MICHAEL KIWANUKA
Two years ago, Michael Kiwanuka was an artist in crisis, doubting his worth and dismissed by his own label, Then he started to sing about that uncertainly, and everything changed. Stevie Chick speaks to reborn artist about kanye, crisis, creativity and ho
Britain’s new soul-folk star on how selfdoubt and label stand-offs fired one of the albums of the year, and how singing about his “brokenness” put him back together.
As 2014 reached its end, Michael Kiwanuka was at a low ebb. Only two years earlier, aged 24, he’d been proclaimed the BBc’s sound Of 2012, his rapturously received debut LP Home Again nominated for that year’s Mercury award. now, though, he felt washed up, broken. Kiwanuka had cut 20 new songs for Home Again’s follow-up, but his label were unenthused. “they said, ‘We don’t hear a single. how can we sell this album?’” he sighs. “same stuff artists have been hearing for decades.” Kiwanuka’s confidence was shaken. he was “livid” and, in his darker moments, he thought his a&r man was out to ruin his career: “Like he wanted me to do duets with cheryl cole or something. i wanted to lamp him. i wanted to throw a brick through someone’s window.” he thought seriously about quitting music. “after a year of being told your work is unsellable, you get tired,” he says. “the last thing you want to do is pick up your guitar and sing and write from the heart.” But one listless afternoon, working with a new collaborator, London hip-hop producer inFlo, at the square studio in hoxton, he found himself idly strum- ming a new riff, and stumbling upon a way forward. that riff grew into a new song that built on his ‘brokenness’ and Black Man in a White World found Kiwanuka singing his own blues more plainly and personally than ever before, reconnecting him with the creative voice that had momentarily eluded him. and now nothing would stop him finishing his second album. he would call it Love & Hate.
LOVE & HATE DEBUTED AT NUMBER 1 IN THE UK ALBUM chart this July. But for all its success and its uplifting melodic power, Michael Kiwanuka’s second LP is a dark, sorrowful beast. he says that friends who have heard it typically ask him if he is “all right”, and that when he guested on her 6Music radio show, presenter Lauren Laverne told him the lyrics to songs like i’ll never Love made her want to give him “a big hug”. it’s a little hard right now, however, to reconcile those desolate, anguished songs with the man who wrote them, as he jokes with MOJO’s snapper atop the roof of Frankfurt venue Batschkapp, firing off trivia questions about england’s euro ’96 football squad, a favourite game between Kiwanuka and his bandmates as their tour-bus has criss-crossed the continent this summer. Whatever existential blues once haunted Kiwanuka seem to have passed, at least for now. Validation, it appears, can do wonders for a lad’s emotional equilibrium. “i’ve never fit in,” he says later, sitting in some shade near Batschkapp’s sun-soaked loading bay. he grew up in Muswell hill, a middle-class pocket of north London, whence his parents had fled from idi amin’s bloody reign in uganda. “My culture was pretty much ‘middle-class white culture’,” he explains. “i love neil Young, i love football, i love the guitar. But i’m a black guy.” as he would walk to nearby Fortismere school, where he played in a number of school bands, he listened to nirvana, red hot chili Peppers and the White stripes on his iPod. “My black friends just thought i was weird, with my unshaped afro, my electric guitar, my picky beard.” he laughs softly, rubbing his chin. “i was this weird rock’n’roll guy. “in my late teens and early twenties i tried to revolt against my middle-class background, trying to be more quote-unquote ‘black’. i grew up playing gospel music, but because i was in Muswell hill it was white gospel music. it was cooler to play Pentecostal gospel stuff, so i joined some Pentecostal groups as a guitar player, playing Pentecostal churches in Wood Green and Peckham. But i didn’t know any of the songs! they’d be like, ‘We’re going to play Father almighty’, and i’d be, like, don’t know it! i was, like, Flip! i’m an alien!” he didn’t discover classic soul music until his best friend sam Watkins brought an old MOJO covermount cd, 2001’s Soul Riot, to school. hearing some stray studio banter before an outtake of (sittin’ On) the dock Of the Bay fired his imagina--
tion. “I’d never had an idea of how records were made, what a studio was,” he marvels. But now the studio was where he wanted to be, and he began writing songs in earnest. At 18 he went to study jazz at the Royal Academy of Music. It was a humbling experience. “I just wasn’t as good as everyone else,” he says. “So I stopped going to lectures, and dropped out.” By contrast, his own music was coming along. His demos, uploaded to his MySpace page, won A&R interest; by 22 he’d released two well-received EPs on Communion, the label of Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett, and was signed to Polydor. Paul Butler, formerly of Mercury-nominated Isle Of Wight group The Bees, helped bring Home Again to fruition. Critics raved over Kiwanuka’s impeccably old-school soul chops, name-checking Bill Withers and Terry Callier, and hearing in his folk-shaded songcraft something delectably vintage. Success brought further outrageous fortune: Kanye West wanted him to contribute to 2013’s Yeezus. Kiwanuka flew to West’s studio in Hawaii, abuzz. “He set me up in his studio and said, ‘Just play’,” Kiwanuka recalls. His face darkens; for a moment he seems lost again. “He just wanted me to be myself but… I didn’t know what to do.” Kiwanuka’s first brush with a hero quickly turned problematic. “I felt out of my depth, unworthy of being there,” he adds. “Every day I’d get a call to come to the studio. I began to dread it. Then one day, I switched my phone off and went to the beach. Classic smallfish-big-pond moment. I felt like I’d been found out. That I couldn’t come up with anything for Kanye’s album, it just meant I wasn’t really good enough.”
