Eight years is a long time to be out of the game for a rapper. That’s nearly 3,000 days away from the spotlight, out of the charts, out of sight and out of mind. Taking a break of that scale isn’t advisable for any artist, let alone a young rapper still on the rise. Yet this is exactly what Tinie Tempah did when, at 29 years old with seven No 1s and two Brit Awards to his name, he hit the brakes.
“I felt like a Lil Wayne or a Justin Bieber in the sense that I’ve been doing it a long time, so I always said to myself that when I got to 30, I’d take a break,” he says now, still only 36 but passing for late twenties in an oversized grey hoodie and sneakers. “My life had been so surreal and I wanted to do normal things: hang out with my friends, have kids, try other hobbies.” He has a purple belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
Rewind to 2017 and Tempah, née Patrick Chukwuemeka Okogwu Jr, was at the height of his cultural influence. He had established himself as a perceptive and intricate lyricist with slick, cheeky songs like “Pass Out” and “Frisky” that channelled some of rap’s febrile energy into sticky dancefloor pop. He had been anointed GQ’s best-dressed man and appeared on Top Gear. Prince William, a fan, gave him a high-five on live TV.
From the outside looking in, the hiatus was baffling. From where Tempah was standing, it was all part of the plan. He’d heard the horror stories: all the rock stars, the tech entrepreneurs, the finance guys who regretted not spending enough time with their children, and so he set about creating a family. He married Eve De Haan, daughter of Sir Roger De Haan, in 2019, and has two children, now aged four and seven. “For me, none of this is worth it if my house is not intact,” he says. Turns out, Tempah is no longer the man who “just wanna have eh eh”.
His hits didn’t go away during his absence. Like “Mr Brightside”, his songs represent the party playlist terra firma, deployed at bars and in late-night taxis to perk up flagging revellers. But the time has come for new songs and new crowd-pleasers. This month, he released “Eat It Up” – a fierce, frantic track in collaboration with Skepsis, built on the skittish polyrhythms of drum and bass. Like its predecessors, the song is primed for sweaty dancefloors – that is, if there are any left in the UK in the coming years.
In tandem with releasing new music, Tempah is throwing his support behind The Last Night Out, a campaign from Night Time Industries Association to address the country’s rapidly declining number of clubs and music venues. A toxic mix of Covid-19 and the cost-of-living crisis (a situation not helped, perhaps, by a lack of young people eager to drink and party) means three UK clubs are closing every week. “By 2029, there’s going to be virtually nothing left,” he tells me from across the booth, looking solemn. The partnership makes sense: Tempah is, to many, an avatar for the UK’s once robust nightlife scene of yesteryear – a time when Fabric, Turnmills and Ministry of Sound dominated the music scene, of which Tempah was a crucial part.
After all, it was at many of those clubs that Tempah cut his teeth as a south London teen during the Noughties, bopping around High Wycombe, Luton, Bury St Edmunds and Wolverhampton. It was also there that he first got interested in fashion as a way to distinguish himself from the other 16-year-old fans he was performing to. “That was my rite of passage. It was my 10,000 hours in a live space,” he says. “I had to overcome stage fright. I had to overcome ego. Sometimes you’re expected to pack out a show and you get there and there’s 10 people and a tumbleweed rolling through. You still need to do your thing.”
Plus, the fans you earn from those live shows are the ones who will stick around. “Social media fans are fickle,” he observes. “The more content you put out on there, the more people find you, but it’s the ones I brought on board at the start of my career who are still with me today.”
At 36, Tempah might look younger, but he seems older than he is. His confidence isn’t quiet per se – before we begin, he briskly shoos away his team who have set up camp in the booth with us – but there’s no sign of the cold swagger he paraded on early tracks (“I’m fairly famous, I’m sorta known/ And if your son doesn’t, I bet your daughter knows”). His trademark braggadocio is still in evidence on “Eat It Up”, but it’s coming from the vantage point of reflection: “Remember when they wouldn’t book us for a fiver?”
