Kane Chattey, musician, podcast and ex-creative director of SBTV

Kane Chattey is not only a man with a strong and influential social media presence but a pioneer. Chattey describes himself as a human being first, then an artist, creative director, podcaster and film-maker. His current twitter bio concludes that he is a “scumbag”, which I can only assume is a post-modern euphemism I am yet to be updated with as my conversation with Chattey presented me with a man that not only dreams big, but does big, a man that not only inspires but educates. I am yet to meet such affectionate scum-bags. Chattey is well known to be the Creative Director of SBTV,  but since leaving the internet sensation backed by Richard Branson, Chattey has been taking the podcast world by storm with his revolutionary podcast series “So You Want To Be An Artist?”.  Having relocated to Los Angeles, California I spoke to Chattey over Facetime in a conversation that left a lasting impression on the Practical Dreamer in me.

Who and what exactly is Kane Chattey?

First and foremost a human being. It may sound cliche but I feel a lot of people get caught up in what they want to be and the image they want to show people they are. So first and foremost I would say I am a human being before any job role, before any profession and before any industry label. Aside from that I am creative or an artist (I don’t have a role). I am just a person who craves freedom and the freedom to express myself and someone who doesn’t like to be limited or put into a box or stuck in one place. The best way to describe me is free. But I know that I am not all the way there yet, that is what I am working towards.

What would you say has been the highlight of your entire career so far?

Just having one really! I struggle to celebrate any kind of success because I struggle with being present, I am always thinking in the future or thinking about what I could have done better in the past. No real achievement for me is something worth talking about. But what is worth talking about (for me) is the fact that I have the career, was able to come from a small town [Bournemouth] where no one really does anything and being able to travel the world and work with my favourite artists and understand what it is like to experience life and have great opportunities and meet incredible people. Also being told that I am worth something and my opinion is worth something, that is (to me), the biggest miracle out of anything I can possibly do.

So how do you self-validate yourself in regards to everything you do? What do you do to remind yourself that you are worth a lot and what you have to say is worth something?

I don’t know, it is difficult. It is one of the easier things to say than it is to do. It is easy to say your opinion is worth something but to truly believe it inside you is like a big battle because you have how many years of believing that you are not worth something until you decide to make the change and believe that there is no difference between me and any other person that I see with a platform. It’s like waking up everyday and thinking I can actually do something great. I think another aspect of freedom is that you are free from the prison of your own mind. Freedom comes from waking up and not having to remind yourself that your opinion is valid or that your perspective is important. It is just reminding yourself “it’s okay Kane, you need to do something productive today because people need to hear how you see the world, or people need to hear your opinion”. People struggle with that because throughout your whole life you are told and taught to be humble, to be modest and to not even believe in your own potential. You just have to break away from that and you have to tell yourself you know that this is not a dress rehearsal, this is your life and you are not going to have another go at this. 

Kane, I absolutely love that answer!

The only reason there are people out there with important opinions is because they are the only ones who have tried. Everyone else stopped or gave up, or didn’t even start. No one is even more exceptionally talented than anybody else, in my mind everyone is equal and we all have the capabilities to do what everyone has done. Everyone is a creative, everyone is an artist, the only reason people have these platforms or have these voices is because they are the only ones who have gone and got it. That is another reason or another way I keep myself motivated.

That’s gold. How do you remain productive and how do you actually get yourself to start doing something?

To start, you have to be inspired by something. If you want to make a change in yourself, that is where it comes from. Any great idea comes from a big battle with yourself. It is like a computer game, once you complete a boss level you get a reward that helps you continue to evolve and get further in the game. So first of all, you start by having this battle with yourself, unless you are a child without worries and you can pick anything up and put it down without commitment or without insecurity. But if you are, for example, to start music or whatever, you need to have this battle with yourself and ask yourself what do you want to get from the world? What do I want to do day to day? You have to pose these questions to yourself and you have to really go face to face with yourself in the ultimate rumble in the jungle. You have to come out on top and be like ‘alright, cool so now I have beaten myself, my own worst enemy, I can go out and beat anything else’. 

