Kate Tempest, Village Underground - music review: 'she was startling'

Whether she’s a performance poet, a doggerel merchant or simply a 28-year-old lawyer’s daughter with her finger on the pulse of what makes surly adolescent girls tick, Kate Tempest’s time is now, despite her being shaded to the Mercury Prize.

Backed by three superloud, supertight electro-drummers and a backing singer, Tempest turned out to be indeed a mighty storm. Were there a Mercury for swearing, it would adorn her mantelpiece right now. She was mostly fuelled by raw, bewildered anger, whether claiming that “for 12 years I’ve been busking around food bins at festivals” or declaring “you don’t have to be pretty and sexy and sing someone else’s lyrics to be a woman on stage”. If it’s passion and intensity you’re looking for, the former Kate Calvert is your woman.

Tempest’s stream of consciousness and her backers’ unforgiving music merged seamlessly but she’s not merely a female Streets, and when the music stopped to allow her an unaccompanied verse of Marshall Law, she was startling. She occasionally slipped into self-help juvenilia (“I never wanted to be anybody other than the person I am”) but she delivered her tongue-twisting tales of poisoned relationships and duckers and divers at superhuman speed without missing a word.

A Hammer showed she has comedy timing too, while Circles was her plain-clothes pop moment. Long may she have much to get off her chest.