YouSaid · the spoken record

Kae Tempest

lines on the record: 38
first: 2026-05-02
most recent: 2026-05-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And it's so beautiful. It is so beautiful. You're watching people have the time of their life as the seaside. It's the fucking seaside. It's fish and chips. It's the best. It's so beautiful. It's this endless horizon. It's the movement of the ocean and the stuckness of the place. Unbearable life can be in the same place as how beautiful life can be. And for me, like... Something about that is it's an accelerator for my creativity. It's like as soon as I knew that's where we were, then it really came to life, I think.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We lost a friend recently. She died, and I went back to where she was from, which was a coastal town for the wake, and I remembered something about how those towns feel in that moment, and that was quite present, I think, in the mix when I was writing. Also, I went to stay at a friend's house down on the coast, and it was real to me. I've often run away down to the sea. I go there for joy and for misery, as a lot of us do. And there's something amazing about a British coastal town, which is like the most hardcore stuff can be going on. And at the same time, there is always someone having the time of their life.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It just appeared to me that this is where the characters lived. And it's a combination of many places I've known, coastal towns, British coastal towns, and a little bit like South London, like when I was growing up, there's always a little bit of new crossing every... Every time I close my eyes and think of place, I kind of do think of that place. But also.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so important. This novel is set in a fictional I did one of these events in London recently, and the interviewer, Sean Fay, she said, she described Edgecliffe the town as being small enough that you bump into the person who bullied you at school. Big enough that you can get lost. Was actually so overwhelmed I didn't even really notice that she said it, but my girlfriend later was like, Did you hear what Sean said about Escle? She was right. It was really amazing. This town is an amalgamation of many places that I've known and it came out of To be totally honest, I don't know where the idea started. I don't know why this place appeared in my internal landscape the way it did. But it”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel probably the place where I feel most comfortable or the place where I get lost most easily is in the recording studio I making music because that's something to me that takes me away from everything like when I make music how it feels but it's The things aren't related, it's like different languages or something. I can't really explain it as you can tell. It starts with the idea, which is the first four words that I said in response to that question and then went off for about fucking 15 minutes. And that's the end of questions, everyone Really, I hope that answers your question. I'm sorry I didn't do a bad job of it.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Felt like What I'm doing never and with the novel I started to think this is going well I started to film the years that I've spent working paying off in terms of I could understand a bit more about just myself my process how to stay with an idea how to follow it like how to be less baggy with my all this stuff it's like any craft you learn you get better but As you learn and develop in the craft, the main thing you learn is how far you've got to go and how little you actually know in the scheme of things. So all that to say. Every single thing is creatively satisfying and creatively. Somehow you hit on these ideas and they're just, it's like it was like they're all along, and it's just glowing, and you just want to know more and more and more about it.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Playwriting, where I had to learn about dialogue, I had to learn about not telling but showing. All this stuff just totally wrecked my head. I couldn't believe it. It was so fascinating and exciting. I had to learn about how actors, even if they've trained for years and years as actors, don't actually know about rhythm, like lyrical rhythm. This was very interesting to me. So many things that I've learned by just plunging into a new form have then started me thinking and things will be ticking over and I'm trying to understand it. And then by the time I get to the end of that thing that I'm working on, there'll be another idea that is basically where I resolve the issues that have come up for me through one thing. I then turn my focus into somewhere I feel more comfortable or more challenged. And then within all of it, there is something unbelievably satisfying about working beyond your comfort zone for me anyway. I've never, not ever, ever, ever, ever.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you've got to. You've got to write a play because there's an opportunity to write a play. So you better learn how to write a play. That's literally what happened. And then suddenly I was working in this new form and my brain was electrocuted into this new, like I could feel new pathways forming because this was a long time ago I got offered the opportunity to write my first play wasted. And because a new writing theatre director had seen me doing my poems I was only doing my poems because I couldn't make any money through my music and somebody had told me about a thing called a poetry slam where if you go and you win it you could get £100 and then so it's all been an accident of just trying. I just kept on trying and then suddenly I found this thing.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing is, the process is generated by the idea. So it's not like I sit down and think, oh, which medium am I going to work in? I don't think I've ever had a thought like that. And people often ask me about the different forms. And people say often, what's left? What are you going to try next? And I think, well, that's not how it's not like that. It's not how it feels. It comes from an idea, or, to be totally honest, it comes from a deadline. And like a commission”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so cool, it's still so new to me to know that anyone's read it. I still can't believe it. These people are so, they're so alive to me. But it's like talking to somebody, but they don't know who. Nobody has met these people, and then suddenly you've met them.