And then staying productive from there is the hard thing because it feels like an uphill battle all the time.  Staying productive is just about getting out of our comfort zone, understanding you are not supposed to be stationary, you are supposed to be moving. Everything in this universe is moving, constantly rotating, orbiting. You have to keep moving. You also have to have lust for education and I don’t mean education in the traditional sense like University ( unless you are a lawyer or something, you need that stuff). Right now I am talking about self education.

You mentioned a rumble in the jungle, I am not sure if you are aware but that is a historical Muhammad Ali fight,  who was a pioneer in self-belief. How important is self belief to you?

Nobody will believe in you until you believe in yourself. You look at Muhammad Ali and you look at Prince, those are two people that show that if you love yourself enough the whole world will love you as well. If you don’t love yourself no one else will. It is a cliche but it is deeper than self love and all of that sh*t, until you can really stand up and say you believe in yourself and say it with your chest and your heart no one else is going to listen to you. If I go onto my podcasts and I whimper and I sound half hearted and I don’t believe what I am saying and I don’t come across with passion like I am talking to you right now, you are not going to be compelled to carry onto writing whatever you have to write. You are not going to want to subscribe to the podcast, or you are not going to listen to the music. I have to stand up and really f*cking believe what I am saying to you and be willing to die for that. That is what self belief is, it is basically the biggest co sign you can get. Everybody is looking for a leader because there are so many people out here who don’t believe in themselves. It is a reason why we have religion, we all need something to believe in, so why not start with ourselves.

So what is the most valuable lesson that you have learnt about yourself and others in your relentless pursuit of your dreams?

I think for myself, it is that I am capable. That is something I struggle with a lot and it is a lesson that gets erased and gets learnt again all of the time, that I am capable to actually do whatever I want to do. If I want to make a video, I will make a music video. If I want to make a film, I will make a film. If I want to make a song, I will make a song. If I want to paint something, I can paint something. I think that the biggest lesson to learn is that you are capable and secondly it doesn’t matter, nothing matters. It doesn’t matter if you make a song and it turns out bad, it doesn’t matter because the process is where the beauty is and the process is where the education is, the process is where the experience is. It is the same for everybody else, the biggest lesson about everybody else is that they are capable as well. I have seen people work at stuff for years who haven’t really quite got there and suddenly it clicks, all it takes is a moment for a switch in your head to go off and it literally is just that, suddenly you understand and you understand where you should be creating from and what you should be creating for. That is such a huge lesson to learn, that you are capable of really anything. These are such cliches but cliches are just cliches because they are true. The truth is going to get used over and over again and then suddenly they become cliche but you are capable of anything, really and truly.

I would like to know- what obstacles have you had to overcome to get to where you are today?

My whole life seems to have been an obstacle course, really and truly. Stuff that’s probably irrelevant is that I grew up in foster care, I was kicked out of three schools before I decided to knuckled down, I dropped out of University. At the time I dropped out of University I was a chef as well so I had a good career, a girlfriend and apartment in London. That was an obstacle because that comfort zone of having a girlfriend, a job and the apartment, that comfort zone was the biggest obstacle that I had to get over and leave behind. Then starting work at SBTV as a cameraman or like director, the obstacle there was like …  I have this glass ceiling of Jamal Edwards who is the face of SBTV and no one really knows about anybody else. There was an obstacle there because I wanted to be known and I wanted my opinion to be heard and I wanted my beliefs to be shared. When I had to figure out a way to work my way up and get the Creative Director role when I was there. And then the biggest obstacle was “do I stay now and build with Jamal or do I leave and do something for myself?”.

