Poet, playwright, novelist, recording artist and proud provocateur of love and empathy Kate Tempest is an astonishing young creative with a powerful message.
Her new record Let Them Eat Chaos is a testament to this: a rousing concept album that weaves together the lives of seven perfect strangers, living but not feeling within their malevolent city of London.
Their stories come alive through the tiniest of details, which Tempest constructs with such skill and precision that her metaphors cast images and information straight into your mind. These details are more than just a way to set a scene, however. They are integral to who she is as an artist.
“The whole point of what a writer does or what a lyricist does is that you recognise the present, you look around, you look so closely at the things that you pass and you examine why or where the feelings come from, where they begin, and that’s what sends you to sit down and write lyrics,” she says.
Tempest also relates that these details are in essence a grounding feature in her raps; agents that make stories relatable and relevant to the everyday. “Whether it’s the arrangement of objects, or the perceived relationship between strangers in the street, watching a young child communicate somehow with their sibling – all these things also register and also need to come out.”
Thus, from blankets and booze to making sandwiches and peddling drugs, these tiny yet vivid details are abundant across the album, and imbue Tempest’s characters with immense energy through striking depictions of their internal and external worlds.
Tempest spits out descriptions of death, destruction and war with audible contempt, pairing them with the simplistic banalities of human existence. The characters are forced to live their lives in a cold and unfeeling world where no individual is able to find meaning. And yet there is such tenderness to the music, as Tempest breathes an intense warmth and kindness into her subjects’ impossibly bleak existences.
“These strange compulsions to write or to perform, they’re so beyond understanding, but they are deep, deep drives that we can’t escape from,” says Tempest. “They’re part of us, and part of my particular drive seems to be one of real love, real love for people. It moves me so much, living in a big city, looking around and being part of a community of people, standing in a crowd at a gig, just hanging out and watching people move through space. I sit down to write because I love people, and I want to be closer to them.”
This is clearly apparent beneath the grimey beats and around the shimmering dreamscapes produced by long-time collaborator Dan Carey, who received a Mercury Prize nomination for his production work on Tempest’s previous album, Everybody Down.
“We get on extremely well,” says Tempest. “Our brains are sequenced at the same pitch. He pushes me to have weirder, bigger, deeper, more ridiculous ideas. And I push him the same way … We sit down in a studio and we talk a little bit and we begin to write, then we begin to find out what we want to do, we make maps, sit in the pub a little bit, and then we work long, long days, long nights, we try everything we have at what we do. We discover and then we work really hard to create shapes that feel satisfying.”
Tempest has already visited Australia this year for Sydney Writers’ Festival, and she says her experiences in the country were very humbling and insightful. “It brought me a bit closer to certain people in Australia who invited me into conversations which furthered my understanding of situations there, which was really exciting and important.”
In particular, Tempest was struck to learn at a festival talk that more indigenous children are being taken from their families now than during the Stolen Generations. Despite this harrowing discovery, she had a great time during her stay. “I had a really amazing experience when I was there – I met some incredible people, and I had some pretty mind-blowing encounters. But I don’t want to just pop back lightly – it’s the kind of place where if I go back, I want to spend some time.”
Just as Let Them Eat Chaos swirls and resounds to a close around Tempest’s seven strangers, the album is a tribute to love and empathy as a cure to the numbing effects of modern life. As advice for those who feel lost and uncertain in our raging modern world, Tempest offers the record as a rallying cry to “love more!”. On an everyday level however, her message is this: “Wake up and remember that you’re a human being, every single person that you pass is a human being, people are worthy of your time and your attention. Think of other people more than you think of yourself.”
[Kate Tempest photo by Neil Gavin]