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Watching it pass on by. And then suddenly here they are out in the world, and the world's changed. Angel gives them. This possibility, I would say, without wanting to say too much. She's like Counterbalance So where they're getting to or where they'd like to get to, she does not want to, she's taken the opposite path, we could say. In fact That's probably the best way of putting it. Very similar. Internal mechanisms. Selecting different options Do you know what I mean”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Activating a different kind of behavior in a moment that proves to themselves in some way. They're actually worth the air that they fucking breathe. Like they've got a lot of stuff going on, Roughgo. They've been through a lot. And actually they're trying to, as we meet them, take themselves as a human being in the same kind of regard that they would take any other human being. But it's really hard for them to do it. And they've got this second chance at life. They've been inside for ages. They've done this really, it's awful stuff happened and they've been inside for ages. They've come out. And they just really want... Really want to live in the day. They really, really, they just want. Be grateful for every second because they've spent so much of their life.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such a good question Is the wound you lick on these pages? Angel is an interesting character. She's been, this is somebody that I've been on a big journey with. So, for example, She, I know everything about this character. I wrote in a very early draft, she was too brief. And my editor was like, I need to know a bit more. I can't really see her. I can't really feel her. So then I wrote about 100 bazillion words about Angel and delivered the next draft of the novel. My editor was like, uh... She doesn't realise, but I take notes really seriously I can't really give it my all. And then it was too much. So then I had to start again. I've started again with Anger a lot of times, but the function that she serves is important because she is, she offers Rothko a possibility of...”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And were made of every day, of all of our lives and the lives of all of the people that have influenced, you know, and that's an impossible thing, I think, personally, just to put my hands up and say, I couldn't have made that happen intentionally. I had to go all the wrong way for ages and ages and ages and then suddenly it clicks into place and you think it was always going to go there. But if I'd intended and getting there, I wouldn't have been able to. Keep”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was something in their characteristic that I would never have written in the perspective of the person who then subsumed them because this person was of a different generation. She was much older. She'd lived a different life. But when I put her response to a situation into the character of another character in this novel, suddenly I got a real character because people are not what you think of them. Actually, nobody behaves like you think a person behaves. And actually it was the best thing that happened. 40,000 words lighter and suddenly this person starts to live because rather the me telling that person how to behave because of everything, all my prejudices and preconceptions about a person of this age, of this type, of this journey, then actually when this kind of collision of selfs happened, then you actually got what felt more like a realistic response to a situation because that's actually what we are where many people, people are many, many people.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They start to live. They start to really live. And usually it'll be some accident. It'll be like, for example, I didn't want any unintentional repetition. And I realized I had these two sets of characters kind of doing the same thing. So I thought, well, it had been a problem in draft after draft. Why are the audience meant to stick with this complete perspective change and follow this whole other person that they've never met? And I just thought, well, why not? actually, well, that's not really what it's quite a tall order. But I thought like, well... James Joyce wrote Ulysses and I love it. So why don't I just stay with somebody and then suddenly just bring in a completely different character. Anyway, all this to say, when that person finally was on the cutting room floor”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost kind of like get it out of my system, like just write it that way so that then you can think, well, how interesting I hadn't even spotted that narrative trap in myself, but that's something that's at play when I think about. Person A or situation B, or whatever it is, you have to just allow yourself to just write it out. And then at some point, as you keep going and keep chipping away at it, it stops being the case that you're telling them what to do and you start to observe them, talking to each other. And it's like the most incredible moment when you've spent enough time just basically allowing yourself to make mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake. And suddenly out of all of that effort.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within the world of the novel, everybody is given enough space to deal with their will to function and their will to dysfunction. And somewhere in all of that is what they receive as children, what they receive from the world. That also makes me think about what you're saying about these kind of traps we fall into of defining people by their worst days. These are also narrative traps that we receive from culture. It happens to me all the time that my first ideas, and maybe this is useful to say, I'm sure there's loads of people here that are working on writing of some sort, I'm sure of it. The first ideas that I have are always just full of clich ⁇ and what I would call unoriginal received information. So the first time I think of a character, what I'm really seeing in my mind's eye is all the things I've learned about what characters are and do from absorbing everything that I absorb all the time. And so often I just have to let myself like...”