Mercury Music Prize nominee Kate Tempest takes to the very low stage of Edinburgh’s Bongo Club to deliver a heartfelt sermon of poetry and rap to a diverse crowd, helping to cement her reputation as one of UK hip hop’s finest new talents.
Opening with brash, ravey beats and crashing snares, before dropping into a spoken word version of ‘Marshall Law’, it is clear that this isn’t going to be a gig that is constraining itself to the usual formulas.
Following the order on her debut album Everybody Down, band and vocalist come together for ‘The Truth’ and then for album stand out ‘Lonely Daze’, with plenty of crowd interaction in between tracks, warming herself up by letting us know that it was the last leg of her tour and that she felt lucky to be able to do what she loved.
Plenty of the gig is poetry, but each time the band comes back in it comes back harder and faster, taking cues from the manic rap rave of the likes of Die Antwoord, more abrasive and raw than the record, with the drums frequently taking centre stage, and the songs sounding more psychedelic than on record.
The story continues, kitchen sink tales of her characters Harry and Becky twisting into darker places, with ‘Circles’ being one of the most experimental tracks of the gig, and the crowd interaction doesn’t abate either, with Tempest letting us know that the Referendum was looked upon by her as inspiring in the way that it reintroduced apathetic voters to political actions.
An excellent poem, receiving the loudest cheer of the night, follows ‘Circles’, concerning itself with how people had once given themselves to religion, gained certainty, but at the expense of truth, and now, having lost this, became lost themselves to consumerism, culminating with the line: “once we had the fear, now we have the fix”.
After exhorting that we should all be more empathetic and less greedy, and that she was angry at society, but not sure about any solutions, the gig ended with an a’cappella duet with baby faced and velvet voiced support act Loyle Carner.
Comparisons with The Streets and Lady Sovereign are inevitable, but there seems to be a greater depth here than either of those, if a little more uncertainty about what it is that she stands for, but then that’s no bad thing.
An extremely talented writer and affable performer, who despite her spoken word ode to hip hop towards the end of the gig, probably needs the scene a lot less than UK rap needs her.
Words: Stevie Williams
