THE OUTSIDER
IN a parallel musical universe, Mancunian soul fans would not be preparing to watch Michael Kiwanuka at the Albert Hall tomorrow. Nor, more to the point, would those same fans have spent the past ten months enjoying the British soul singer’s stunning second album, Love & Hate, by some distance one of 2016’s standout releases.
That’s the parallel universe in which, rather shockingly, Michael Kiwanuka would have followed through with his original plan to hang up his guitar and quit the music biz. Despite the tremendous critical and commercial success surrounding the North Londoner’s initial breakthrough in 2012, Kiwanuka was left crippled with selfdoubt, unable to summon up the creative energies to write a follow-up album.
Three years on, now reflecting on that turbulent period, Kiwanuka says: “I wanted to give up making music after my first album. I started to think that it was luck the first time around. I wrote a first set of songs for a new album, but they weren’t good enough. I just needed a new approach to reflect who I am now.”
It was clearly a wise strategy. After all, alongside his earthy, old-school soul voice and nimble guitar playing, Michael Kiwanuka’s greatest asset has always been his ability to dig deep and ask big, (and often uncomfortable) questions about himself.
That vulnerability was the defining quality of his debut album, Home Again, the record which first propelled Kiwanuka into the national consciousness back in 2012. However, his second album, Love & Hate – the record which emerged from Kiwanuka’s lengthy period of self-doubt – takes this emotional autopsy approach even further. Tackling his own romantic failings, there are songs admonishing his inability to open up in relationships, as well as one track (The Final Frame) in which Kiwanuka admits to not treating an ex-girlfriend as well as he should have. Such honesty has, inevitably, led to complications, especially when Kiwanuka plays live. He admits to leaving certain songs off set-lists when his current partner has attended gigs, saying, “They’re dark, sad songs. I would take them off the set-list at gigs she was at. But they’ve not got anything to do with our relationship – you can go to other parts of yourself, past times, old relationships.”
Kiwanuka’s soul-searching approach also led him to write his most powerful, emotive song yet in the shape of Black Man in a White World. The centrepiece of the Love & Hate album, it’s a song which directly addresses what Kiwanuka refers to as his ‘outsider’ status - his struggles to reconcile his musical ambitions with his upbringing as the son of Ugandan immigrants in North London. In a year in which race and identity is a massively hot topic, the track clearly carries a deep, profound resonance.
He says: “That song is about all the sadness and frustrations of childhood, of being one of very few black kids in Muswell Hill, and never feeling like fitting in. It’s about not feeling like I could be a rock star, of always being categorised as jazz, of attending the Royal Academy of Music and seeing no black people on the course, and thinking just how much I was a black man in a white world.”
Constructive self-criticism and the need for absolute perfection is, of course, a line that most musicians carefully tread, but Michael Kiwanuka clearly pushes himself harder than most. As he begins his biggest UK tour to date – dropping into the Albert Hall tomorrow – you just hope that he listens as much to his adoring fanbase as his own selfcriticism.
“The confessional aspect is cathartic for me,” he concludes. “You accept it, once it’s done, it’s out there. That’s the therapeutic nature of it. Now, I’m living in a way where I’m not apologising. A lot of this album was grappling with the insecurities that I’d learned. The first album was grappling with faith. Here, I’m not so worried about that – I’ve accepted that it comes and goes, and now, I’m left with myself.” Michael Kiwanuka plays the Albert Hall tomorrow.