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was chewing my own brain to pieces, going through whatever I was going through, thinking, how the fuck do I, but how the fuck do I? And then I came across Aristotle, you know, two and a half thousand years ago, said, well, you are what you do repeatedly. And I was like, thank you. I've just been like, I wish I'd known that. Because I was like, and I just think that. Hopefully”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I know Because it just dawned on me as you kind of put the question. I just was thinking about wow, what is the difference between them? So clever. But the thing about where it ends and you are what you do repeatedly, I mean, so many people in the novel are struggling with how to make their lives feel like they want their lives to feel or how to make themselves behave like they want themselves to behave. So many of them in different ways and there's people going through all kinds of different things and from all kinds of different places and even within the same family. People have chosen very different paths to Way of coping and bearing life and themselves and their point within it. Thing about redemption and atonement and behavior being the key to Selfhood, it's like”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was an amazing question. There's so much I want to say. The difference between forgiveness and atonement is really interesting Because forgiveness. Is something that we get from other people. And atonement is something that we do internally. Is that right?”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“awful fucking day and I don't know what any of you have been through today I don't know I don't know I will never know none of us know what someone else in this room has had to deal with today I wouldn't even try and pretend that I could even imagine but somehow what is amazing is that sometimes even after everything that might happen in a day we still get to notice the light moving over the fucking city when we're walking towards whatever and something about that is that can only be expressed I find in a musical language, in a poetic register, because that feeling of heightened gratitude, or at least for myself, I haven't found a way of saying that in prose that doesn't just sound real. It doesn't resonate with the right kind of frequency because the feeling that it gives me is a musical feeling.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somehow there was so much beauty in it, and that's the thing that I wanted. That's the thing I wouldn't have been able to handle because life is fucking beautiful, even when it's really hard. And I think so often when we're talking about hard stuff without the beauty, it's not satisfying. And also I don't think it's real. I don't think it's true. You ask me about how, why did you use this novel to get to this truth? Actually, the experience of one day into the next, that's what's so beautiful about life, even when you're having...”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But more as an impressionist like we were talking about less like the gritty realism section and more just actually the symphonic like the musical like the fully charged the terrifying the way that everything changes We're dealing with violence and addiction and heavy stuff and despair. But if I dealt with it in this musical way, if I pushed myself through rhythm and flow,”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be the thing that we need to see in order to think we understand them. I kind of wanted to just situate the person in a present and just leave the worst days of their life out of it. But then actually what happened was that my editor was telling me there was this kind of feeling in the reader that you've been cheated out of information or you've missed something or you don't want to create confusion. And so in the end, I'm like, okay, well, I don't want to linger on all this heavy stuff. I don't think people should be defined by what happens to them in their heaviest moments. I wanted to set Rothko free, actually, from all that. But then I realized that what I've got at my disposal is this way of entering that. Entering that moment”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suddenly the prose changes, time changes, you kind of fall down this well, and 20 years elapses in what hopefully feels like one breath. And that came out of a conversation I had with my editor, who, in one version of this story, we didn't know what happened in the 20 years between. And I didn't want to dwell on what happens to a person on their worst days. I didn't want the worst things that happened.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sonorous at some moments they lock in and they find their groove, and at some moments they're all playing completely the wrong notes for each other. But that visual idea of how music plays and what it sounds like to be part of a dynamic of any sort, that was all in my mind. And then the thing about the section that you mentioned, so we start in the present day, we meet our character, our main character, and we are situated with them in their reality. Then we go back 20 years and we meet them 20 years ago, and we get to live with them in this quite crucial time in their becoming, in their life. And then we reach this point where suddenly the time signature changes in their life. And so from within the content of the character and the story, the form changes. We kind of fall into this verse section where...”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you write a poem, is that each page is its own time. You're asking that page to be forever and also like a kind of doorway into a memory or something. It's so interesting to me. It was so new when I had to learn what a page did that the stage couldn't or what the stage did that the page couldn't. I was learning all this stuff all the time. And then in terms of the novel and how you have to hold in your head like I was saying these timelines and you've got to really try and understand how time moves for each of the characters, I kind of understood them always being like four parts of the same musical piece, this family. So if you, the way that I think about their interaction is that at some moments it's more dissonant, at some moments it's more.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a teenager, like the training and the foundation of all of this, everything I've gone on to do since has been musical. I learned all this stuff about words through music. So it's like an instrument, really, I think about myself as somebody that plays words in the way that I relate to other musician friends of mine, I feel so much kinship with the way they play because of what they're thinking about phrasing time, momentum, how to begin where you go, the fact that on stage when you play music, you create a time signature, you create time altogether, and then the audience are invited to come into that time, and then the time takes over and suddenly you come out at the end of it and you don't know where you've been. That stuff happening to me all the time, I think was a good training for what I then went on to discover about meter, form, poetic time, what happens on the page.