It is early February, a Sunday. We’re in an open-roofed Bristol club and Kate Tempest stands at the front of the stage. It’s the end of her performance. Drawn back by etiquette and pride — that Pavlovian imperative of riotous applause — she looks dumbfounded. Humbled. Wary too. Scared, even.

I can’t blame her. The applause is a bit overwhelming. After an hour of insight, humour, belief and guts, distilled into controlled, breathtaking verse, audience has become echo chamber, rebounding back at her the full amplified force of her words.

This applause is love returned. Passion squared. Empathy returned.

Kate Tempest talks about empathy a lot. Her mantra to everyone here — and to a very different audience at the Bath Literary Festival where I see her perform her poetry few weeks later — is “more empathy, less greed.” You can’t help feeling it’s an equation that should add up.

She approaches the microphone. Says thank you. Says that the band isn’t allowed to play another song — Sunday licensing — but would we like a poem? People shout out titles. Of poems. She contemplates one request — Hercules. Then changes her mind. She’s thought of one that seems appropriate. Or maybe one she can simply remember. Says it’s heartbreaking but important. Are we up for it?

That noise again.

She starts. It’s a parent, talking to a child. Daddy is a soldier. It’s Mum speaking, and Daddy isn’t coming home. The poem pivots — it’s now an angry meditation on patriotism and politics. It’s emotional, full of the convulsions and revulsion of war. She captures a disillusionment many feel with the people who let this happen, people who think lives are worth sacrificing to religion, money and oil.

Why are we beholden to this? Why are we “kissing the coshes that cripple us,” as she says on a different song, The Beigeness, the centrepiece of her album, Everybody Down.

So, important, yes. Heartbreaking, absolutely. Extraordinary too that someone is still having to write Masters Of War in 2015. She finishes the poem — that applause again. She says goodbye one last time. I turn around, dazed.

There’s a man behind me crying. His friends are hugging him. His face tells the same story Kate just did — a child thinking of the father he’ll never see again. It’s really heartbreaking.

I’ve never seen this at a gig before. I’ve seen people lost in the dream. I’ve seen people wasted and limp. I’ve seen them agog, lifted.

But I’ve never seen someone look like that.

I think about those near me for that last hour. The teenage girls bouncing and raving to Circles. The young couples nodding their heads. The dreads behind me, whipping my friend’s face as they bounce eagerly. The two middle-aged women leaning on the barrier, next stop the Hay Festival.

The man crying.

I think about another line from The Beigeness.

You’re so focused on finding the differences,
You ignore the bonds that bind us.

And I think about why it is that Kate has brought all these different people together, her face the focus of all those different faces in the crowd. Wary, scared, at the foot of the stage and on the precipice of… something. The force of the audience’s response a measure of their intensity — for somebody, anybody, to be saying what she’s saying.

Discussing the gig later, the names that come up are telling reference points: Lena Dunham, Joe Strummer, Bob Dylan, Russell Brand. All folk heroes of a sort, each with diverse sets of followers, tribes within tribes. All writers too, outsiders wielding an influence beyond their means to control. Lauded by fans as messiahs, berated by critics for their naivety.

A club of people who couldn’t win whatever they did, and didn’t really play the game anyway.

Something about Kate’s face and the eager noise of that audience suggests she might have already joined this club, whether she wants to or not.

The Beigeness is about the vague, self-imposed prison we live in. Propulsive and urgent, it comes in the middle of Everybody Down. And in the middle of The Beigeness, there is this:

See the kid with the memory he can’t shake.
See the man with the lover on his mind.
See the lady with the guilt and the heartache.
See the woman trying to battle with time.
See the man with the blood on his hands.
See the girl with her hands on her hips.
Everybody say nothing. Stay bland.
If you don’t show it then it don’t exist.
Right?

Please, she says, look. But also, see.

This is the essence of Kate’s message: more empathy.

Imagine the stories of strangers, the ones that exist behind and beyond the brief glimpses we’re given every day. People just like you and me — with, as Morrissey said, “loves, and hates, and passions just like mine.”

Those stories need not be invisible, not to the person willing to see them. It just so happens we need a poet to remind us they’re there.

Them things you don’t show I can see.
Them things you don’t say speak to me.
Them things you hide ain’t hiding.

But don’t worry. There is a better way.

No firm ground but we ain’t sliding.
Them things that haunt you, let them be.
That thing you weep for, leave it.
All life is forwards, you will see —
It’s yours when you’re ready to receive it.

This plea, this invocation to stop hiding what pains you because it only keeps you from living, is the chorus to The Beigeness. It says, don’t hold on to what holds you back. You have agency. Life is yours for the taking.

All life is forwards

I love that.

And I think the people listening to Kate that night loved it too. It was a performance of hope, love and power. They know this is what she preaches. It’s something they need to hear. That’s why they love her — she’s doing a poet’s job, pointing out truths, empowering those prepared to hear them.

I’m moving through a space that some can’t see.
I know this space exists.
So do you if your heart beats the oldest groove.

“If your heart beats the oldest groove.” This is primal, elevated stuff. It says, we’ve forgotten that we’re connected to something bigger than us, something we all share. Worse, we’ve done it to ourselves. We’ve inhibited our own consciousness and we’re all pretending we’re not suffering.

Life is huge but we have shrunk it,
We’ve made it small.
We used to walk tall.
But who cares, right?
We’re having a ball.

The Beigeness says the pretence has to stop. We’re complicit in our own mental and spiritual imprisonment. We let it happen to us every day and we force it on others , telling ourselves we can’t do anything about it.

Go ahead, keep it in ‘til it withers you.
Move fast, don’t stop, you got things to do.
Tell yourself, it’s them man it isn’t you.
Nod your head and believe that until it’s true.
You can tell it not to show its face
When you are trying to hold your space.
But it’s in you.
Deep in your sinews.
And it comes out on the coldest days.

It’s in you. Deep in your sinews. This is the kind of rhyme Kate spatters about everywhere. A quick line, passing by at speed, perfectly synched with the rhythm and framed perfectly. A flow filled with aphorisms.

Then lines like this.

Do it your way and they’ll find you ridiculous.
Pick apart your behaviour.
Their scorn ignites what inhibits us,
And then we hate ourselves.
And our fear pickles us.
Sitting in jars ‘cause it’s safer.
Some of us are happy to live with it.
But some of us know it’s against our nature.

Their scorn ignites what inhibits us. Our fear pickles us. Sitting in jars ‘cause it’s safer.

Isn’t it scary that we’re all too scared to admit that deep down we’re really scared?

But the alternative is even scarier.

In the valley of vanity, viciousness,
Full schedules and empty containers.
We’re kissing the coshes that cripple us.
Enjoying the Beigeness.

I love The Beigeness because it reminds us that avoiding responsibility for our own lives is a pyrrhic victory.

It reminds us we can change things.

And, to quote the first verse last, it reminds us that “Nothing’s beyond you.”