Kate Tempest, Art School, Glasgow, review: This is no greatest hits set

Kate Tempest performs her recent second album ‘Let The Eat Chaos’ from start to finish with a three-piece band, in a piece of performance narrative telling the story of seven characters on an estate

Kate Tempest performed her second album at the Art School in Glasgow (Rex)

In times which scream out for big explanations to be made and answers to be served up, it may be easy to fall back on the urge to describe Kate Tempest as political. Her writing, after all, is gorged on the minutiae of 21st century life – based in her native London, specifically, but it could be anywhere suitably urban in the British Isles – and the on-edge hyper-awareness that life lived through social media brings.

This performance certainly doesn’t refute that idea, but only on the surface. It’s the first date of this tour in support of Tempest’s recent second album Let Them Eat Chaos, the follow-up to her 2014 Mercury-Prize-nominated debut Everybody Down, the subsequent books Hold Your Own and The Bricks That Built the Houses, and the Ted Hughes Award-winning performance piece Brand New Ancients. This is no ‘greatest hits’ set, however, just the new record performed in its entirety from start to finish.

Yes, it’s rooted in the now, often punishingly so. The show is styled like a traditional concert, with a three-piece band behind Tempest (all, including her regular producer Dan Carey, playing chilly electronics) and breaks in music, genre and mood to indicate where each new track starts. But it’s more of a suite than a set, an extended piece of performance narrative that winds through the stories of seven characters on an estate in London.

Their stories, enhanced by Tempest’s gorgeously relatable lyricism and delivery, are painful, yet somehow comforting in the strength of the connection they make. In “Pictures On a Screen”, a young man is woken in the middle of the night for work, exhaustion causing him to ponder “I know it’s happening but who’s it happening to?”; in “Whoops” “basic wages takes ages to get through the month” and the only option is to live for the payday party; in “Europe is Lost”, a tailor-made Brexit anthem, she doomily mourns the sense of disconnection of the “bored-of-it-all generation”.

Where it’s downbeat in places, however, it’s neither depressing nor tub-thumping. Tempest captures words in such a way as to make them irresistibly emotive, and the music – although there’s something of a reliance on dark, meaty grime and dubstep beats – sets an evocatively textured scene; in “Grubby”, she even co-opts the chorus line of Sister Sledge’s “Thinking of You”. The ending, in fact, is rather beautiful, precisely because it thoroughly rejects political point-making in favour of something nakedly emotional, two areas that are often not kept separate.

“I’m pleading with my loved ones... to wake up and love more,” she gasps at the end of “Tunnel Vision”, and it feels like a call to put our phones down and talk eye to eye. It’s a sense which is reinforced during the encore – just a musically-enhanced short note of thanks during which we’re reminded “the further away from ourselves we are, the further away from each other we are” – and it strikes warmer chords than any earnest speechifying might.