Michael Kiwanuka interview: 'You have to be loud and proud about who you are'

Third time lucky? Michael Kiwanuka's nomination for the 2020 Mercury Prize is the third time he's been up for the award
David Smyth24 July 2020

Yesterday’s Mercury Prize nominations have prompted the usual arguments about who is responsible for the best British or Irish album of the past year. Who should be on the 12-strong list that isn’t? Who does or doesn’t deserve to be on the judging panel? Why on earth did they give it to Klaxons over Amy Winehouse in 2007? And so on. It’s tradition.

From Michael Kiwanuka, at least, there are nothing but good feelings for the £25,000 award. Others have been nominated more times (Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys, P J Harvey and Laura Marling) but only he and Anna Calvi have appeared three times and been shortlisted for every album they’ve made.

“It’s a nice trilogy, man. It’s amazing,” he tells me on the phone from his Southampton home. “You don’t make albums to get awards, but you do need to have something to be ambitious towards, to keep you digging for the best stuff and bettering yourself. It keeps you hungry.”

The 33-year-old already enjoyed an even bigger platform at the start of this year when third album Kiwanuka was nominated for British Album of the Year at the Brit Awards. He lost out to Psychodrama by the rapper Dave, which he didn’t mind because they’re using very different musical styles to explore the same thing: what it is to be black today.

Kiwanuka, whose Ugandan parents escaped Idi Amin’s regime to settle in Muswell Hill, samples a speech by Alabama-born civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis — who died last week, aged 80 — on his album. He references the US sit-in protests against racial segregation in 1960, and has a song called Hero about murdered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. The lines “It’s on the news again/I guess they killed another”, have given the album a powerful resonance. “In those first few weeks [after George Floyd’s killing] it was difficult to talk about. It was so heavy, on top of the pandemic, I didn’t really know what to say,” he says. “Now I realise how important art can be. Making music, you think you’re just writing songs, but the world does give it to you, if you just sit and be in it for a while. When you open yourself up to that you can write something about what is really happening today.”

He had to find out about Lewis and Hampton for himself, learning none of that at school. You can hear his growth if you listen to his albums back to back. Home Again, his 2012 debut, is lightly toasted folk-soul, acoustic mostly, somewhat cosy. On Love & Hate, in 2016, this nice guy’s musical ambition becomes apparent. There’s the swirling 10-minute epic Cold Little Heart (it became the theme song for HBO telly hit Big Little Lies), and Black Man in a White World, a sparse clapping song that sounds like an old spiritual and expresses his lifelong feeling of outsider status. Then on Kiwanuka, released in November, the canvas is broader again. Gospel, funk, fuzzy psychedelic guitar, a wild, vaulting sound concocted with the help of producers Danger Mouse and Inflo, reminiscent of Isaac Hayes, Sly Stone, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye, retro but of impeccable quality.

“When I was making my second album I really started to think about my identity, because it gets thrown in your face when you’re a singer,” he says. “I was trying to survive in a system that wasn’t really made for me — on a pop label, making the kind of music that I make. I was called ‘soul’, because I’m black, but then my influences are so varied. It was really annoying me. Then that carried on into the next album which was more about the identity of black people in the world.”

When he began his career in music he was advised to take a stage name because Kiwanuka was supposedly hard to pronounce, so it’s gratifying to see the name in curvy orange capitals on the third album, above a portrait of him as African royalty by Atlanta artist Markeidric Walker. It shows a self-confidence that he lacked early on, when he dropped out of a course at the Royal Academy of Music in 2007, or abandoned sessions for Kanye West’s Yeezus album in 2012. “At some point you have to be loud and proud about who you are. A third album is often where people find their feet and really get going ... Sonically, the title, the cover, everything is more confident.”

Of course he should be confident. Cold Little Heart’s success means he’s playing bigger venues worldwide. He hopes large hometown shows at Brixton Academy and Alexandra Palace can go ahead later this year. In the meantime, he’s sitting on an album that, for better or worse, has captured the mood of the time. “I think that’s what the zeitgeist is,” he says. “If everyone’s thinking about something, and you just sit there and listen, it will come out in writing and songs and art.”

The winner of the 2020 Hyundai Mercury Prize is announced on September 10. Michael Kiwanuka plays September 5, O2 Academy Brixton (o2academybrixton.co.uk) and November 27, Alexandra Palace (alexandrapalace.com)