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's no, he's fucking amazing. He's like, it's like going to space watching him play. He's really special. He's a special musician. We were children together, we learned together how to be artists, and it was his influence on me really that allowed me to see that maybe I had something worth saying. He used to be the one that would go and get the mic and pass it to me in parties because no one would give it to me without him there. So we're part of each other's soul. The only reason I bring him up is because I had this thing of watching him constantly pushing and pulling time. It was an improvised set. He was playing with these other musicians and I was thinking, oh bless them. They hadn't met him before. They didn't know what they're in for. And it was incredible. Like, it was so beautiful to watch. I don't know, I just had this physical body memory of how often I've either stood in front of his drums or had him play in the chair, the bus window, just his legs. And it just made me really understand the training that I had.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew it was going to be a good conversation with you. I knew it. The other night I went to watch my childhood friend, one of my oldest friend really, I went to watch him. Playing a gig. I went to pick him up and drove him to his gig. That's the only way we can hang out at the moment. He's got kids, I'm really busy, so I was like, fuck it, I'm at home, I'm going to come and get you. I'll drive you to your gig. And he's a drummer. He's the only. While I was watching him play, it dawned on me, watching him playing his drums, is the closest I've ever come to seeing what it feels like when I'm with my words. The way he plays his drums constantly pushing time, he's quite a far out drummer. He's quite difficult drummer to stay in time with.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've learned that actually, if I spend enough time listening to the idea before I tell the idea what I want it to do, if I listen to what it wants from me, then there comes this moment where you're like, oh, okay, it's really clear from the first encounter. That's what this is going to be. And you know you're years off, you're miles away, but you just, you're like, okay, the first encounter, the first little scene, you know, like 250 words of like trying to work out what kind of hair they've got or something and you're like, oh, this is, I feel that this is a person who has, you know, like if you see a reflection on the surface of the water and it goes down as far under as it does above, it's that vibe. It's like, oh, this person. Wants to be fully formed, so I've got a long way to go.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're inviting people into a fictional world, it has to have as many rules as this world has in terms of how time passes and what we do to each other and how the presence of one life affects the journey of another. All of that needs to be consistent. And if there is inconsistencies, they need to be intentional. So all of that to say that the reason that this form was the right form for this story is because when I started to spend time with the characters, I realised how much there was to it Soon as I met Rothko in my imagination or felt them coming close to me, the idea told me this is going to be, this is what it is. And it's been a long time since my last one. And I know what it's like to have an idea and want it to be that. And actually it isn't that. And that's me forcing it into a place that isn't right”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out 30 years of all of their lives and made notes of any years where big things happened to all of them in the same year. Not that any of them knew that the big things had happened for the other ones. Some of these family members were estranged, but I knew that, for example, in 2011, it was a big year for that family because something happened for all of them. What does that do to next time they see each other? Actually, when are they meeting up? Well, it's been three years since that big year. So how does that affect All of this goes in to a scene that is brief and feels fleeting, but hopefully feels real and realized because I've gone on this mad journey where you”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I wanted to tell you about because Sean, one of the characters that you meet briefly 20 years ago, actually, when Rothko gets out, they met up again in an old version, just in something that I had to write. They went to a boxing. Sean was a boxer. He went to a boxing match. But it was in a community centre. It's like a charity boxing match. And all the kids were there. You have to understand this didn't happen, but it happened. I did it. I went there. I've hung out with every single one of these characters. I've hung out with them in places throughout their lives that You will never know about. I know what angel's uncle, what motorbike he used to ride, and I've been with him while he was fixing it when he was looking after Angel when she was waiting for him. I've sat with them for all of them for 20, 40 years. I had big posters up, sorry, I don't mean to have my back to you. These big posters up on the studio wall of like the main family that we follow.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such an interesting question. Thank you. Something about the way you have to build a world when you're writing a novel. So complete, you have to know everything about everyone. Was even remembering like two days ago, I remembered characters that have gone from this draft that I followed so far into their own lives.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them fucking awards, I come to State of it. Thank you, Daniel Wilde. This is somebody who inspires me deeply. This is one of the most fantastic poets I've ever encountered the work of. I'm so honoured that Danielle's here to talk to me tonight about the book and also want to just say thank you everyone for coming out. It's quite a tall order to remember that you've bought tickets to something. Make the fucking effort to get across town and all the plans you had to make and all the money you had to spend and everything. Thank you for putting the value on this experience and being here with us. Appreciate it.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm head of programming, Connor Boyle. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with the poet, musician, author and playwright Kay Tempest. Tempest is widely regarded as one of Britain's greatest wordsmiths, and he joined us live on stage at St George's in Bristol to discuss the themes of his highly anticipated return to fiction, having spent life-seeking. It's his first novel in a decade and weaves together themes that have shaped Tempest's work to date, family and forgiveness, redemption and atonement, desire and abandon, selfhood and community. Tempest has joined on stage by writer and poet Danielle Wilde. Let's join the conversation now at St. George's Bristol.”
2026-05-02 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT