Kae Tempest And A Beautiful Revelation.

On conversations with our younger selves....

One of my favourite ever episodes of the Changes podcast happened two years ago in May 2023. It was a conversation about change with the writer, poet and rapper Kae Tempest.

Kae has published three plays, a novel, a book length essay and six books of poetry. For his poetry, he has won the Ted Hughes Award, and in 2014 he was named a next generation poet by the Poetry Book Society which is a once in a decade accolade. His books have been translated into 11 languages and published to critical acclaim around the world. And then there's the music. Kae has released five studio albums, two of which have been nominated for the Mercury Prize, and there’s a third one on the way in July of this year, called Self Titled.

Our conversation on Changes was beautiful and raw. Kae has a way of articulating the pain and joy of living in a way that is ceaselessly profound. This, partly, I think is because he has made the choice for his primary motivation in connecting with people to be one of love. He has this almost divine gift of being able to move out of his own way, withhold personal judgement, put himself in other peoples shoes and assume only love for them. He came into our conversation with an open heart. There was a sense of trust there that as an interviewer I wanted to honour and reciprocate.

Kae allowed me to ask some serious questions. He talked about his childhood and how he had accepted his gender dysphoria as concrete. Then he talked about coming out as trans in 2020, how he realised that he had been repressing himself for twenty years and how the gender dysphoria became euphoria. We got on to talking about writing and truth. Writing is such a soul searching past-time, we write to know ourselves, how did younger Kae manage to keep writing when he was going through so much inner turmoil?

Kae then told me a story. Here is a transcript of what happened next.

Kae the way I think about writing, the way I've always thought about it, when I was a kid and I was suffering I thought of writing, my lyricism, was like my older self coming into my head and giving me the words and being like, come this way, this way, this way.

I can remember it was this one time I was in between places to live and I was staying- my friend had this caravan on this site and I was there and I was fasting. I don't know what I was doing- whatever, I was trying to get right with myself and I was visited by this voice and it was- I wrote these lyrics and I wrote this poem. It's called 13 Commandments.

‍Annie And that voice was, in your head, the older version of you?

Kae My older self. It was my older self. Came into my head, told me know yourself.

‍Annie Oh my god, that's the line?

‍Kae Yeah from the, from the lyric yeah.

‍Annie 'Came into my head, told me to know myself'.

‍Kae Yeah.

‍Annie Oh, my God Kae! It's blowing my mind!

Kae *Laughs* yeah, it's crazy. But then as I've got older, now I'm like, wait, I am that older self and I'm not going back. I'm not going back in time. I know I'm not. I'm not going back in time and taking that kid. And then it's like actually, every time I sit down to write, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm going back there, I'm taking that kid and I'm saying, come this way, I got you, I got you. And then as I start to move into more of myself, I feel that kid and all the things they were carrying and I'm looking after them and like, just like they were looking out for me back then, you know. So it's in this process of writing, it strips away everything. You go to the raw place, the true place. That's why I can stand up in front of so many different kinds of people who have so many different kinds of experience and I can tell a poem and that poem can mean a hundred different things to the 100 different people in the room. And it can carry all the different significances of everybody's experience and day and the environment because we go to a place that's even beyond language. But you use language to access the place. But the place is beyond language. It's like, it's the guts, it's the feeling. It's underneath the feet.

This week, exactly two years after the episode of Changes went out, Kae visited my weekly BBC podcast Sidetracked that I present with Nick Grimshaw, and told me another story.

The second single from his new album dropped this week, it’s called, Know Yourself. Produced by The Chemical Brothers, the song is crafted as a dialogue between Kae and that younger version of himself. In the hook, we hear Kae’s younger voice reciting the line from the 13 Commandments Poem,

When I was young I sought help from my older self. Came into my head, told me know yourself.

And then we hear Kae now, rapping around that sample of his younger self.

Could you picture me when you were spitting sixteens?

Surfing the top deck penning them bars, underaged in the clubs taking charge of the mic

Precautious little nothing with the world in his sights

I am on it now I will work harder

This is peace to the kid I came after (Peace to the kid I came after)

The words of the bridge between the present and the past I know myself at last

Kae told me this week that as a result of our conversation on Changes, the utterance of the line in his conversation with me, and my reaction to it, “that poem that that line was from, kind of rumbled up from the ether of time, it was more present in my consciousness” so that when he went into the studio to create this song that he knew he wanted to be a dialogue between his older and younger self, it was the ‘know yourself’ line that he used. Because it was there in his head, two years later.

So a young person in dire straits in a caravan, is visited by an older version of themselves, then they write a poem about it, twenty years later that same person is talking in a podcast about their relationship with writing and truth, and tells the story of their younger self, reciting a line from the poem that they wrote to describe it. Two years later they use that same line, in a song.

A story told and retold, condensed into a line, in a poem, then a podcast, now a song.

I’m mad moved by this whole chain of events. Connection, true open hearted connection allows our deepest truths to flow upwards and outwards and to fly through time.

Can you imagine, in the same way Kae did, your younger self in dialogue with you now? What would you say to each other? I haven’t felt close to my younger self in such a long time, but recently, in the last five years I feel like we’ve come back to each other. Maybe this is what growing older is, finding our way back to ourselves?

The original changes episode from 2023 is here.

This weeks episode of Sidetracked with Kae is here.

And the song Know Yourself. So good! Listen and watch below…

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