It’s late night on a Tuesday; ecstatic music fans squash behind one other hungrily, shoving whatever money they can into Rob Da Bank’s hand, grabbing Sound Of Rum’s 7” E.P., and proceed to gush over how extraordinarily life-altering her music is whilst she signs each one in metallic marker pen. The passion displayed by these music fans is a rarity; one bloke didn’t have a record player, and they weren’t selling C.D.’s, but he bought a vinyl anyway. The audience’s infatuation with rapper/poet/lyricist-extraordinaire Kate Tempest and her hard-hitting lyrics is infectious. After hearing about Kate through friends, and seeing her perform solo at Secret Garden Party, I just had to interview her and her band. Sound of Rum deserve to have as many people listen to them as possible.
The first time I go and see Sound Of Rum collectively marks the penultimate week of the band’s residency at The Old Queen’s Head, leading up to their single release of ‘Slow Slow’, which is out today. The group consists of Ferry Lawrenson on drums, Archie Marsh on guitar/bass/keyboard, and front woman Kate Tempest who writes the lyrics and raps over the top of Ferry and Archie’s music. The band formed when they ended up jamming together at a squat party; the first song they improvised developed into their first song, ‘Elevator’. Legendary producer John Dent described Sound of Rum as a cross between “PJ Harvey and Dr Dre”, which is a pretty cool combination, right?
For Kate Tempest, music is more than just an art she creates, something to perform, a means by which to make money. It is, please excuse me for sounding cheesy, a burning fire that runs through her veins; anyone who has been around her will be able to tell that. It’s a raw, uncontrollable passion, an innate yearning to expel her talent out into the world. She’s accompanied by a quiet, but very talented drummer Ferry, whose performance is compelling to watch, as he glides the drumstick around the cymbals, clearly absorbed in what he’s doing but occasionally looking up to beam at Archie and Kate. Archie, with a lot of help from loop pedals, creates a remarkably thick funk texture on his keyboard and guitar.
When I sit down to sup with Kate and her band at The Old Queen’s Head before the closing night of her residency, she is a little fidgety, and gushes to her band mates “man, I can’t wait ‘til tonight! I’m so excited,” and bounces up and down on her chair like an excitable infant. There is no barrier between her and the music she makes; Kate embodies it, her lyrics are part of her. She is not, unlike some other performers, detached from the art she creates. All this is quite apparent when I delve possibly a little too deep, asking her to explain lyrics to her song ‘Cannibal Kids’, for anyone who wasn’t too familiar with Sound of Rum. Clearly they are emotional words to recite for Kate, having been almost unable to perform it, pausing and stuttering at certain points during the number at one of her residency gigs at the ‘Queen’s Head, each time being prompted by the same devoted fan, and cheered on by the whole crowd. There is a warmth when Sound of Rum perform; the audience whoop and whistle at Ferry’s cracking drum solos and Archie’s multi-instrument mastery. Tempest’s lyrics rouse laughter and cheering. All in all, Sound of Rum have an uncanny ability to bring an audience together in a blissful reunion, and each person who walks out of the venue wears a grin from ear to ear- almost floating, slowly and pensively as if they have an improved outlook on life.
“We want to be known by as many people as possible”, explains Kate, about her worries of how she is presented through the press, “but you can’t transmit energy through a photograph [...]this has been our little baby for two and a half years, this has been dead precious to us. We’re kind of at this stage now where it’s time to let it go.” Tempest continues reasoning why she is wary about magazine coverage: “It’s difficult to be, like, ‘you who don’t know me, go and represent me to a thousand other people who don’t know me’”; is what you’re trying to say is that you want the substance before the image? “That’s actually a lyric from one of Kate’s songs. That’s what happens when you come and see us twice!” Sorry Archie… can’t win, can I? Ferry adds, endearingly, “it’s kind of weird because you feel like you have to know yourself a lot more to be able to express and explain yourself more, and personally for me, I haven’t got a clue who I am! You want to know who I am? I don’t even know!”
It’s no coincidence that Tempest’s lyrics have been embedded in my brain after seeing just a couple of performances, and that the audience regularly join her in verse; there must be some of that ‘secret formula’ that people so often talk about, in relation to great talents, in Kate. Indeed, her lyrics are unexpectedly profound for a Sahf Lahndaner; Elevate sees Tempest vent her occasional frustration at city living:
We eat crap-donalds burgers instead of wholegrains,
Bound up in our gold chains…
Warm hearts shiver in this cold place,
I try to hide from these spies but the cameras rotate
Whilst the poignant Cannibal Kids underlines the unavoidable effect knife crime has had on the people it encumbers:
A long way from bat and ball,
They don’t play, they let daggers fall
From blood-soaked fingers while
Their siblings lie bleeding in hallways, dead,
But like wisdom has always said
Blood forgets blood and keeps spilling,
So the pavements are stained and our hearts are grief strick’
Around here.
Sound Of Rum have just finished recording their first album with Rob Da Bank’s label Sunday Best, collaborating with reputable producers such as Dan Carey, who has worked with Lily Allen, CSS, Fatboy Slim, Franz Ferdinand and Emiliana Torrini, to name just a few. Kate explains how SoR came to get Carey to master part of their album: “The first time we went to go and see Dan, me and Archie drove through the snow in my car. We were going to deliver him our demo, so that he could hear it, so that we could start mixing it. We’d been offered one day [to see him]. We drove through South London, and there was the worst ice [on the road]- my car was slipping out of junctions into main roads and I was convinced we were gonna die!” Archie adds, “he lives on a really, really, really long road that’s a big hill and we parked on the wrong end of it and hiked for about half an hour through the snow.” Kate: “He will never know what we went through to get to him”, to which Archie retorts “but he might do now.” To put it simply, Kate says “the point is, to work with these people is such a trip for us.” Archie adds, “we didn’t really learn much because it’s like alchemy just watching him; he’s walking around the room flicking switches and turning knobs. We couldn’t do the whole album with Dan, so we did our initial sessions with him, and then we had to go somewhere else to record [the album], so we just had to learn as much as we could about how he was capturing the sound from those three recordings we made [at his studio] initially and then take that elsewhere… mainly [the mastering of] the drums and the amps.” Ferry: “I’m really into the way that the drums sound of the album- there’s chains on the drums and cymbal harmonic.” Kate Dubs it “The Lawrenson Swirl”. Archie adds, “yeah, I’ve never seen it done before; apparently there’s a psych-metal band who have made a whole tune, just out of that [cymbal harmonics].” Although I can assure everyone that there will be no such metal featured in Sound Of Rum’s upcoming album, which will be released in the next few months.
I think Kate Tempest rounds up the interview quite eloquently: “The first couple of days we jammed together, I was blown away by this project. I still am, every time we play.” Sound of Rum’s single, Slow Slow, is out now.
-Bronya Louise Francis
Upcoming gigs:
Friday 11th March @ Camden Barfly, London
Friday 18th March @ Joe Driscoll Album Launch- Secret Location, London
Monday 28th March @ Shoreditch House, London