Back in the days before Covid-19, Nakhane was coming to the end of a two-and-a-half year tour playing songs from their devastating 2018 album ‘You Will Not Die’. Since its release, Nakhane has duetted with Anohni, been cited as an inspiration by Madonna; sung the role of Siddhartha in a forthcoming musical with Elton John and Christopher Plummer; acted in the feature film ‘Two Eyes’, and a screen adaptation by the playwright debbie tucker green of her play ‘Ear For Eye’; and performed alongside Glenn Close and Patti LuPone in John Cameron Mitchell’s podcast musical Anthem: ‘Homunculous’.
The artist has also written a plethora of newspaper and magazine articles, plus an erotic short story – and has a second novel and a short film under construction. Nakhane has also come out as non-binary, using they/them pronouns. Many of the songs on ‘You Will Not Die’ had been written while Nakhane was still living in South Africa, where the artist had grown up gay in an increasingly fundamentalist Christian family. Given the trauma it drew on, Nakhane says, ‘You Will Not Die’ wasn’t exactly a party album – a fact underlined when the time came to play festivals.
As an an emerging artist, Nakhane was playing the 2pm slot, just as the crowd were warming up with a few beers, “the sun is blaring on us and I’m singing these sad songs to people who just want to dance and I thought ‘I can’t keep crying for people. I want to write an album that has movement in it, you know?’”
The result is ‘Bastard Jargon’, a pounding, physical, hot-blooded third album which sounds like grit sprayed over shiny pop. Written over 18 months in Lisbon, Ghent, Oxfordshire, London and Hastings, “It’s an existential sex album,” says the artist. “Almost every song on it has some kind of wink towards sex. It’s not necessarily a seductive, come to me, bedroom eyes kind of sex – it’s much more inquisitive, psychological sex. When I wrote ‘You Will Not Die’ it was at the end of my relationship with Christianity, and then when I wrote Bastard Jargon I’d moved to London and I threw myself into just wanting to feel good.”
To realise this lustful vision, Nakhane recruited Nile Rodgers as executive producer, having first met the Chic legend at the BBC doing Later With Jools Holland. “I was in the makeup room, I got up to say hello, slipped and fell into him his arms. It was like a romcom but also quite humiliating. We exchanged numbers and I thought that was it, but I thought of him when I wanted someone to do production work on my album and he said ‘Sure, I’d love to’.”
Rodgers plays on the second track (and co-produced 5 others), ‘Tell Me Your Politik’, along with a ferocious rap from South African performer Moonchild Sanelly. The song is Nakhane’s densely pulverising demand for prospective lovers to be ideologically aligned. “I wanted it to sound like a pack of wolves barking, saying ‘unless you get your politics right I’m not gonna fuck you,” Nakhane says. It’s a song drawn from their real life. “Oh my god, you have no idea. When you have sex with somebody and then they have really scary views, you feel tainted.”
On ‘Bastard Jargon’, the politics are personal: “micro, they’re intimate, they’re about day-to-day relations, one on ones, and so in that world, even though that world is also influenced by the macro, your own decisions have a hand in how your life will be. I wanted to make a reflective pop album. In two songs – ‘Standing in Our Way’ and in ‘The Conjecture’ – I say “the problem is me”. In music, not a lot of people say that.”
The new album is available online HERE