Kate Tempest / All We Are @ The Art School, 1 Dec
Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts' graduates All We Are put in a peppy turn, drawing the attention of a chatty, full capacity Art School with rich vocals and well practised, cut and paste crowd pleasing techniques. Arms are held aloft, stadium style, and strategic, clap-along drum beats receive a bouncy response.
Feel Safe, the band’s grooved, understated single from last year, sounds a little tinny in comparison to the bolder material they push tonight, but underneath their ultra-polished professionalism there’s surprising warmth. They take a bow, and vocalist/bassist Guro Gikling offers a rousing, introductory speech for night’s headliner: “Kate Tempest is unique. She is one of a kind, and we are lucky to have her.”
Glasgow’s audience doesn’t need telling. When the South London rapper/poet takes to the stage, it’s to an ear-splitting, foot-thumping roar of a welcome – and it doesn’t subside. Tempest mouths “oh my god.” She says Glasgow’s her favourite city to gig. No, really. Then she asks us to turn our phones off. She’s going to play new record Let Them Eat Chaos from beginning to end, and “those screens can take you out of an experience, and they can take the person next to you out of their experience.” The room cheers again, as the man next to The Skinny whips out his phone to film it...
Let Them Eat Chaos is a complicated, engaging narrative that works best in order: it’s built to be listened to like you would an audio book, or how you’d watch a drama. Sometimes something lacks in a gig that runs an album from start to finish, but Tempest’s plotted extra points within her story for adlib and expansion – and she soars.
After the storm, the album rounds out with a simple call to arms: Love more. It’s easy to dismiss the mantra as too soft, but the room explodes with thunderous, unceasing applause. This might be a crowd of the already converted, but Tempest eventually returns to the stage with a final word of warning, rather than an encore. “That’s it,” she says. “There’s no more. But what you can do, now, is to live with an activated empathy. Every day. Towards every person that you pass in the street. It’s hard.”