Music
Kate Tempest: "There’s nothing objective about it all. It’s beautiful"
The renowned wordsmith gives insight into one of the year's most impactful albums.
Kate Tempest’s lyrics often portray a bleak image of contemporary society. The British poet-rapper is capable of making listeners feel not just upset by the prevailing state of affairs, but despondent at their own complicity.
It’s not her aim to incite guilt, however, and Tempest’s 2019 release, The Book of Traps and Lessons, isn’t without vestiges of hope.
“When you’ve made an album, even if it comes from a place of despair or concern or pain, the act of creativity is so positive and so full of love,” Tempest says. “Even if I hear an album that is full of pain, I feel like it’s an abundantly positive experience when I listen to the work of an artist because I know how much commitment and love it takes to create.”
Track five on Traps and Lessons – which came out in June this year – is the frankly spoken break-up song I Trap You. Over a dusty sample, Tempest’s lyrics raise uncomfortable questions about the nature of our intimate relationships and what they’re actually rooted in. The line, “I want you to be happy, but don’t threaten my happiness,” is particularly unnerving.
Tempest implicates capitalism for corrupting our understanding of love and morphing the manner in which it’s expressed, rapping “[Love is] an endless cliché that imagines itself to be deep revelation.”
“I Trap You is absolutely about me coming to a realisation about a relationship that I was in where I was obsessional and needy and living in a fantasy, really,” Tempest says. “It’s not coming from the outside, looking at other people and being like, ‘This is what’s wrong.’ It’s from the inside. I’m in the problem saying to myself, ‘What am I going to do?’
It’s so exciting when you’re making a record. It’s one of the most incredible feelings I’ve ever known
“That is what my writing has always been about, really, and then also trying to make that useful for other people. Like, how do you turn your own feeling or the way that you process the world into something that can be of service to how other people might be dealing with stuff?”
The record’s lead single Firesmoke is devastating for a different reason. Featuring lines such as “You make me immortal. You take me to space,” and “Your body is home to rare gods. I kneel at their temple,” it’s one of the most beautiful love songs released this year.
“I think that it’s important that [I give attention to] these two examples of different kinds of love that we can find ourselves in,” Tempest says. “One of which is a love of abundance and devotion and the other which is a love of self-sabotage and addiction. So there’s these two examples of how fooling yourself can enable you to mistake one love for the other.”
Elsewhere, tracks like Holy Elixir, All Humans Too Late and Hold Your Own directly correspond with contemporary issues, looking at our reliance on social media, crumbling living standards, the evolving zombie population and consumerist brainwashing.
Traps and Lessons’ topical significance is undeniable, but it’s all refracted through the prism of Tempest’s own experiences as a 30-something Londoner.
“You’re not stepping outside of it to look at how it’s going to manifest in the world,” she says. “You’re trying to be as close to it as possible so that you can serve it and make feel as real and true as you possibly can.
“It’s so exciting when you’re making a record. It’s one of the most incredible feelings I’ve ever known. You get so obsessed with it. It gets inside your skin. It’s as subjective as you could be. There’s nothing objective about it all, really. It’s beautiful.”
The Book of Traps and Lessons wasn’t made in isolation, however. It’s Tempest’s third full-length collaboration with London producer Dan Carey – who has worked on a stack of high profile records over the past decade, including multiple releases from Franz Ferdinand and Bat For Lashes.
Carey – who co-manages the Speedy Wunderground label – has also shown genuine support for artists based in South London, striking up working relationships with the likes of Goat Girl, Warmduscher, Black Midi, as well as Tempest.
“What we have together is so beautiful,” Tempest says. “We just are so enthusiastic about the other person’s talent and it creates an environment where we’re both always pushing further at more and more adventurous ideas.
“I always want to do the most stupid thing. So does he. Whether that’s wanting to tell a story over 12 tracks or wanting to make an album where we don’t listen to each other when we’re recording, whatever it is we’re both fully involved in experimentation.”
Tempest is active as a poet, novelist and playwright outside of music. Her spoken word piece, Brand New Ancients, picked up the 2013 Ted Hughes Award – an annual prize given to a living UK poet for making an innovative cultural contribution. She’s also released a handful of poetry collections and in 2016 launched her first novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses.
“I feel like doing lots of different things gives me energy to do all the things that I want to do,” Tempest says. “If I was just doing one thing I think it would be easier to become exhausted by it. So sometimes having that space to just think in a different form, it gives my mind the oxygen to come back and think again about a problem in a particular project.
“I really relish the opportunity to be able to work across the forms. I definitely find writing fiction to most challenging; it’s the hardest. I find writing music the most instinctive, but I really love them all.”
Kate Tempest is touring Australia in February 2020. Details here.
