Kae Tempest is a musician, poet, novelist, and playwright, who has won critical acclaim and award nominations in all four fields. Kae will tour Aotearoa later this month in support of their latest album ‘The Line is a Curve’. They talk to Oliver Hall about how coming out and recording during the pandemic affected their artistry and reanimated their enthusiasm for discovery.
What can we expect from your NZ tour?
We play pretty much the entirety of the album, and then a section of older material, and then also a section of brand new stuff, that’s not out yet. I think it’ll be a beautiful discovery, hopefully, for people. It feels really good.
The tour is supporting your album ‘The Line is a Curve’, which was your first post-pandemic album, how much of an effect do you feel that had on the music you made?
Making this album in that time had an impact on the recording process because we couldn’t be in the room together for quite a long time. We tried to do some stuff remotely, but for Dan and I the way we work, we need each other. We need to be physically together. So it presented its challenges. When we actually came to record the album itself, I wanted to deliver the vocal as one live take to an audience of one. I wanted to deliver the lyric as one take on one day to three different generations of people just to see what happened to the local words and delivery. In my dreams, I wanted them right opposite me. In the booth, I wanted to look them directly in the eye. But because of COVID, when we could be in rooms of people again, they had to be two meters away. It was still cool, but it made us have to rethink. So the presence of the pandemic is in the actual process of the recording.
Were you in lockdown on your own?
There was quite a lot of time when I was. I had a breakup. I think like so many of us, it either made or made or broke relationships. I was on my own but really glad of it. It was actually incredibly beautiful for me to have that space. It’s extremely rare for me to not have to be out there and to just be with my own company. It was intense but amazing.
Do you personally hear it in the album when you listen back?
No, not really, because now my association with the record is about the tour we’ve been doing. It just feels like a different moment. The songs have their resonances from the performances and now the album’s out It just feels different.
And what’s the experience of the tour been like so far?
It’s been incredible. It’s been some of my favourite live experiences. Audiences seem to be more open, more up for it, and more excited; it just feels more joyous. I’m seeing myself reflected in the audience a bit more, and I think the audience are seeing themselves reflected in me.
‘The Line Is The Curve’ is also the first album you’ve made since coming out publicly as non-binary. Did that bring with it any feelings of expectation or pressure?
Coming out has been a huge relief. Really just a necessary and beautiful step towards, hopefully, a lifetime of growing and recognising things… I didn’t have expectations that anything would be any particular way. I was shitting myself and it felt impossible, then suddenly, it had to happen and I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Maybe that’s got something to do with why this tour feels so much less painful than others have.
Had you already begun recording the album when you came out publicly?
The way that I work is I work on lots of different things at the same time, so the life of each work is hard to trace, it doesn’t really make any chronological sense. Something might begin its process five years before it ever finds its way out. In the meantime, 100 other things have happened. But I think that there’s a lot about transition, repression, and looking for the space to be oneself in this album. I think it’s throughout all of my work, but this is not an album specifically about transition.
Will you make an album specifically about transition in future?
There’s a poetry book that will be out in April that has much more explicit references to my experiences with that. Following on from that there’s a novel that I’m working on where that is more present, but I don’t know when these things will ever actually appear.
You’ve had critical acclaim as a poet, a musician, a novelist, and a playwright. What do you put that success down to that it can cross genres so easily? It’s fairly unique.
I don’t know. I’m aware that when I’m hanging out with musician friends of mine, or other performers. I realised that they don’t have the other side that I often have to be balancing in my mind, which is the rigours of a life of performing or being on the road, which can be out of balance with what it is to want to retreat and think about characters and world building to write a novel. To write the world of a play you need to create a world that is entirely complete and to do that, you need isolation, but to be out there as a musician, you need to be in a community of people. It’s definitely a strange position that I’m in and one that I don’t see reflected that often in other people. It’s also amazing to have the opportunity to have to express myself in all the ways that I can.
It sounds like a bit of an introvert/extrovert contradiction.
It’s a different practice. Performance is extremely important to me. It’s a very important part of my art and my creativity. When I’m up there on stage, it’s crucial for me to be in that mode, but it is so different from what it feels like to sit down writing and being in the studio, or just at my desk with an idea.
What does it mean to you to have so many spectrums of your art embraced?
I don’t know what it means to me to have them embraced. All I can say is I am so excited by my ideas, by form, and by the things that inspire me. Little tiny things can inspire me. The other day, I was in a hotel breakfast bar. I read an interview in a paper with Bonnie Raitt, who just got nominated for Grammy. I love her and reading the interview about her songwriting just absolutely bars me up. I was so excited just to read about her experiences; just thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to write some more songs.’ Then a few pages later, there was an article about a play that was going on on Broadway. I started thinking, ‘Oh, wow’ how amazing it is to come up with dialogue… My mind is easily excited by the prospect of working on an idea and that just seems to generate more and more energy. The more I do, the more I generate the energy to do.
Is there an art form that we haven’t seen from you yet publicly that you plan to display in the future?
I’m working on lots of different things, but it’s not like I’ll suddenly be really good at acrobatics. I’m into words, I like drama, narrative, and plot. I love music. But the commonality is always the lyrics. If there are ways of telling stories with words, I’m interested in it, but beyond that, I don’t have aspirations to branch out.
So you won’t be suspended from the ceiling with silks or tumbling across mats?
I mean, I do have aspirations to do that, but they are fantasy aspirations that will never happen!
You mentioned your love for Bonnie Raitt who won Song of the Year at the Grammys last week. How are you feeling about the current state of music and the music industry?
There is so much incredible music coming out at the moment. I don’t really know how I feel about the industry. I try not to give it too much thought. What’s interesting is that I have this inside view of five different creative industries. So I’m able to think about the commonalities, the differences, the ridiculousness; I can see the mechanisms of all of them because I’ve done it. Once you can see how it all works inside, it can give you some despair as an artist to see how these things actually work and the requirements of the industry. But at the same time, I’m excited by so much of what I hear and discover that my main thought is that there’s just so much incredible work coming out.
Have you always felt quite passionately about the work coming out or is this more in recent times?
There was a time I lost some curiosity. I was exhausted from touring and putting work out, so I stopped. I realised I was only listening to things I had already listened to and hadn’t discovered something new in a couple of years. So made a decision to reanimate that part of myself that gets enthusiastic about new discoveries and give new records a chance. I understand because I make albums, that an album might take two years from conception to finality. So the idea that you could get an album in one listen, is just so foreign to me. So if I listen to a record by an artist that I love and it doesn’t chime with me at first, I know that’s because of the place that I’m in rather than about the record itself. So I make an effort to go back to it and to keep going back to it and be patient with myself and the album. I’ve made some real discoveries that way by just increasing my patience.
