In 2016, from nowhere, Kings became the biggest thing in New Zealand music. In the process, he lost sight of himself. Now he’s back, and he’s learned some lessons.
On May 6, 2016, North Shore music producer Kingdon Chapple-Wilson uploaded to the internet a song he had written, recorded, mixed, mastered and produced, along with a video he’d shot and edited.
Upon its release it languished, unloved and largely unheard, and he assumed that would be that until, three months later, someone from small Auckland radio station George FM stumbled across the song and called to tell him they were going to start playing it on B rotation.
No one can say for sure how or why Don’t Worry Bout’ It emerged from B rotation at George FM to become one of the most successful songs in New Zealand history, but the record shows that it did and that Chapple-Wilson went from solo father to hottest artist in the country. Don’t Worry Bout’ It went to number one and stayed there for 33 weeks, making it history’s longest-running local number one, beating previous record-holder, Lorde, by an astonishing 15 weeks.
When the song first started getting traction, he was suddenly inundated with requests, offers and attention. The major music labels started emailing and calling from all around the world – Universal, Island Music: “All the sh**,” as he puts it. “It was overwhelming to be honest.”
He signed with Warner Music, describing it at the time as “literally life-changing”. He was given the most money he had ever seen. “I had this bulk of income,” he says. “‘Mum! We made it! I’m going to buy you a house!’” His first ever gig was opening for supergroup TLC, in front of 7000 people.
“And thus,” he says, “began the uprising of Kings.”
For a couple of years, the uprising continued. He won the Breakthrough Artist award at the 2016 New Zealand music awards, then won the Highest-selling Single and Radio Airplay Record of the Year awards in 2017.
In 2018, he released another hit single, 6 Figures, which has gone on to generate more than 25 million streams on Spotify – several million more even than Don’t Worry Bout’ It. From nowhere, he was suddenly everywhere. From the outside, it was every musician’s dream come true. From the inside? Not so much.
The advance he’d received from Warners, which in retrospect he says was not nearly enough for a house, was all gone within six months. The other baubles of success quickly began to lose their lustre too.
“I sat in the room with all the awards, like, ‘Who gives a f***? Who cares?’ That’s actually the truth. I have, like, double, triple platinum, all these awards, and they’re in my studio and I kind of looked at it and it was like a big w***fest for me. ‘I have no one to share this with apart from my daughter. Like, where’s my friends?’
“I was on such a single course of being the best once I hit it, that in some ways I felt like I was probably mean. Not even mean intentionally – disregarding people in a room because I’m looking forward, like you’re running, running for the finish line and not taking care of my peers as much as I should have.”
“It probably wasn’t actually that bad, but I felt like I could be a better person.”
He set out to live a different kind of life. He took all the awards out of his studio and moved them to a back room. They remain there today, “collecting dust”.
He decided to focus more on relationships and less on achievement. He didn’t apply for this year’s music awards. “I feel like I probably could have smashed them this year,” he says. “I just didn’t apply.”
He also started focusing on mindfulness. He took a meditation course, recommended to him by Six60′s Marlon Gerbes. He started focusing on how to be present, especially when he was around others, and to stop living so much in the future.
Kings remembers times when he was younger that his mum would say to him “Are you even here?”
“She hasn’t said that to me in a long time.”
He is no longer with Warner Music. He has his own label, Arch Angel Records through which he releases all his own music. He’s recently reclaimed the rights to Don’t Worry Bout’ It from Warner.
The label is not just about him though. He wants to help artists learn the lessons he learned the hard way.
“It’s sad to say,” he says, “but your song is probably 10 per cent of its success. Maybe 15, maybe 20. But there’s a lot of it that is marketing, promo, business acumen. There’s so much to it. Like, talking about [mega-successful K-Pop band] Blackpink: The amount of rehearsals, the look; it’s not just a song. And that sucks to tell an artist, ‘Hey, you need to get sharp on this stuff if you want to really make a big impact’.”
Kings grew up on the North Shore, in a place he says “wasn’t always nice”, brought up by a single mother who was working two jobs. “It was difficult,” he says. “I was often on the street. I didn’t go to school.”
There were times when he felt tempted to go down the wrong path.
“I’ve seen people do things that aren’t the nicest. And if you ask these people why they did it, nine times out of 10, they say for family. So is it a bad thing? It’s hard. We have this debate, me and my friends, sometimes about, like, if anyone was to hurt my daughter, I’d have probably gone smash.
“Am I right in doing that? The majority of people would say, if they knew the context, they might say, ‘Yeah, of course, go get them.’ But does it make it right? It’s like it’s not the right action. You should never hurt anyone. But yeah, that’s the conundrum.”
He says his daughter has been a huge positive influence in his life, that just seeing her helps him remember why he does what he does. Without her, he says, his career would never have reached the heights it has.
He has strived to give her the environment he felt he didn’t have growing up, but she’s now 13 and he’s starting to worry he might have gone too far.
“You can over-sanitise something, so it’s too clean, so she never slips, so she doesn’t know how to correct. And I feel like she’s there. She’s so awesome man, and that’s the thing. She’s dope and she sings and she loves being creative but she doesn’t think she can do anything wrong. And so that’s the challenge now, is trying to bring the pendulum back to the middle.”
Kings says he didn’t have much of a relationship with his own father growing up, but after doing a communication course, which he describes as teaching how to “let go of your crap”, he and his dad had a heart-to-heart and came to understand each other.
That reconnection, he says, also helped to straighten him out. “It was f***ing awesome,” he says. “He’s my best friend now.” It also helped to reconnect him with his Māori roots. He describes it as a “Mufasa moment”.
But because he had grown up outside the Māori culture and especially because he couldn’t speak te reo, he says that for a long time he felt fake. All that changed when Don’t Worry Bout’ It became the biggest song in the country.
“And it was only because the people who looked like me, Māori and Pasifika, were looking at me like, ‘Yo, you did it, man.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ And it felt good. And I could see in them that they saw what I look like, and I look like them. Even though I didn’t sound like them, maybe they could connect to me.
“That was when I was like, f***, it doesn’t matter – I got to do what I got to do.”
In just over a week, Kings will begin appearing on screen as a contestant in Three’s new local version of the international hit reality show The Traitors NZ.
The show is hosted by Paul Henry, who he describes as “cool” and “the perfect host”, and features a mix of Kiwi celebrities, near-celebrities and non-celebrities. Some of the contestants are “traitors”, who hold regular secret meetings in which they decide who to eliminate from the competition, while the rest of the cast race to figure out who the traitors are and have them banished.
It’s a show that calls for psychological trickery in pursuit of tens of thousands of dollars and Kings says his new outlook on life made it a more difficult proposition than it might otherwise have been.
“If I’m put to a challenge, I’ll do the best I can with the most integrity these days. I think before, maybe if I’d played when I was rushing to be the best, I’d probably s*** on everybody. But yeah, I think with integrity and trying to be a good person in a game like that — it was challenging.”
The Traitors NZ begins on Three and ThreeNow on August 7.