Music / Spoken Word review: Kate Tempest
Kate Tempest ****
Glasgow School of Art
Let Them Eat Chaos is a portmanteau tale of “seven perfect strangers” who all live in the same set of inner city flats and all find themselves awake, for different reasons, at 4:18am one night. This is Tempest’s snapshot of broken Britain and it was all the more powerful because of her empathy and her eye for detail, which was further enhanced by the music. The woozy dreamscape which accompanied her account of the superficially sorted Bradley underlined his dislocated state (“life’s just a thing that he does”). But in the end Tempest rejected “the myth of the individual” and drew her characters out of doors for a communal experience of a cleansing rainstorm and a happy – or at least hopeful – ending to her moving, intelligent, angry ode.