Wasted

Kae Tempest

Wasted

Kate Tempest was born in London in 1985. Her work includes the plays Wasted, Glasshouse and Hopelessly Devoted; the poetry collections Everything Speaks in its Own Way and Hold Your Own; the albums Everybody Down, Balance, Let Them Eat Chaos and The Book of Traps and Lessons; the long poems Brand New Ancients and Let Them Eat Chaos; and her debut novel, The Bricks that Built the Houses.

Katie Beswick is a lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter, UK. She has published widely on theatre and council estates in journals including Research in Drama Education, Performance Research and New Theatre Quarterly, and her monograph Social Housing in Performance was published by Methuen Drama in 2019.

Wasted

KATE TEMPEST

With commentary and notes by

KATIE BESWICK

Series Editors: Sara Freeman, and Jenny Stevens, Matthew Nichols Chris Megson

Contents

Chronology and Significant Historical Events

Context: History, Society, Politics

Form and Genre

Hip hop

Verse drama

Realism/naturalism

Themes

Loss

Neoliberalism

Youth culture

First Production

Further Exploration

Works by Kate Tempest

On Kate Tempest

On hip hop

On realism/naturalism

On gentrification

Notes

Wasted

Chronology and Significant Historical Events

The timeline below maps an account of national and world events that surround the first performance of Wasted. As we will see in the CONTEXT section of this introduction, these seemingly unrelated events converge in the play in a variety of ways.