There was another obstacles of choices so I decide to go by myself and try do something for myself, everything is an obstacle. You have your ideal end point and then basically you have to climb, jump, duck and swing around and fight against every single obstacle that comes your way.  You are never actually got to get all the way there because you spend too much time climbing. But the closer you get to it the better, so it is like even with music videos when I did the Devlin and Skepta video. The night before I didn’t have one actor, I didn’t have a location and it was raining. I was ready to call it off the day before the shoot and now it is about to touch four million views. There [are] so many, there are more obstacles than there are successes. There are more obstacles than there are opportunities, it is a constant battle, but you have to get your fight on.

How did you make that decision to leave SBTV and do your own thing?

It was kind of made for me, in the sense I was just unhappy. None of this is a reflection on anything else or anybody else, this is all just a reflection of myself. I just wasn’t happy with myself and the way I was feeling when I was waking up every morning or the things that I would think about before I go to sleep at night. For a spell of maybe three to six months, it felt like I had lost my mind for a little bit and I decided that if I carry on going any further, like if I carry on in this mindset, I may not have much life left in me to live. It was getting at that point like I am not built for a comfort zone, I am not built for a 9-5, I am not built for the same thing everyday structure or routine. The keyword with me is always freedom so if I don’t have that I start to feel like a prisoner or I start to feel like the walls are closing in. It felt like the walls was about to get so close that I was going to be squashed. So I started to make a decision that I was going to something for myself and see if that makes me any happier.

So when it felt or feels like your dreams won’t materialise, what has kept or keeps you going?

Just the fact that there is nothing else. There is nothing else, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t want to work in retail. I can’t work in retail, I will end up killing myself or something. I have worked in retail, I have done loads of stuff. I used to be a labourer, I worked in retail, I worked as a chef, a bunch of different things. But I realised there is nothing else for me, it’s either if my dreams don’t materials alright great cool, no one knew that I existed or they do? Alright, cool great people know that I have existed. I got to do what I love to do but either way my dreams are going to be materialised. Whether a million people know about it or just me that knows about it, I worked at it and I did something and I managed to create whenever I felt like creating. I don’t care, I don’t give a f*ck if the world knows about it, I don’t care if it is just me that knows about it. My dreams will always manifest, I think the real question there is if people don’t know your dreams manifested will you care. It is an interesting question because I think people gage success by how many people know they achieve something, really and truly. But for me I don’t care about that, I know about myself so I don’t care if no one else knows, that is not my job.

What tools or books, you can include apps, would you recommend to Practical Dreamers?

Yeah I love books! ‘The Alchemist’ , that was the book that changed my life. It was ironic because my girlfriend at the time bought me that book and then that book was the one that made me break up with her.  Also a book called ‘Do It’ by Jerry Rubin, that is a great book. It is basically is a communist manifesto of the sixties and seventies. So it was the bible or the book that the hippies would refer to. Obviously my podcast, So You Want To Be An Artist. And a book called ‘We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us About’ by Nicholas Van Hoffman.  ‘Daring Greatly’ by  Brené Brown. Also listen to TED talks really. TED talks are great. ‘The Power of Vulnerability’, that TED Talk is amazing. Yeah I think everything you need to know is in ‘The Alchemist’ , really and truly.

I have got one last question for you and this is a bit of an odd one but I feel that the answer is very telling on people’s personality, so I love asking it: if you had to describe yourself as an animal what animal would you be and why?

In my past life, I was some kind of cat. Because I am a Leo, but also because also if I am with a girl and she starts playing with my hair, then for some reason I become paralysed. I get so comfortable and sleepy. I would just have to be a Lion, I think because they just chill out. Lion are asleep for seventeen hours a day, then they only really move to f*ck or eat, those are the two reasons they move.  That is a little bit reflective of me  but it just shows that they don’t really care about anything else . You don’t really see a Lion walking around acting tough and trying to intimate people. People just know that you don’t f*ck with a Lion. But the Lion doesn’t really need to do anything to make that opinion, he just sits in the sun. So I would have to say a Lion.

Listen to So You Want To Be An Artist here