ANOTHER KIND OF DIVINITY: KAE TEMPEST

Kae Tempest is a prolific poet, writer, and spoken word artist whose work bears immense emotional weight. They reflect on the truth of performance and the search for connection in a disorienting world.

By Libby Hsieh

Kae Tempest is writing a world. From the comfort of their South London home, they devote their hours to the building blocks of a novel—envisioning the songs warbling through an imagined high street, the distinct gait of a character, the grain of cement under their feet. Lately, Kae’s time is sacred. Between producing their sixth studio album and shaping their second novel, it has to be. In their speech, they exude a steady grace—a pocket-sized glimpse of that which spills out of their work, reminding their audience that living and creating are not separate acts, but inextricably linked.

A poet, playwright, novelist, musician, and performer, Kae is both the singer and the song: writing the words and living by them in real time. Weaving together sharp lyricism and an unfiltered voice, they harmonize melodies of the universal and the personal, the mundane and the profound. Kae’s work is earthbound, looking both inward and outward—taking immense, indescribable feelings and whittling them down to their simplest form.

In their live performances, Kae’s willingness to be forthcoming fosters a meditative, almost spiritual quality—a divinity not marked by traditional religious dogma. With ecclesiastic lyrics like, “Surrender, I do surrender / Move through me and feel me get out of the way / And tune into something more deep and reflective than what’s to be achieved,” you can imagine a room full of people—almost like a congregation—singing, praying, and feeling together. With driving beats and a flawless cadence, their shows are proof that what brings you pain can often be a pathway toward collective healing.

All that time spent bringing their ideas into the world can be exhausting. Kae balances the dizzying carousel of their mind with boxing, weightlifting, or really anything that takes their “entire consciousness into the repetition of difficult movements.” These exercises show up in their forthcoming album, which features rich orchestration and pounding bass drums, reminiscent of a fighter’s walk-up song.

True to form, Kae speaks candidly with Beyond Noise, offering a glimpse into the alchemy of their writing, the mundanity of being a creative professional, and the continual search for connection in a disorienting world.

LIBBY HSIEH: Within The Line Is A Curve, there are moments of tension and anxiety, while the newer stuff feels like you’re standing with two feet on the ground. How does that feel—whether you’re writing from a place of reflection or a place of pain?

KAE TEMPEST: The honest answer is that it’s not an intention, it’s a discovery. I work out how I’m feeling by making work. Whether there is a feeling of absolution in the record or a feeling of anxiety, it will just be about what’s happening or where I was that day. It’s never like I want to give the feeling of this or that. You just keep going until you’ve got an original thought—until it feels shorter and clearer and stronger.

LH: Since you work across a lot of different disciplines, how do you determine what goes where?

KT: It’s usually much more practical than you might imagine. Over the last 20 years of making work, I’ve learned to streamline the attention I can give each project. I take out all my frustration with one process by immersing myself in another. Writing a three-and-a-half-minute song is very different from writing a 90,000-word novel. Writing a scene between two people in a room is very different from writing a three-line tercet rhyme scheme. Normally, I’m deadline-driven—it’s really unromantic. As well as it being my life’s greatest joy, it’s also my job.

LH: Do you find that the act of making your passions professional changes the way you approach them?

KT: I think that there are different modes of experiencing creativity. There’s the rush of connection to the divine. There’s also checking in with your internal landscape, how you’re feeling, and clearing space emotionally. There’s the play and the inquisition. But then there’s the craft—which is what you get from putting the hours in. If we’re talking about a musical instrument, that’s all underpinned by hours and hours of practice so that you can actually master it. You can only understand your ability once you’ve learned the basics. It doesn’t matter how good you are at writing if you haven’t put the time in. You need to learn. Every work that I’ve written, any album that I’ve made, any tour I’ve done—they’re learning curves, they’re stepping stones. My friend Stephen Camden is a writer. He said every finished book is a time capsule that whispers, “Next time, I’ll do better.”

LH: Are you driven by learning and discovery?

KT: I absolutely adore the feeling of having an idea. It colors everything that happens in life. You look for it when an album starts to take shape; it’s this thing from an invisible world. It’s coming into this world, and you have a part in marshaling its journey between them. It’s also a difficult feeling, because no matter how beautiful the idea is, the reality of creating it is always a failure. I’m driven by learning. I’m driven by trying to get closer to accommodating these ideas. I’m trying to be clearer, less baggy, more concise—to express with less effort and more direction. That inspires me about writing and music that I love; every time I hear incredible music or read something, I swear it was written just for me.

LH: You spoke a bit about the divine before. Do you think that process is like trying to get closer to the divine?

KT: I think that if you’ve been on stage playing music, or been in connection with other musicians, you have this experience of “another world.” I would call that the divine because it’s also a place that I know through meditation or prayer. Music is what has given me access to that world. On a good night in a performance, you feel yourself moving towards it. It’s like, I don’t know, pure consciousness. We reach for it together through performance. For me, it is sacred, the divine. I don’t know if I use these words in a way that will confuse somebody else, because obviously, they have religious connotations. But for me, it’s just my spiritual practice as well as my creative practice—the two things are the same.

