The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Michael Kiwanuka
Perth Concert Hall, October 18
Michael Kiwanuka knows the importance of connecting with people through music.
The 30-year-old, twice Mercury Music Prize-nominated singer, songwriter and guitarist remembers the feeling he’d get walking to school in Muswell Hill, North London, with his headphones on, listening to his favourite bands.
“I was obsessed by music,” he says. “I listened to all sorts of things: Jimi Hendrix and Prince were big favourites but I also loved Nina Simone, John Lennon, Alabama Shakes, and White Stripes, and I remember how they made me feel. So when I go into the studio now as a musician making records, I always think, ‘how can I make people feel the way these people made me feel?’”
With his second album, Love and Hate, which like its predecessor, Home Again, made big waves on its release last year, Kiwanuka feels he might have come closer to answering that question.
He didn’t quite get the fuss that Home Again made – it reached number four in the UK and charted in another nine countries including the U.S. and Australia – and he certainly didn’t understand, at the time, why Kanye West flew him out to Hawaii and then Paris to sing on his Yeezus album.
Kiwanuka had just won the BBC Sound poll, made a gold-selling debut album and toured as support to Adele but his confidence deserted him in West’s presence and, after sitting around feeling stupid, he put his acoustic guitar in its case and flew home.
For about a year afterwards he felt like giving up on music. The first set of songs he wrote for his second album were “good but not good enough.” He needed to find his own identity.
It turns out he’d already found it. Black Man in a White World, the opening track from Love and Hate, was written from the perspective of being the only black kid in Muswell Hill who was a Bob Dylan fan.
“I didn’t write it as a protest song, although it might sound that way,” he says. “It was more that when I was young I didn’t want to stand out but now I feel I can celebrate my Ugandan blood. I have a British accent but I’m often reminded of my African roots.”
The British hip hop producer Inflo turned Black Man in a White World into something that sounded fresh and exciting to Kiwanuka.
Then his record label put Kiwanuka together with producer and hit songwriter Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, and they clicked.
“The cool thing about Brian is he’s been very credible but he’s also had a lot of commercial success,” says Kiwanuka. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in that. When you write songs it’s cool if they’re remembered.”
www.michaelkiwanuka.com