This article was first published in the May 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
When Kate Tempest speaks, it sounds like music. The 30-year-old poet and musician's south London accent, care of her upbringing in Brockley and time at the BRIT School in Croydon, rises and falls like the Thames - the inspiration for her award-winning 2013 epic poem "Brand New Ancients".
Since then, the river and the poem's characters have run through her 2014 Mercury Prize-nominated album Everybody Down and her debut novel, The Bricks that Built the Houses.
The book follows a group of twenty-somethings in London as they struggle against a backdrop of drug dealing and family secrets. The characters were born through a 2012 collaboration with producer Dan Carey on the song "Lonely Daze". "I was nobody then, but when he had a few spare hours he would call and I'd go running over," she says. At that point the central characters of Becky and Pete were just "him and her", but Tempest and Carey discussed maintaining a narrative over abody of work.
"As they came to life, I was writing chapters to have ammunition for a record," she says.
Tempest wrote the novel during snatched hours in her tour van. As she turned it from a "mess to a book", the songs she was singing live every night "fed the novel in the way the novel fed the album". But, with The Bricks that Built the Houses the final chapter in the tale, Tempest has other plans: "This novel is what I've been trying to say for a long time," she says. "I can breathe in a different space now."
The Bricks that Built the Houses (Bloomsbury) is out now
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
