her opening salvo she calls for a new mythic pallete. Job done mate.

Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome, 8 March 2014
Rating:
Bella Todd