“Thank God for the multitudes in us, the younger selves that will not give up,” Kae Tempest raps on ‘I Stand On The Line’ – the opener to his stirring, triumphant new album Self Titled. While the record lovingly addresses the trans community, Tempest’s home city of London and his imagined child – over a brooding palette of strings, bass synths, piano and brass – the most recurrent subject is the younger, pre-transition Tempest. On ‘Know Yourself’, the 39-year-old even duets with an old recording of himself performing as a 22-year-old, in which the young poet claims “I sought help from my older self.”
Speaking to me over Zoom from an airport, Tempest confirms that old recording referred to a specific event. “When I was younger, I was visited by my older self. This voice came into my head, and gave me instructions and guidance – to choose creativity rather than destruction, to make better decisions, and to love myself,” he says. “I often think about that kid who became so obsessed with lyricism and rapping, but as I’ve gotten older, I haven’t gone back to visit them.” When he entered the studio to work on this album, his first since coming out as a trans man, “I had this feeling rip through my whole body. My hair stood up on end. I realised this album is me going back – this is the person who spoke to that kid. Post-transition, I’m finally strong enough to hold all the selves that I’ve been.”
That grand unfurling of Kae’s experiences – from starting out as a teenager on the battle-rap circuit to his eventual acclaim as a writer, musician and playwright – reaches its emotional peak on the six-minute ‘Breathe’. The recording was Tempest’s first and only vocal take, breathlessly cycling through memories including witnessing a stabbing, touring experiences, relationship problems with his ex-wife, and gradually understanding his gender identity. “I put pen to paper, wrote it very quickly, and went into the booth shaking – I was almost crying by the end of it,” Tempest says. “I make a few mistakes, and there’s some hesitation and stumbling where I can’t read my handwriting.” However, he agreed to not do a second take at the suggestion of producer Fraser T Smith, who had earned Tempest’s trust after aiding Stormzy’s creative risks on Gang Signs & Prayer. “There’s something about the breathlessness of the recording that felt true – it felt like an arrival.”
Beyond this condensing of Tempest’s life story, time takes on a strange character in Self Titled. There’s the time-travel narratives in ‘Know Yourself’ and ‘Till Morning’ – the album’s heart-wrenching closer, where Tempest imagines going back as an adult to guard the door of his own childhood bedroom. Compared to the shared immediacy of the present and past, the future is treated with ambivalence, as in Tempest’s address to his “unborn child that I can’t bear having” in ‘Bless The Bold Future’. “I believe time is simultaneous – what’s happened once happens forever,” Tempest says. “The present is all there is, and everything now is a direct result of what we’ve done and how we’ve lived. This is the same moment of the World Wars, and of the Enlightenment – this terrible, beautiful, chaotic, unmanageable moment.”
For Tempest, the rest of the year will largely be spent touring. “Sometimes I get in my head about a performance,” he says. “There might be a problem with the sound, or tech, or I’m tired. Then you just look at someone in the crowd, and you think of the power there – the power I’ve received from music.”
He relates this to the Baker’s Dozen he shares with tQ: a collection of favourite records spanning pop revolutionaries like Grace Jones and Björk, rappers like GZA and Chester P, as well as some modern classical and jazz. “These albums I talk to you about, they saved my fucking life. I feel them all behind me, charging up my back. It means their light can come through me, and charge someone in the audience, who can take that light and let it charge them up,” he says. “Because I’ve received, I can transmit.”
Kae Tempest’s ‘snew album Self Titled is out now via Island. To begin reading his Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below