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Tempah certainly remembers. “There were a lot of people who resisted,” he says, speaking of his more pop-leaning sound. The 2010s saw a re-energised grime scene, out of which Tempah himself emerged, but his forays into other genres weren’t always welcome. He points to his 2006 breakout demo “Wifey” as an example. “When I dropped that, I was 18 and everyone was doing really hard-line rap talking about street life, and there I was on an R&B tune talking about a girl I like,” he says. “People thought I was soft. Now you’ve got AJ Tracey and Unknown T sampling it.” In other words, he was right all along. “It’s validating to see that,” he smiles, or is it a smirk?
As far as the purists were concerned, he was diluting the essence of what made British rap British. Yet for him, there was nothing more British than folding in other sounds. “I had the Nigerian influence from my parents, and two younger sisters who were always listening to Destiny’s Child, Backstreet Boys, Boyzone, Steps and all that,” he says. “I felt like being able to mix all that stuff up was almost a perfect representation of UK culture versus trying to make the purest rap possible.” He traded in the more abrasive, chunky beats of his still excellent 2007 mixtape Hood Economics for a glossier sound, and the world responded.
It was seeing the crossover success of Dizzee Rascal and So Solid Crew in the early Noughties that broadened his horizons as a school kid putting out music. “These were the guys that I saw breaking out of that kind of confined zone that we were in, which was initially restricted to pirate radio stations, where we were almost like faceless entities,” he says. “I remember when Dizzee supported Red Hot Chili Peppers [in 2012], and that was such a juxtaposition. This grime guy from east London is flying around the world with the Red Hot Chili Peppers – what the hell? For me, it was reaffirming the fact that all my ideas and where this could go was possible.”
Still, it was a big deal for his family when Tempah forgoed his studies to pursue a music career. “I’m the eldest in my Nigerian family with two younger sisters and a brother who’d I’d always had to be a role model for,” he says by way of explanation. “I was embarrassed to not go to university; I felt like I was letting the side down by not completing my education to do something which has no guarantee of working.” After he found success, it was that same up-from-the-bootstraps work ethic gleaned from his parents, who moved from Nigeria and started a property business, that stopped him from getting complacent or cocky. “I always was scared of becoming or being considered as a one-hit wonder, and I felt like [any display of] ego was going to fast-track that,” he says. “You start thinking that you’ve made it before you have and before you know it, you’re faded into the past.”
Inevitably, the musical landscape he’s entering now is very different from the one he left nearly a decade ago. For the better, he says. “Wherever I go in the world, people know me or Stormzy or they’ll know Dave or whoever. We’re considered artists on the world stage and taken seriously. When I first started out, it was very marginalised. People didn’t know what we were doing; they thought we were trying to copy American culture. It was very misunderstood.”
Likewise, Black culture is getting its due, finally. “A lot of Black culture is synonymous with ‘cool’ and I feel like that’s always been known, but it’s also, in my opinion, underappreciated,” he says. “When Black people think something is cool, typically it is.” For his part, Tempah, known back then for his preppy-meets-street style look, has been as much a fashion reference as he was a musician. Having rappers such as A$AP Rocky sitting front row now at fashion shows makes sense, he says. “They’re taste-makers of culture and before everyone knew it, but no one celebrated it. Now it’s a celebration, and an acknowledgement.”
In the decade between 2010 and 2020, Tempah notched no fewer than seven UK No 1s – more than any other rapper, and only bested by Calvin Harris and Ed Sheeran, who had eight each. It’s an impressive feat. I wonder aloud whether he feels he ever got his flowers for that chart-topping success. “I used to care about that more when I was younger,” he says, even-keeled in his response. “One little comment on social media could affect me – or even that question itself. But maybe I haven’t totally got my flowers yet because I’m just not done. A lot of men, and I’m not talking just musically, hit their peak at 40 or 50, that’s when you see titans. So yeah, watch this space.” He grins. “And anyway, I’ve got loads of flowers in my garden.”
‘Eat It Up’ is out now
