Kae Tempest
Vicar Street, Dublin
★★★★☆
Kae Tempest isn’t as well known as he should be. The London artist, who has twice been nominated for the Mercury Prize, rarely troubles the upper reaches of the pop charts yet has cultivated a dedicated following for his albums, poetry, fiction and plays.
This often matchless rhymer got out of the traps early, battle-rapping as a teenager, delivering rhapsodic slam-poetry and winning the Ted Hughes Award in 2013, while still in his 20s. There’s a widescreen luminosity to his craft that dazzles: he can pull you up so close and quickly to a subject you fear whiplash, experiencing his pain and, less often, his joy.
Tempest has been given the complicated gift of an artistic subject both rich and agonising: gender identity. In 2020 he came out as nonbinary; this year he announced his gender transition. On his latest album, Self Titled, he anatomises what that feels like, flipping from intense personal loneliness to fame, from public shaming to turning down an MBE.
Through stark imagery and relentless vulnerability, via painfully robust details, Tempest tells a story beyond the soundbites. Delivering it live, there’s a sense of self-consciousness about all this self-scrutiny. “How dare I be so introspective?” he asks towards the close of his set at Vicar Street on Thursday, before offering a rationale from one of his literary heroes. “Joyce said, ‘In the particular is contained the universal.’”
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The 39-year-old makes no secret that he is writing letters to his younger self, and he exhorts the crowd to become or accept themselves fully. Tempest has the posture of a pugilistic preacher – arms wide, pacing the stage – and sometimes the attitude of one, too. “If you’ve come here with a friend or if you’ve been waiting for this for years, or somewhere in between, welcome,” he says before lighting into More Pressure, a highlight from The Line Is a Curve, his 2022 album.
It’s a measure of Tempest’s artistry that the set, though intense, rarely comes off as overly earnest or spirit-sapping. Songs blend into songs without pause: there’s doomy grime, blissed-out electronica, flashing visuals with lines of text skidding across the screen, heavy beats and constant, effortless delivery of rhymes that trace the tension of modern life. “They used to tell their children not to stare, but when I’m dead they’ll put my statue in the square,” he chants. Those in the Church of Tempest hang over the balcony, rapt.
For almost the whole gig he is on stage with just one other musician: Pops Roberts, one of the founders of the Manchester band Lovescene. Impressive as Roberts is, deftly triple-tasking on vocals, drums and synthesisers, you long to gauge how these songs would sound with a more elaborate stage set-up. Still, there’s an easy vibe between the two that speaks to a well-forged commitment.
A cover of George Michael’s Freedom! ’90 – the melody yanked out to emphasise the lyrics – sees the return of Jacob Alon, Tempest’s talented support act (and Mercury Prize nominee), and there’s a welcome synchronicity between the three. “Can you tell I’ve done this live, like, 26 times?” Tempest says, adding, with admirable comic timing, “But it never feels like it does now.”
In unpicking the snarl of emotions that soundtrack his life, Tempest makes art from alienation and finds his joy in doing it – as his smile, constant throughout the night, attests.
