Enter Slowthai, the rock star
Rolling Stone UK|April/May 2023
What do you do when you find out therapy is not for you? If you're this new dad, you return to your friends and to rock music - the genre Tyron Kaymone Frampton always wanted to make instead for curative release
By Hannah Ewens. Photography by Simon Emmett
Enter Slowthai, the rock star

Psychotherapy didn't work for Tyron Kaymone Frampton.

Before you, a therapised reader, get ahead of yourself with preconceptions or misconceptions, he tried. He'd previously dabbled in the great American task of talking about shit with "some guy" and this second time there was plenty to discuss with a professional: he was performing as the rapper slowthai, "burning the candle at both ends" and dealing with the personal pressures of becoming a dad and co-parenting with his son's mother. But after a few months of committing to the process during his global festival circuit in the summer of 2022, it was game over.

In fairness, therapy: it ain't for everyone. "I'm not, like, a know-it-all or nothing, but I've done my own research, and I give enough people advice from myself to practise what I preach. I could be a therapist," Frampton says with a smile, sinking into a couch in a private room in London's Soho. "I might just go study psychology and start doing that."

The final straw was when he cancelled some sessions and his therapist charged him for them anyway. I've got trust issues, Frampton says, and what about this "doctor-patient privilege"? He asks if I've seen The Sopranos. "Tony Soprano's fucking therapist goes to another therapist about this don and that therapist probably goes home to his wife and says, "Today was a long day, I had this guy who told me..." Frampton trails off and raises his eyebrows. What's an Italian-American mobster or a British musician who semi-regularly appears papped and printed in the UK tabloids supposed to do? Risk leaked secrets and more controversy? After everyone's finally forgotten about the drama at the NME Awards three years ago? Nah, mate.

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