THIS IS THE KIT
Kate Stables beat crippling shyness to ascend to her Rough Trade label’s pantheon of offbeat distaff pop. “I’m quite contrary by nature,” she tells MARTIN ASTON. “When people think something’s a bad idea, I usually cling to it.”
With her fifth LP of worldly postfolk, Kate Stables comes out of her shell. “I found it easier to have a conversation in song,” she says.
THERE WAS A LOT OF RESISTANCE to the name This Is The Kit,” reveals its owner, with an unmistakably gleeful smile. “I’d tell promoters and they’d still bill me as Kate Stables. But I’m quite contrary by nature – when people think something’s a bad idea,
I usually cling to it.”
Inside her second-floor flat in Paris’s busy 10th arrondissement, a wiry and exuberant Stables is entertaining MOJO, dressed in baggy pants and a T-shirt advertising Hull’s Adelphi venue. Her unruly mop of hair, arbitrarily pinned up, suggests a determination to go her own way.
“People used to call me Kit – they still do,” she says. “The name speaks about my relationship with words, about assonance and alliteration – to me, This Is The Kit is one word, not a sentence.” The literal translation of ‘kit’ is also appealing. “I enjoy being self-sufficient and travelling around, so I like the idea of having what you need wherever you go.”
Originally from Winchester, Stables has lived in Paris with her husband and fellow musician Jesse Vernon and daughter Mo since 2007. The stuffed front room illustrates a family hard at work and play.
“That’s the board games shelf,” she says. “The front door is disguised as a stamp collection… And these are our records. And here’s my office. We basically live in here.” One wall is festooned with maps: Africa (“we need to brush up on our African country knowledge”), America (“People are always naming places I need to look up”) and “the old homeland. People ask, ‘Where are you from?’ and I can point to it.
“I love living in Europe, and being able to get nearly anywhere by train,” she continues. “Anything could change, of course, but we have so many friends here, Mo is happy at school and Jesse has his community orchestra – and Brexit is so depressing. So, here we are.”
STABLES’ JOURNEY AS THIS IS THE KIT IS ALREADY a trek, with another milestone – a fifth album, Off Off On – looming. She began as an intimate folk singer, accompanying herself on banjo (“I like the physical sensation of playing it, and the percussiveness of the sound”), resembling the spiritual heir of Hedy West (with a dash of Anne Briggs and Bridget St John). But just as This Is The Kit has become more of a band than solo artist, so her sound has expanded, embracing jazzy cadences, tranquil woodwind, soulful brass, African highlife and desert blues. Asked for her current musical obsessions, Stables plumps for Beyoncé and French-Malian pop singer Aya Nakamura. “My music is very European,” she vouches, “but music from other countries seeps in. I just love things that flow repetitively and rhythmically.”
Off Off On was only partially affected by Covid-19. After recording at Real World, Peter Gabriel’s pioneering temple of global fusion near Box, Stables and Vernon arrived home one day before France locked down, so the album’s final polish and mixing had
to be accomplished remotely. It’s more Stables’ roving mindset that’s suffered.
“I’m a bit of a nightmare,” she says, grinning. “A bit fidgety and twitchy. My first response to lockdown was, Yes! I’m not good at the bit before something happens, so cancelled tour dates felt like getting a present, which I think stems back to trumpet lessons as a kid, which I dreaded. I thought I could recuperate. I hadn’t been at home for longer than four weeks at a time for at least seven years. But I came down with isolation-itis. I just couldn’t get anything done, or even get out of bed. Now I really miss gigs, and the energy exchange with the audience, being in the moment.”
Kate, or Kit, sometimes Kato and, to one close friend, Kattu Kattu, admits she was a painfully shy child: “If anyone even looked at me, I’d burst into tears.” She’s one half of (non-identical) twin sisters, with elder twin sisters to boot (“We were all apparently freakishly well-behaved”), and both parents were language teachers, ironically since, as Stables admits,
“I’m awful at spelling and grammar. But I got a real kick from people I thought were great with words, like Bob Dylan, who was always played around the house. The way he uses words is so… delicious. You can feel it in your body and your mouth. I’ve always enjoyed saying, or writing, certain words.”
