Kae Tempest has spent most of their life trying to escape themselves.
It's something the 37-year-old poet, musician, rapper, playwright, and author has been mulling over ahead of their Australian tour, which kicks off this week and hits Sydney Opera House for the opening of WorldPride.
Words have always been Tempest's bread and butter – and until recently, their means of escape.
"We've all felt it, when you go out dancing, or when you abandon yourself to the spirit somehow. It doesn't have to be in a kind of ecstatic reverie … It's just when you get lost in creativity of some sort, anything that makes you lose yourself," says Tempest.
"That's the place that I went to as a young teenager that made me realise what life could be about."
Warning: This story includes strong language.
It's early February and they're speaking from their apartment in Catford, a gritty district of South London, which has been their lifelong stomping ground.
Tempest began writing and performing their unique blend of spoken word poetry and hip hop at 16, starting with open mic nights at Deal Real, the famed hip hop record store.
Since then, they've produced six poetry collections, five studio albums, four plays, a novel, and a non-fiction book, and won a number of awards, including the prestigious Ted Hughes Prize for poetry.
Their mastery of music and language is due in no small part to years spent beat-making and rapping on the streets of South London as a teen – and it gives a particular charge to their style of performance.
They have a command of language and rhythm that makes you listen; makes you care about what they have to say.
The effect is immediate, grounding; thrusts you into the present like a sucker punch.
Tempest describes the feeling of meeting the energy of an audience in their 2020 book On Connection: "Sometimes it's like tackling a giant slippery monster, and other times it's like letting a bird out of my chest and watching it fly up into the light."
On Connection is a thesis on connecting through creativity. Tempest puts it simply in the book: "Telling poems levels the room."
But it does more than that.
There is a transcendent quality to their style of performance. Their lyricism resonates variously as a prayer that elevates the room or a primal scream that rings out against the dirge of modern life; a beckoning back to the body; a summons to the soul.
There's something primordial about it.
In the book, they talk about the Jungian concept of "the spirit of the depths", which they interpret as an 'ancient self' that can be "reached through creative ritual and abandonment to something wild and in many ways terrifying".
Tempest invokes that feeling of wild abandon in their performances. But the experience of it has changed tenor recently.
"It's different to how it was before, of [wanting] to disappear completely; give me this black hole to jump into and let me just scream my words out and … that will make everything go away. It isn't like that anymore," they tell ABC Arts.
"It's less like escape and it's more like arrival."
But it's taken the better part of their life to get here.
Coming out as non-binary, in 2020, was a major turning point.
Connection through creativity
For Tempest, creativity is inherent.
"It's been the prime function of my life. It's how I solidify friendships, it's how I have fun, it's how I made my name in my neighbourhood, and then in the wider world," they explain.
"It's really hard for me to try and imagine where my life outside of creativity begins and ends."
Creativity has also been a lifeline.
"Creative connection brings a person closer to themselves when they have started to drift," they write in On Connection.
Tempest speaks openly about their struggles with depression.
They recall a particularly low point about 15 years ago: "I was drinking a lot. It was a bit of a weird time in my life and things were really chaotic."
They were touring Latvia at the time and wound up doing a poetry set at a warehouse party.
"I was just on my own drifting around this place. I'd done my set and I was drunk … and this woman came over to me and she said, 'If you keep turning your back on the light, eventually it will stop trying to find you.'
"What she meant was: 'I liked your set but you're too drunk. What are you doing?' And it just stuck with me."
Even so, it took several years for them to fully emerge from that slump.
Creativity was the thing that kept them going.
"The thing is that [the light] might stop trying to find you but it doesn't go anywhere. You might stop feeling this thing at your back saying, 'Come, this is the way,' but when you're ready to turn around again and face it, it's still there."
Reckoning with identity
Tempest's latest album, The Line Is a Curve, is a major step towards that light. It was written at a time when they were grappling with gender dysphoria, and was released after they came out as non-binary.
"The album is not specifically about my transition or about my gender identity but it comes out of a moment where I was realising that things had to change, and so a lot of stuff within it is more implicit," they say.
"The more I tour it, the more I realise, as with all of my work, I'm talking to myself."
Tempest's struggle with gender dysphoria came to a head during the throes of the pandemic in mid-2020, while they were working on the album.
"I reached a point where the repression was so intense that I became really ill," they tell ABC Arts.
"I had thought that there was no way of me ever being honest with my family, my friends and the world. I just thought it could never happen … but it got to a point where I was repressing so much that I really wasn't well."
They also began to feel that the shame they were carrying about their gender identity was making a bigger statement.
"When I look at my community, who I've always loved — I've always felt power from the community, but I've been so afraid. It's like, if I'm ashamed of that in me, then I'm ashamed of them.
"I was internalising all this shame and homophobia and transphobia, and it's OK when I'm putting it on me, but when I look out at them I think, 'How can I be ashamed of that?'"
Having spent years trying to escape their bodily discomfort and shame through performance they finally turned to face it.
"You can't separate the body from the mind, you can't just tell the body to shut up and deal with it, especially if it's the body that's got to go out on stage. I was suffering and I couldn't hold it back anymore," says Tempest.
"And thank God I was able to make that decision, that it was actually time to start living – to come alive."
Shame to pride
Tempest describes coming out as non-binary as "transformational".
"You know, some people will be like, 'Well, why the fuck does it matter? Why do you need to tell anybody about your experience with your gender?' I have heard that from people," Tempest says.
"But just the relief of not keeping a secret [anymore] and actually being able to look at myself as the person I am – dyke, butch, fucking trans guy – and be like, that's beautiful. That's so fucking beautiful. Also, it's calm.
"I'm not in anywhere near as much pain as I was in."
Less than two months before coming out, Tempest posted a poem about pride to Instagram. In it they framed pride and shame as opposing ends of a spectrum of queer experience, saying: "I've carried my shame like a drunk friend, dragged through the days of my life."
Since coming out, that bodily experience of shame has lifted for Tempest.
"This is the most beautiful I've ever been, and as I continue to accept myself, it will be more and more beautiful.
"But the thing about pride is, it's difficult, and I just want to acknowledge that and say to other queer and trans people, 'It's never going to be straightforward, and I'm sorry that we live in a culture that tells you it should be – it never has been for us.'
"But the repercussions that come from being honest are nowhere near the suffocation that comes from holding it in."
Tempest is about to begin their tour in Australia when we speak.
The show is built around The Line Is a Curve – the title of which is an analogy about making peace with past selves.
"I think on this tour, increasingly, I'm bringing my body with me. I'm staying grounded and I feel good," Tempest says.
"I'm looking at the audience also, and I'm seeing more of myself in the crowd, seeing [queer] community, and that makes me feel so safe. I love seeing that."
Kae Tempest performs at Perth Festival on February 15; Sydney Opera House on February 17; Mona Foma, Launceston on February 18; Canberra Theatre Centre on February 20; Brisbane Powerhouse on February 21, and Forum Melbourne on February 22.
