Music

Chris Kabs: ‘Someone came into my room, put a gun to my head and asked where my father was’

The most-played black Irish male artist on radio this year used to be an accountant – but that’s not the most surprising thing about his past

Chris Kabs: ‘I came from a wealthy, big family. Money creates envy and enemies’

Tony Clayton-Lea's face
Tony Clayton-Lea
Tue Jun 20 2023 - 05:00

So far, so good and so settled. We are sitting in the sun, Chris Kabs and I, iced water at the ready, and several bases are being covered: his teenage dreams; his path from a nine-to-five job to a life in music; what makes him tick. Kabs, the most-played black Irish male artist on Irish radio this year, is good company. Confident without being overly assertive, he comes across as a 30-something person very much in control of his life.

The teenage dreams involved basketball and how, at the age of 13, he moved from Sweden to Ireland because “one of my dad’s friends said he had heard Ireland was a great country for basketball”. I give Kabs a that’s-a-new-one-on-me look. “I know!” he says. Nonetheless, he and his family moved to Ireland, and Kabs ended up playing on University College Dublin’s under-19 team.

His first job, he recalls, was in tech support at a computer firm; he then toiled as an accountant until 2017. “I was working full time, and I just thought I had to go for it. I had good money, and the job was quite secure,” Kabs explains.

“However, I knew if I continued that I would never see the bigger picture, so on a random Thursday I stood up from my desk, left my stuff on it and said goodbye to my friends. They thought I was going to return the day after, but I felt it in my bones, my spirit. Even though I was working, I knew it was temporary, because my calling was music.

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“The thing was that I didn’t know how to make music work for me. We have ideas and aspirations, but you need skilled people, a community, around you. I needed clarity of vision, and it took me years to find people that could help me as I developed. The music industry is one of the toughest, most challenging, where if you have the wrong people then you’ll need all the luck in the world.”

What makes him tick? “I’m very smart with my work ethic, meaning I don’t burn myself out. I’ve learned not to be too hard on your time. Know when to sit back, know when to pay people to do things you either don’t want to do, or don’t know how,” Kabs says.

“I don’t work to be tired; I stop when I feel I should stop by listening to my body and my mind. I’m also into fitness, I work hard in the gym. I work better at night, because when it’s quiet and dark I create the most beautiful sounds. It’s a different kind of energy than during the day. What else? I do a lot of self-reflection – to the point where I start to see myself as second person.”

So far, so relatively normal. But then Kabs drops an autobiographical bombshell about his early childhood in Zaire, as the Democratic Republic of the Congo was known at the time, before the 1997 overthrowing of the country’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, in the first Congo War.

“I came from a wealthy, big family. My dad was a businessman, and we learned that the more you have the more problems there are. Money creates envy and enemies.” Kabs isn’t sure if he wants to continue. It’s his call, I say. He decides to carry on.

“We had our haters,” he says. “When I was about four, some people broke into our home. Someone came into my room and put a gun to my head and asked me where my father was. My dad came home, and they attacked him, beat him down. They came to steal whatever he had.” Shortly after this “life-and-death experience”, Kabs was the target of at least two kidnapping attempts, and so as the second Congo War raged around them the family packed up and headed for Sweden.

Kabs swapped the day-to-day grind for music in 2017. He lights up when he describes what sounds like a religious visitation. “Music arrived, and every time when I closed my eyes and started to sing, I could envision a crowd, holding a microphone, and giving a big performance,” he says.

Kabs knew that when he left his job as an accountant there was risk involved, but luck came his way when he was commissioned to work as a producer and arranger on an album project, the fee for which he “invested in myself, my equipment, my studio, and so on. It showed me that if or when you take a risk for the things you love there is always a way out. It was a leap of faith, and I knew that if I kept going then I would see more of it.”

Which is exactly what happened. Increasing success – notably the surge of radio play for his robustly arranged R&B/soul/dance music – isn’t something he views casually: “You can’t achieve something like that by yourself; you need the right people around you at the right time, because an artist can take things only so far. What I had been lacking was a person or people who believed in and trusted me the same way I did, someone to guide me.”

There had been a tendency, Kabs says, for people to presume everything was neatly arranged in his life, but the memories of having a gun shoved in your face and being forced into the back of car don’t disappear. Kabs admits that his self-assurance, the need to make his presence felt, sometimes got the better of him.

“The one thing I had to learn was to slow down, but then” – he beams the biggest smile – “I come from a big family. Tough love, lots of voices around the table, and if you wanted to be heard you had to be loud!”

Chris Kabs is special guest at Jenny Greene and the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra on Friday, at Live at the Marquee, Cork

Chris Kabs