FRESH GHOST
Fed up of feeling “over-qualified and underpaid”, Ghostpoet left music after his last album to run a coffee shop in Margate. Life as a barista didn’t go to plan either, and he returned to music to pour his frustrations into his fifth album. As he tells John Earls: “I’m a glass-half-full guy…”
GHOST POET
There’s the possibility if you were on the Kent coast in the last couple of years, your morning latte might have been served to you by one of the most forward-thinking musicians Britain produced in the 2010s. Annoyed at the under-performance of his 2017 album Dark Days And Canapes, Ghostpoet sought refuge by opening his own coffee shop and bar, Radio Margate, moving to the artistic hub after spending nearly all of his life in South London. Ghostpoet mucked in, serving coffees by day and drinks at night. “I had to deal with blocked toilets, floods and fights,” he notes. “Getting up stupid-early to serve coffee was nuts.” But it was better for his soul than simply trying to make another album after years of being a commercial nearly man, failing to make a mainstream breakthrough despite two Mercury Prize nominations.
“I was sick of music after the last record,” Ghostpoet admits. “Dark Days And Canapes just didn’t work out. I didn’t get to gig as much as I’d have liked, the campaign didn’t last as long as I’d have liked. I felt I was at a point where I was over-qualified and underpaid. Getting out of the city and moving to Margate, trying new things, was to reinvigorate myself.”
Naturally, some of Radio Margate’s customers recognised their new barista, much to Ghostpoet’s amusement. “Some dudes would come over like, ‘Wait, are you…?’ and others would give me this half-squinting look I’ve come to know,” he smiles. “I’d realise at that moment, ‘I’ve got to walk away and get busy somewhere else’, as I know they’d be Googling me on their phone and clocking me. It was hilarious, but I’d never thought about being a public figure before. I’m just somebody who makes music, being recognised has never been my thing. Some people I know were, ‘What, you work in a coffee shop?’. I wanted to open the shop to have more immediacy between graft and reward: getting just desserts for a hard day’s work. I wanted that after seven years in music, where you put in a lot of work with no guarantee of anything.”