Part-poet, part-rapper Kate Tempest is the latest thing on the spoken word scene ? and she is thrilled at how suddenly everyone ?gets? the spitting, weeping cultural off-shoot where hip hop meets literature. ?It?s mind-blowing that people are listening,? she says.
This week she?s the face of performance poetry for the London 2012 Festival, her inventive, soaring rhymes the highlight of Shake the Dust, a poetry slam on the South Bank. Tomorrow she supports Saul Williams, a New York-based hip hop artist and one of the most influential voices of the spoken word scene.
Tempest herself is a regular on the festival circuit across Europe and this summer she?s at Latitude and the Secret Garden Party, ahead of supporting poet Benjamin Zephaniah at the RSC and opening her own one-woman show, Brand New Ancients, at the Battersea Arts Centre, both in September.
In the past she has wowed crowds at Glastonbury, where her mature, lyrical and heartfelt poetry was unexpectedly included in televised highlights. Wild blonde curls flying, her crazed blue eyes fixed on you, tattoos flashing on her pale arms, her performance is elemental and frighteningly passionate. If anyone in television could work out what to do with her, she?d be great. As she puts it herself, ?that kind of conviction is hard to come by in the theatre?.
She should know about that, as a first-time playwright whose debut, the well-received Wasted, has just finished touring for Paines Plough. Her heroes include William Blake, James Joyce and the Wu-Tang Clan.
Her themes are informed by classical mythology, passion, love. She speaks about the moon reflected in puddles, ?the things we?d give the whole world not to feel?, the wonder and horror of urban life (?We live so close together but we feel so alone?). In some senses she?s like an urban Shakespeare: in What We Came After, her poem about Prospero, she writes: ?I tell of him who summoned them storms in vengeance, Poisoned by the wrath of his remembrance, Him that gave language just to impose a sentence.? Her signature poem, Line in the Sand, is, on the other hand, so close to rap it almost has you bobbing up and down as she delivers her message of gritty, defiant, ironic Britishness: ?In me is the spirit of Old England?s dragon,
I?m draggin? my feet at the edge of the chasm [?] Me I was born to embody all the words that I speak [?] These are strange times and, yes, I know full well I?m a strange kind.?
South-east London born and bred, she is youngest of five children. She?s 26 (but looks younger) and has been performing as a poet for five years. ?It?s not lucrative,? she says. ?You play to 11 people in Sunderland.?
Before then she saw herself more as a rapper. She studied at Croydon?s Brit School and at Goldsmiths and found her voice on the rap scene from the age of 16 where she would fight for space in MC ?battles?.
Having tried music (she played guitar for her Brit School audition) and rap, she has now found where she really belongs and is a fixture on the spoken word scene alongside writer/performers Salena Godden, Scrubious Pip and Polarbear, each with their own growing fanbase. Dressed in a baggy shirt, black jeans, ?Tempest? nameplate necklace and brown suede shoes that look like burnt Cornish pasties, Tempest has described herself as the antithesis of the Pussycat Dolls.
She has a hippy vibe: one home-drawn tattoo reads ?India? and another weaves ocean waves and cherry blossom around her arm. The water is a symbol of calm with turbulence underneath and the cherry blossom is to keep her writing on track. ?My dad once told me that there?s a Japanese saying that the poet starts to write when the cherry blossom starts to fall. This is to remind me that the cherry blossom is always falling.?
She is fascinated by the mechanics of spoken word. ?It?s very hard to explain what we do,? she says, ?but it just transfixes me. All it is, is somebody talking. But so much of it is attached to the personality.? It can be disarmingly intimate. Casually, while Tempest is having her photograph taken on the terrace of the caff in Brockley, where we meet, she performs a love poem about drinking three bottles of wine in bed. It?s like she?s showing you the inside of her soul.
?This is a very exciting time in London,? she gives as her parting shot, ?there?s this real DIY attitude, that no matter what you do you can make it work. It?s a cool time for throwing yourself into things.?
With her first poetry collection, Everything Speaks in Its Own Way out, a one-woman show around the corner and a diary full of tour dates, she is definitely taking that literally.
Kate Tempest performs at Shake the Dust with Saul Williams at the Southbank Centre, SE1 (020 7960 4200; southbankcentre.co.uk) tomorrow as part of the London Literature Festival which runs until July 12.
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