Poet, playwright, novelist, rapper and musician Kae Tempest was born in 1985 in London. He grew up in Brockley as one of five children. At the age of 16, around the same time he started performing at open mic nights around London, he was accepted into the Brit School for Performing Arts and Technology. In 2013, he won the Ted Hughes Award for his poetry collection Brand New Ancients.
He’s released five studio albums, two of which – Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos – have been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. His debut novel The Bricks That Built Houses was released in 2016 to much acclaim, while his play Paradise – a new take on Philoctetes by Sophocles – opened to rave reviews at the National Theatre in 2021.
Tempest came out as non-binary in 2020, then as a trans man in 2025. He uses they/them and he/him pronouns.
In his Letter to My Younger Self, Kae Tempest looks back at the inspirations that drove him, and also how happy and full of love he feels after tough times in the past.
At 16, I was just starting to take writing seriously. I became obsessed with lyricism and writing lines and my heroes were all musicians. I was absolutely crazy about music. I loved a lot of East Coast rappers, because they were at the peak for innovation at that time. But there was also lots of interesting stuff in London, where drum and bass MCs were doing interesting things with flows.
I started to realise that there was a difference between a creative life or a life of destruction. Music was everywhere. It’s how I socialised, it’s how I partied, it’s how I celebrated, it’s what I did all day long – sitting in the park, writing lyrics and rapping at people. I just love, love, love music. My ears love it. My heart loves it. All my senses buzz for it. My body buzzes for it. And as soon as you’ve got that drive, it takes the pressure off the heavier stuff that happens to teenagers in the city because you’ve got this thing that’s so joyful and connects you to people in a meaningful way.
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Kae Tempest with producer Fraser T Smith at the BMI Awards in London. Image: LMK MEDIA / Alamy
I really struggled at school. I was excluded a few times and ended up in a pupil referral unit. Now I understand that I was undiagnosed ADHD, and had depression, gender dysphoria and whatever. But I don’t know if knowing those things could have smoothed the experience, because outside of music, things weren’t going well. Then I found out about the Brit School and went to an open day with my friend G, just because I went everywhere he went. I couldn’t believe it. It was this performing arts school in Croydon and free if you passed an audition. You could do music or dance or theatre. After not really going to school for four or five years, I got into the Brit School by singing and playing Spanish guitar – this was before I was really rapping out loud, it was still a bit of a secret. To go to a school full of shit-hot musicians was just mad. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the best place in my personal life, so I didn’t make the most of the opportunity.
There was a record store in Carnaby Street called Deal Real, which was a legendary spot. Every Friday night it would be packed full of people sharing lyrics. It was so exciting and would spill out onto the street, then we would be rapping all the way home on the night bus. I was just obsessed.
I experienced the lyrics I was writing then as words from my older self. That’s what it felt like at 16 or 17. Every time I was rapping it felt like everything I was doing had come to me from this voice that would give me guidance and counsel. But as I got older, I was thinking, I haven’t gone back so who the fuck was it? Then, when I was in the studio with Fraser [T Smith] making Know Yourself, I realised – this is the moment I go back. This is what I’ve been heading towards. I had to get to here. That kid was in so much pain, now finally I can kind of be the adult he needed me to be. This is a long-winded way of saying everything I write feels like advice to my younger self and communication from that younger self to me now. Every time anything happened in my life, I was writing lyrics. So I’ve got this direct line to communicate with my younger self. I’ll be walking around and a verse I wrote when I was 17 years old starts to play in my mind’s ear and I can kind of remember exactly where I was.
2025: Kae Tempest onstage in Bologna, Italy. Image: Carlo Vergani / SOPA Images / Shutterstock
I didn’t have a desire to find queer community because I had internalised so much homophobia. Lots of queer kids don’t grow up in places with an accessible queer community, but not only did I not have access to it around me, the culture at the time was homophobic and transphobic. So I couldn’t bear my queerness. Couldn’t bear it, didn’t want it. I would have my partners, my lovers, but all my friends were straight guys. I found community through music and was so detached from the kind of community that could have given me access to loving myself or accepting myself. So I dug into the community that helped me escape myself, and music was a bit of an escape. But I’m glad it happened that way. Because finding that queer community at this late stage of my life is really profound. It’s been a really powerful experience. It’s why I feel so amazing when I step out on stage now and see all these young queer or gender queer people. It fucking blows my mind. It makes me feel so happy, you know?
If I’d seen someone like me on stage, it might have allowed me to know myself a bit better. I’d never seen a trans person – maybe I had, what does a trans person look like, who fucking knows? But I hadn’t knowingly seen any trans guys. So if I had seen somebody on stage looking healthy and happy, especially when it’s clear I wasn’t happy, it would have been amazing, to think maybe that’s something I can allow myself to believe I want as well. Connecting with someone singing directly to your lived experience, about something you know in your heart from your own life, is very special.
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I am a lover. I’m fully a lover. I’m full of love. I just adore people. I fucking adore music. I adore romance. And I think every song I write is a love song. When you’re a little queer kid and you can’t really be yourself, the world is quite scary. Especially the world I was in, which was pretty macho. In my relationships, I could be tender and stupid and goofy and queer and sexy – all the things that I couldn’t be out loud in the world. The problem with that, and the advice I would give to my younger self, is that if you don’t allow yourself to be known by anybody outside your intimate one-on-one love relationship, you put too much pressure on that relationship to be the be-all and end-all of your ability to connect and feel. How amazing would it be if you could love yourself enough to be yourself all the time? You could accept intimacy with friends and allow yourself to be seen. Then you wouldn’t be so afraid. And you also wouldn’t have put up with so much terrible shit in your relationships.
Having a play at the National Theatre was crazy. It’s on the South Bank and every Londoner has a personal relationship with the Thames. So I could walk over the bridge, look at the National, and think, fucking hell. Wow. I’m allowed to be here. I belong here. But I feel it even more when I’m performing – because it’s fucking real.
Murphy joins Kae Tempest on tour
The kid I was would have given anything to go on stage to 1,000 people that had come to see them. They would have given anything to sit backstage at a venue and kill time for an hour while we try and fix an amp. When I think of how hard they were working to be heard, how desperately they wanted to be seen, how urgently they wanted to connect… I say it all the time to the crew: we have to do this for every day of our lives when this was something we couldn’t have.
Every time they wrote lyrics, it was for me now. When you’re in a creative practice you’ve been in all your life, every time you’re engaged in that practice, you’re moving through time, going back, going forwards. And once you’ve made an album, it lives forever. There was nothing there, then you made an album, and now it lives forever. There is this thing that happens to time when you make music.
My dog comes with me on tour now. Touring is amazing but it can be disorientating – it’s quite a mad thing to go up there on stage every night. So when I come back to the dressing room now, Murphy is there and he just doesn’t give a shit. You played a show? So what? Let’s go for a walk. He just doesn’t care. And it reminds me that it’s an amazing moment, it’s powerful and beautiful, but also it’s not the be all and end all… I’ve got to walk the dog.
Kae Tempest’s new single Freedom! ‘25’ and album Self Titled are out now. He is on tour in the UK and Ireland from 8-13 November.
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