1973	11 August: Hip hop culture officially begins when teenager Clive Campbell performs as ‘DJ Kool Herc’ at a back-to-school party, thrown by his sister Cindy, in the recreation rooms at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, an apartment complex in the Bronx, New York. Using two turntables to play the same record, he innovates with a technique he has perfected over the preceding months, creating extended instrumental breaks so that partygoers can dance for longer. According to hip hop legend, his friend, Coke La Rock, hypes up the crowd by rhyming over instrumentals. Three of the four ‘pillars’ or ‘elements’ of hip hop culture: DJing, MCing (rhyming over music) and break-dancing (dancing in the instrumental breaks of song) are in action that evening. The fourth pillar of hip hop, graffiti, emerges around the same period. During the 1970s, graffiti, often in the form of ‘tags’ (marks indicating the creator), is seen across public spaces in inner city New York. Often it covers the interior and exterior of subway cars that travel all over the city. In New York: A Documentary Film, cultural critic Marshall Berman describes how the subway trains provided a means through which those (black, Hispanic and working-class people) from the impoverished neighbourhood of the Bronx were able to communicate with those in more affluent areas. As he argues, graffiti was ‘the earliest form in which most people who weren’t part of that neighbourhood’ came to understand what was happening there. Scholars who write about hip hop often argue that there are not four, but five elements; depending on who you consult, ‘knowledge’ is often considered the fifth element.
1979	4 May: Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, having served as Leader of the Opposition since 1975. Her leadership is characterized by fiscal conservatism, economic reliance on the free-market, privatization of state-owned industry, hostility towards trade unions and scaling back the welfare state. So-called ‘Thatcherite’ politics, following the model of ‘Reaganomics’ introduced by US President Ronald Reagan, with whom Thatcher was closely allied, marks the UK’s move towards neoliberalism as an economic model (see the THEMES section for a discussion and explanation of the term ‘neoliberalism’).
	December: The hip hop record ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by New Jersey’s the Sugarhill Gang reaches number three in the UK singles chart, marking the first mainstream success for hip hop in the United Kingdom.
1982	December: The first British hip hop record, ‘Christmas Rapping’ by the artist Dizzy Heights, released by Polydor Records, reaches number forty-nine in the UK singles chart, following a surge of underground and self-released hip hop music. Popular British artists, including Adam and the Ants, The Clash, Malcolm McLaren and Wham! also experiment with adopting hip hop techniques into their music throughout the early 1980s, demonstrating how hip hop is beginning to take root as part of popular culture in the UK.
1984	March: The Miners’ Strike, a major industrial action staged by the National Union of Mineworkers in response to the government’s attempts to close British collieries, shuts down the UK’s coal industry. Thatcher attempts to quash the power of trade unions by opposing the strike. In June 1984, there is a violent clash between striking miners and the police at a coking plant in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Known as the ‘Battle of Orgreave’, the event sees thousands of police officers deployed, including mounted officers and police dogs, in an attempt to overwhelm the pickets. The strike is ruled illegal in September.
1985	3 March: The Miners’ Strike officially ends. This marks a significant turning point in the culture and trajectory of the British working classes. The power of trade unions is severely weakened, and in the coming decades there is rapid deindustrialization. Opportunities for working-class people to find well-paid, secure jobs with clearly defined benefits and prospects for promotion decrease, and there is an increase in unemployment, drug abuse and social instability in former working-class strongholds. The sense of community and collectivity that characterized the mid-twentieth-century working-class experience begins to fracture, as those able to participate in the neoliberal culture leave behind those who cannot. In a now famous speech delivered in 1987, Thatcher proudly champions the era of the individual, claiming that there is ‘no such thing as society’.
	22 December: Kate Esther Calvert is born in London. She adopts the stage and pen name Kate Tempest in the mid-2000s after performing for a number of years under the name Excentral Tempest. She is part of the so-called ‘millennial’ generation, a term used to describe those born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s who became adults in the new millennium. Despite a growth in progressive social movements resulting in increased rights for women, ethnic minorities and LGBT people, this group will face more financial instability than previous generations and decreased social mobility – meaning that they are less likely than their parents to move into a higher social class or income bracket than the one they were born into.
	Tempest is raised in Lewisham, in the south-east of London. The language, culture and geography of south-east London runs through her work across music, plays, novels and poetry.
1988	The British hip hop crew London Posse release ‘Money Mad’, a seminal track that is often considered to mark the birth of uniquely British hip hop culture. The artists use their own London accents and do not affect American-style voices as British rappers up to this point have often done. The crew also draw on dub reggae (an electronic development of reggae music), giving their music a distinctive sound that will come to distinguish British hip hop (and later the grime music that emerges from British hip hop, garage and jungle music influences) from US rap music.
1990	November: Margaret Thatcher resigns and John Major wins the leadership contest for the Conservative Party, succeeding her as Prime Minister. He goes on to win a general election in 1992.
1997	May: Labour, branded as New Labour, wins the general election and Tony Blair becomes Prime Minister. ‘New Labour’ is a rebranding of the Labour Party that signals a move away from its socialist roots. Blair’s leadership is marked by an embrace of the free-market neoliberal ideology that has now characterized British politics since Thatcher, although he makes some concessions to reinvigorating the welfare state, notably with investment in education and Child Benefit. He vows to eliminate class inequality through an expansion of the middle classes, and pursues a social inclusion agenda based on the idea of ‘equal opportunity’ for all members of society. Part of this vision includes an emphasis on urban regeneration as a response to economic disadvantage. Nonetheless, despite a period of optimism based on Blairite social-democratic policies, Britain’s historic class divisions remain entrenched.
2001	11 September: A series of terrorist attacks on the US using hijacked planes, most iconically bringing down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, marks a seismic shift in global politics and the trajectory of both the UK and the US for the new millennium. George W. Bush, President of the United States, declares a ‘war on terror’ and the UK government, led by Blair, supports this initiative. The US and UK work in alliance to invade Afghanistan, where those held responsible for the attack were located.
2003	19 March: The US and UK launch an attack on Iraq, claiming that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. The invasion goes ahead despite huge public resistance in the UK, including an anti-war march with the participation of an estimated one million citizens in London. When it is later discovered that Hussein’s regime did not have the capacity to stockpile weapons of mass destruction, there is huge and growing public mistrust in the government.
2005	6 July: It is announced that London has won the bid to host the 2012 Olympics. This is a moment of huge celebration for the city. The opportunity amplifies Blair’s vision for urban regeneration, and gives investors added incentive to put money towards urban development projects, particularly in run-down neighbourhoods in east and south-east London, where the Olympics will be held.
	7 July: There is a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks on London, carried out by Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers who live and were raised in the UK. They leave behind videos claiming that the attack avenges atrocities carried out by the UK as part of the War on Terror. They detonate bombs on three tube trains and a bus, killing fifty-two people.
2007	June: Gordon Brown, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, succeeds Tony Blair as Prime Minister.
2008	15 September: Following a crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market, the bank Lehman Brothers collapses, signalling an economic crisis and a massive global recession, considered by many economists to be the worst since the Great Depression in the 1930s.
2010	May: Following a general election, there is a hung parliament, meaning no single party wins an overall majority. The Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, win the most seats and form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, ending thirteen years of Labour rule. The Cameron government introduce an ‘austerity’ programme, which seeks to reduce the UK’s deficit by curbing public spending and tax rises. During austerity, conditions for the poorest members of British society worsen: there is an increase in the use of food banks, which provide free essentials such as food and toiletries to those in extreme poverty, and in exploitative employment practices such as zero-hours contracts, where staff are counted as ‘employed’ but have no guarantee of work or a fixed income.
2011	15 July: The first performance of Wasted takes place at the Latitude Festival in Henham Park, Suffolk.
	6 August: Following the killing of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old Londoner, by police on 4 August, riots break out across London and quickly spread to cities all over England, including Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Nottingham. There is widespread arson and violence, and looting of consumer goods. Despite Duggan’s killing and the strain that austerity cuts are already putting on inner-city communities, the government and press unite to declare that the riots are politically unmotivated acts of feral, criminal violence. Tempest disagrees with the media narrative, suggesting the riots were indeed politically motivated:
	Basically, it made sense to me I think because I’m a Londoner. It seemed absolutely logical to be honest. There was nothing about what happened then that was surprising. The narrative that was spun about it in the press was that it was this a-political consumption-like spasm, that’s absolute fucking nonsense.
2011	also sees a wave of political movements across the globe, including the ‘Arab Spring’ (a series of pro-democracy protests in countries including Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Syria) and Occupy Wall Street, an anti-capitalist occupation in New York (later adopted elsewhere in the world including in Amsterdam, Paris, London and Hong Kong).
2012	Summer: London hosts the Olympics. The slow regeneration of the city that has been happening since at least the New Labour urban development drive at the turn of the century continues apace. Investment in new building developments renders many of London’s former working-class neighbourhoods almost completely unrecognizable.
	Kate Tempest develops Brand New Ancients, an epic spoken word poem at the Battersea Arts Centre in London; in 2013 this work wins the Ted Hughes Award for innovation in poetry.