Stage: Let them hear Kate

Brighton will get to see plenty of Kate Tempest next May. She has been named Guest Artistic Director for next year’s Brighton Festival. A hands-on job, it will enable her to curate artists and acts she believes in. Only 30, Tempest’s list of achievements are already extraordinary: Mercury Prize nominee for her debut album ‘Everybody Down’, Ted Hughes award winner for Brand New Ancients, writer of several plays including ‘Wasted’, ‘Glasshouse’ and ‘Hopelessly’; and acclaimed novelist with the multi-generational tale of drugs, desire and belonging, ‘The Bricks That Built The Houses’.

But it is her music that she is best known for. She has a long history of performing at open mics, spoken word events and with bands, all of which prepared her for ‘Everybody Down’, released to much acclaim in 2014. It was a brilliantly conceived collection of narrative tracks that married her traditional poetry craft, her skilful and resonating spoken metre, with the kinetic agitation of hip-hop and urban electro beats courtesy of Dan Carey.

With that album she spoke from the heart and with a great deal of courage about everyday tales of poverty, class, consumerism and even simple everyday living – at times drawing on mythology and holistic philosophy to tie the individual narratives into a cohesive whole, with socio-political issues subtly woven into the fabric of her characters’ lives. She’s also very sharp and funny with it.

A couple of months ago, she released her second album, ‘Let Them Eat Chaos’, also made with Dan Carey. A continuation of ‘Everybody Down’, Tempest delved deeper into her thoughts on the universe and everything: each individual’s place within it and the interconnectivity between them and all things. It’s a collection of songs centring around an apocalyptic storm, that ultimately pulls together the lives of seven seemingly unconnected individuals, living on the same anonymous street in London. It details their lives at 4.18am.

The vulnerabilities of these characters are completely open

“What is important about this album is that it is not necessarily that it’s set in that particular place, but this idea that with each individual’s private moments there is much more commonality between them than they feel in their isolation. When they are brought out of that they realise they are part of something bigger than themselves.”

Why did she choose that particular time, 4.18am? “I suppose because the vast majority of people are sound asleep, the question of who is awake at that time is quite an interesting one for me. If these people had no pressing concerns they probably would have been sleeping soundly. It just happens that they are awake at this very particular time of the morning, which is not yet dawn, not quite night anymore. It’s a very strange time, this 4am time. And there’s something I’m interested in about before the time belongs to your employer or your family, or your partner.

“So, the vulnerabilities of all these characters are completely open. And that cyclical, repetitive nature of thought at that time, the kind of insomniac’s hour, when you can’t quite sleep and your thoughts are not doing what you want them to do, lends themselves quite well to the rhythms of song cycles and rapping and the poetics of thought.”

And so to Brighton, where she will be spending much of her time in the lead up to the 2017 Brighton Festival in May. I tell her that the social media feeds were buzzing with excitement when it was recently announced that she was going to be the Guest Artistic Director. “That’s good to know! I do have a real affinity with Brighton. I’ve been going down to Brighton since I was two or three years old.

“I’m really excited by the festival because it feels like such an important opportunity to be able to immerse myself in the arts, in what I love. And to be given an opportunity to think about how to broaden the scope of the festival a little bit, and invite some people to perform who probably may not have been invited had it not been me who gets to do the inviting,” she laughs.

Friday 9 Dec, All Saints Church. SOLD OUT
Jeff Hemmings