THE EXPERIENCE WITH KANYE SET THE TONE FOR the dark months that followed. But then, at the Square, came salvation. Kiwanuka began strumming Black Man In A White World on his acoustic, and singing a rough early version of the lyrics, and Inflo got excited. Kiwanuka, on a big Son House kick at the time, suggested they kill the guitar, bring the song down to just some handclaps and vocals like Grinning In your face, the Mississippi bluesman’s own haunting 1965 ‘comeback’ cut. “I was worried about the lyric,” Michael adds. “The label was looking for a single, but maybe the radio won’t play it. Will my fans think, ‘Is Mike a racist? Does he hate white people?’ The song was as much about my not fitting in with the black world as the white world. It was the truth, and sometimes the truth is awkward. And flo said, ‘Maybe people will want to listen to your new album because you’re telling your truth.’ That paved the way; that was where the creativity came from.” The assistance of another American hero cemented Kiwanuka’s return. Already a fan, Brian ‘Danger Mouse’ Burton invited him to LA early in 2015, when his second album was, officially at least, “dormant”. Burton loved Black Man…, and suggested Kiwanuka and Inflo stay and work on the new album with him. Kiwanuka junked most of the songs he’d penned, and wrote new material in the studio, with Burton and flo offering fresh ears and keen advice. “I had some camaraderie,” Kiwanuka smiles. “It’s hard to do everything on your own. Suddenly, all the chains broke off. I had my forrest Gump moment – I was just running! There was no negativity, no boundaries.” With his confidence restored and Burton and flo at the controls, Kiwanuka focused on his vision for the follow-up: to create something bolder, to transcend genre, to swap Home Again’s vintage trimmings for something timeless. That’s the vision he’s fulfilled; in the context of its predecessor, Love & Hate is like the moment in The Wizard Of Oz when everything shifts from monochrome to Technicolor: a blossoming, an awakening, an arrival.
YOu CAn HEAR IT LATER THAT nIGHT AT Batschkapp, as the album’s meditative opener Cold Little Heart grazes the dark majesty of Shine On you
Crazy Diamond; as the gloriously happy/sad The
final frame breaks hearts with Kiwanuka’s unvarnished, emotive guitar solo; and as Black Man In A White World catches fire, its groove emboldened by Kiwanuka’s live band stretching out for 10 blistering minutes and achieving some perfect fusion of fela Kuti’s riotous upswing and Marvin Gaye’s wracked soulfulness. The journey may have come at considerable psychic cost, but Love & Hate is worth every bruise and scar along the way. After the show, champagne and Sly Stone’s Fresh pervade backstage; it’s percussionist Graham Godfrey’s birthday. Still, amid the party Kiwanuka can’t help but reflect on the lessons of the past two years. “I’d never been self-conscious before,” he says, referring to the idyll of his first album. “With the second album, I had to work out what it was about my music that was ‘sellable’. It was either that, or not put out another record. I didn’t want it to be forced, or contrived.” It was his bleakest time. But he survived, and triumphed, and has learned perseverance. “you have to turn up. you have to keep going. So what if you’ve got no songs and everything sounds like crap? The fiftieth song you write might be better. And then it will all come together.” He thinks back to Hawaii, and Kanye West. “I couldn’t face it. I was facing failure. So I ditched the studio, the place I’d always wanted to be. Pretty lame.” He’s no longer glum over the missed chance, though. Earlier this year, Baz Luhrmann asked to remix the thenunreleased Black Man… for his new netflix series The Get Down, with nas adding rap verses. “It was like hearing Otis or Aretha singing with my voice,” Kiwanuka says, still awestruck. “It’s what I was looking for when I went to Hawaii, I just wasn’t ready then. But I was ready now, and it happened through just being myself. That was all I needed to do, all along.”