It's great when you're Kate ... Yeah!
We once called her a mini-Allen, but chart-bothering songstress Kate Nash isn't "bittah". In fact, she's the new queen of London's pesky pop kids. Sylvia Patterson finds her making fey while the sun shines
Saturday July 21, 2007
The Guardian
Today, the irrepressible Kate Nash, just turned 20, is No 2 in the UK charts with a break-up song called Foundations. Pesky kids, they're everywhere, the biggest and best pop stars in Britain now a generation of skew-haired indie talent, the London "wing" alone a bewildering spectrum of DIY, reality-pop jesters, united in MySpace, currently numbering Kate Nash, Adele, Jack Penate, Jamie T and the Maccabees. Lily Allen, at 22, is their pioneering mentor, last year giving Kate Nash the sort of free almighty leg-up that used to cost marketing millions; in early 2006, Lily positioned her at No 8 in her "friends" list, Kate saw a fan-base duly flourish, alongside a publishing deal with Universal, an album deal with Fiction to record in Iceland with sometime Bjork producer Valgier Sigurosson and the opportunity to ogle the fragrant Leonardo DiCaprio at London fashion week and be "star-struck" into a rare bout of silence. Long dubbed "the new Lily Allen" (or "mini Allen"), her comical cockernee delivery is almost laughably identical. "You say I must eat so many lemons, cause I am so bittah," she lilts, "I said, 'I'd rather be with your friends, mate, 'cause they are much fitter."
Her eponymous debut album, though, considerably widens the picture (she's more a lo-fi Bjork), an inventive, curious, experimental sparse-beat, piano-led song-writer and sometimes deftly wry, sometimes daftly literal lyricist who is not only obsessed with rubbish boys but tells spooky tales of Emily Strange type girls who glue their lips together and have skeletons for friends. Yesterday, she played the tiny, beautiful, lakeside Latitude festival in Suffolk and is now, at 3pm, perched in a back-stage portacabin, having her make-up professionally applied (several spots have erupted), copper hair everywhere, having not long crawled from her tent after a late night festival hoopla. "I look like a tramp, I'm so tired I'm delirious and there's holes in my brain!" she croaks, a rumpled vision in black leggings, black pumps and black Love Will Tear Us Apart Joy Division t-shirt.
Kate was 15 in 2002, the year the Streets and the Libertines changed everything, but is closer in soul, she insists, to the hoary old herberts of punk. "I love punks!" she beams, perking up, "I first got into punk music at 17, The Adverts, just from being a bored teenager. The attitude is just so non-bullshit. I do believe in the revolution, yeah! But I understand you can't save the whole world."
One week on from teen-hood, she's all shades of erratic, earnest, self-conscious and honest, a once "chavvy-dressed" London kid far from the "posho" she'd previously been billed. "That's because a lot of the others are middle class and know each other from private London schools," she notes. "I'm from Harrow. It's rubbish. In Harrow, everyone goes to the same pubs, pound a pint night, on a Tuesday. But I kind of like the fact Harrow isn't very cool. There's so much cool stuff going on that sometimes it's a bit 'oh God, I'm so sick of it being so cool!' I just wanna be in rubbish Harrow and go to Safeways and have beans on toast and chill out."
You can argue with Kate forever over sounding like Lily Allen and she will not hear it. "I just disagree about it!" she frowns. "My music doesn't sound like her. It's so annoying. I just wanna be me."
She wasn't, though, as Lily certainly was, a toxic teenage cluster-bomb berserk on multi-fold drugs. "Drugs are ugly and scary," shudders Kate, "stuff like coke, I'd just hate to put something up my nose (grabs nose). And it just hits you there (top of nose). And destroys part of your brain! I've been tempted. But I've got really heightened emotions anyway. I can get really over-excited about ... a biscuit."
Harrow is an average suburban enclave of north-west, greater London where Kate grew up with her "60s" parents, her dad from south east London (Dartford) who works in computers, her mum a nurse from Dublin ("she was really cool in the 60s, black eye-liner, bit moody"), a folk-loving family who Kate describes as "a bit loopy". A creative, imaginative kid, she had piano lessons with a neighbour and wrote her first songs aged 15.
"Some were about love and friends but they were mostly political," she chirps. "I was very passionate! One was called 'Black And White' about how nothing's black and white. I remember learning about wars and poverty and corruption and was really teenage 'save the world!'. I wanted to be in the Salvation Army. Proper wanted to go to Africa and work as a missionary."
Hating ordinary school, she switched to the non-fee-paying, performing arts Brit School (former alumni: Amy Winehouse, Luke Kook, Katie Melua and, crikey, Dane and Wayne from Another Level), choosing theatre over music "because I didn't think I was clever enough for the music course", immersing herself in physical theatre, Stanislavski method acting and playwriting, becoming "one of the top actors in the year". 18 months followed in Nandos and River Island ("crap, five pounds an hour"), while waiting on the reserve list for the Bristol Old Vic Theatre, her letter of rejection arriving the day she fell down the stairs at home, breaking her foot. Housebound for three weeks, her folks cheered her up by buying her an electric guitar, with amp, and she went back to the songs she'd started aged 15, now using the technological prism of Apple Mac's GarageBand. That year she also survived an operative procedure to correct her faulty heart.
Kate played her first tiny shows in local pubs in February 2006, five months before Lily Allen's Smile went to No 1 in the UK. Today, she's both fictional story-teller, chronicler of her own romantic catastrophes and is yet to have a proper relationship. Even Foundations' tale of a love affair gone stale was based on her observations of others.
"I've never had someone I would say was a boyfriend," she muses. "My longest was maybe about five months. And it was rubbish (buries head in hands) They're all full of shit! All of 'em!"
She thinks about her peers and decides the one specific idea that unites them all is "freedom". She met Beth Ditto on the Friday Night Project, "so cool and sweet and funny" and now sees herself among the spectrum of radically individual female pop voices which, even five years ago, would've seemed unthinkable. "A lot of young girls look up to me and it's amazing," she says. "When I was growing up our role models were fake and thin and pretty and pop and shiny and American R&B. If you look who's in the public eye now, everyone has a different style and body."
Suddenly, a scream. "It's Kate Nash! Coooool!" We're out by the lake, taking some photos, Kate now the striking vision of a flame-haired Irish gypsy is shimmering with the pale blue bruises of a winning weekend at a festival. Here in the open field, she's constantly mobbed, this time by Daisy, Anna and Finley, aged 10, 8 and 8, who ask her out for a row on the boats.
Daisy: "We like Kate 'cos she's got really good songs!"
Anna: "Good fashion sense!"
Finley: "And nice hair!"
"I feel like I'm having the life I dreamed of as a kid," smiles Kate before gambolling off to the boats with the next generation of pesky kids. "You know when you think you want your youth to be exciting and fun and kinda dangerous and nerve-wracking and you wanna be part of something crazy and massive? I feel like, 'wow, I am part of that'. These are the days of my life. Mental. I just wanna be an artist, like someone like Bjork and Kate Bush and Regina Spektor. These are people that have saved people, I think, by being what they are."
· Kate Nash's debut LP is out Aug 6
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
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