Let Them Eat Chaos
Kae Tempest
2016
Let Them Eat Chaos follows seven individuals who all live on the same street who have never met each other before. But then at 4:18 in the morning, a storm causes these seven people to leave their homes and see each other for the very first time.
As its title suggests, Let Them Eat Chaos has to do with what sustains the populace in dark times: the club nights, two-for-one drinks and selfies (“Here’s me outside the palace of me”) that do little to fend off the isolation and fear that strikes in the middle of the night.
That time is 4.18am, to be precise, a moment that recurs across tracks, and finds Tempest’s characters locked into flats, bedrooms, kitchens: Esther, a caterer, making sandwiches and swigging beer after a long night shift; Zoe, packing her belongings into bin-bags, the grease of Blu-Tack on the woodwork; Bradley, a Mancunian PR who finds himself in London, alienated and depersonalized, trying to reassure himself that reality still exists by making films on his phone. “What’m’I going to do to wake up,” he asks himself, “I know it’s happening, but who is it happening to?”
Stand-Out Tracks
Ketamine for Breakfast
Europe is Lost
Tunnel Vision