LH: Was this spirituality something you came to through performing?

KT: I didn’t grow up religious. I’ve always been interested in how human beings experience their humanity, the perspectives of big religions, and also the kinds of spirituality that exist. I’m a student of a lot of these things. There’s a lot in it that is incredibly beautiful, but also a lot that is incredibly cruel and responsible for some of the worst things that have happened to us all.

LH: What are some of the things you glean from them?

KT: Atonement, the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Just human connection to each other and the fact that we all encounter the same internal struggles, and that we all seek comfort from the same pains. There are these ancient structures in place [that illustrate] how to be a human: how to have a body, how to live in a body, how to have a soul, how to have encounters with family.

LH: People are always looking for the same things. Those feelings that people search for inside of religion or church can be made available to you at a gig—facilitated in the right way.

KT: When I was researching for the book that I’m writing, I was thinking about Yom Kippur, the day when all the Jews pray for atonement—their own atonement and also the atonement of others. There’s a prayer where you list all of the sins that have been committed. As you make this prayer, it’s customary to beat your chest. And I was like, Fucking hell! That’s what I do on stage. Like with “Europe Is Lost,” I’m kind of speaking this prayer, like, This is what we’ve done. This is where we’ve ended up. Maybe it’s just a physiological inheritance from a great-grandparent I never knew. It’s interesting, because I wasn’t raised in the synagogue. I don’t speak Hebrew. The only connotation to it is a cultural one.

LH: There’s a collectiveness within that prayer for atonement.

KT: For sure. The other day, I went to a friend’s wedding and I met this lady who was the best friend of my friend’s mum, and she said, “Oh, it’s you! I came to see you perform with my sister-in-law.” This woman came to my gig in Newcastle after she lost her nephew. She said, “It was like you were speaking to me directly.” I wasn’t talking to them, but that’s what happens when you’re on stage if you’re going deeply into your own truth. If you’re performing from a place of the wound, everybody in that room can suddenly be more present in their own experience. Our humanity is so often cut off from us in life. Something like performance, even though it’s an artifice or a play, is more real than this unacknowledged game that we play every day. When we go into the space of heightened reality, it can really hit.

Two weeks ago, I ended up in the city. I was having a really, really tough day, and I just looked up the venues around me. There was one ticket left for this show—it was this singer from Georgia. It was just fucking unbelievably beautiful to hear somebody playing music, and to connect with the ultimate humanity of somebody with a guitar. It wasn’t fussy and it was so direct, and I felt myself uplifted. That’s what performance is; it’s connection. It’s optimistic. Even the act of just being in the room together is fucking beautiful.

LH: Do you think that not knowing anything about their show allowed you to get rid of any blinders and receive it fully?

KT: I think expectation can interfere with connection, because you’re like, I’m really ready to be moved. and then you’re like, Am I being moved? So often, it’s what you bring to the exchange that creates that loaded, heavy, hot feeling in your heart. People will say thank you for [performing], but it’s like, Well, you came to that performance needing, wanting, reaching. In terms of the appetite for connection, I felt lost. I was lost. And the only thing in my life that has always oriented me is music. That’s the thing that brings me back to myself. It’s my life force. So when I feel lost, I go and [listen]… It’s like a way out of the body and into the soul.

LH: When you’re performing, how do you make sure that you’re coming in open and ready to perform truthfully for yourself?

KT: The whole day is a sequence of things I do before a show. You feel it from the minute you wake up. If I try to present it as truth, I’m forcing it. The ultimate moments come in this state of acquiescence to something that is beyond you. If I worry, if the nerves make me think, What comes next? I’ve lost it. When you get out of the way, it just happens. If I’m checking in with the audience or looking at someone dancing, or listening to how cool the drums sound, the words keep going and create this cumulative effect in the bloodstream. If something particular has happened that day or something hard is going on in my life, it shapes and changes and powers the set in a way that you couldn’t recreate. So much of it is about doing what you can to relax. So, I do my vocal warm-up, I do my stretching, I do a workout, I’m careful about when I eat, I don’t drink any alcohol. Because there’s this thing that’s going to happen—it’s like a connection to all your past selves, as well. It’s not me at the moment that creates this thing. It’s whoever wrote [the songs], and that was a person from a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. The words are this bridge between selves.

LH: Like, the ultimate act of surrender.

KT: Yeah and when there’s 5,000 people at a festival wanting to dance, that’s a hard thing to do because your instinct is, like, I’ve gotta please these people. They’ve gotta like me. I’ve gotta make them laugh. I’ve gotta give them what they want. What does that mean about me? You get lost in that. But that’s why I’ve created the show that I’ve created, because all I’ve got to do is just jump into the songs, trust it, and let it do its thing. And then I don’t have to embarrass myself by trying to placate or please or win—because that always makes me feel really cheap afterwards. You want to rise to the occasion and be beautiful and just do the thing you’re excellent at doing. That’s why the people are there.