Tracey Chapman and, more surprisingly, The Velvet Underground, were other formative influences.
Though Stables started writing songs in her teens, for her GCSE music course, she wouldn’t perform them. “I wasn’t brave enough to sing,” she admits, “so I put forward a silly trumpet instrumental.”
But at a school arts evening, encouraged to sing Ani DiFranco’s Sorry I Am, something clicked. “I thought, I want to get better at this,” she recalls. “I began to find it easier to have a conversation in song rather than social situations. I secretly hoped I could make music a career, but I was too superstitious to say it out loud.”
At 11, Stables had joined a juggling class, where she met Sam Leyden and then his younger sister Rozi, who is now bassist/ backing vocalist in the current TITK band. The three friends attended Glastonbury and Winchester’s annual arts and circus festival. Whisper it, but there is still something of the ’80s hippy diehard, maybe even the ’90s crusty, about Stables. “Another band I discovered for myself when I was 11 was The Levellers,” she says. “I’d always fantasised about being a traveller, to live outside and travel around, and light fires.”
ALTHOUGH SHE NEVER JOINED the circus, Stables escaped Winchester for a year of self-discovery. “Whilst everyone else was in Thailand and
“I REALLY MISS GIGS, AND THE ENERGY EXCHANGE WITH THE AUDIENCE, BEING IN THE MOMENT.” Kate Stables
Australia, I was exploring Britain, meeting amazing people and crashing on their floors.”
In Bristol, she formed the acoustic duo Whalebone Polly with singer/guitarist Rachael Dadd, and joined a community choir, led by Jesse Vernon, former guitarist of Bristol’s psych-rock troupers The Moonflowers. As This Is The Kit, Stables and Vernon recorded her song Two Wooden Spoons, which Rob Da Bank’s Sunday Best label picked up for the 2006 compilation Folk Off. Then the pair left for Paris. “We were up for a big jump,” says Stables, “an adventure new to us both. Let’s see if we can learn stuff you can only learn from living in a foreign country.”
In 2008, the debut This Is The Kit album, Krülle Bol, was produced by P.J. Har vey associate John Parish. It wasn’t easy to find in the UK, and the follow-up, Wriggle Out The Restless, also flew under the radar until Elbow’s Guy Garvey announced on BBC 6 Music that it deserved a Mercury Prize nomination. Word spread further when a TITK show in east London was gatecrashed by members of The National, whose guitarist Aaron Dessner asked to reissue Wriggle… on his Brassland label and to produce TITK’s next album.
2015’s Bashed Out was fleshed out by Dessner’s own circle of players but Stables’ band were back in the spotlight on 2017’s Moonshine Freeze, guided by a returning John Parrish, and highly placed (at 14) in MOJO’s year-end Best Album poll. Lyrically, it seemed to brood on the impact of events on personal relationships. “As the change sets in, we have lost our way,” pondered the title track. “Everything we broke today/Needed breaking anyway,” concluded Bullet Proof.
“The specifics involved other people,” Stables tells MOJO, “so all I’ll say is, we inevitably come up against challenging situations that explode your whole world, and you have to start again.”
She still feels too close to Off Off On to be sure of its exact thread, “but I wonder if it’s about taking responsibility for our actions, owning our fuck-ups, and not to oppress others,” she says. “Don’t say, ‘But I didn’t mean to do that.’ And be honest about who you are.”
The new album title reflects Stables’ appreciation for the texture of words, but also her need “to finish on a positive note. It’s ‘out of sync, out of sync, in sync’; ‘not growing, not growing, growing’.” She singles out Off Off On’s last song, Keep Going, as noting a world stretched to breaking point by Covid-19 and demagogue politics.
“It’s good if we keep encouraging each other to keep going,” she says. “I have to stay hopeful that this is the journey we’re all on. Not being hopeful would be too depressing! I’d suffer from isolation-itis again. I’ve just got to keep going.”