Kate Nash is the essence of a modern pop-star: a MySpace-using, laptop-recording 19-year-old who writes songs for herself and sings them in her own cockney accent. But is that enough to make her the next big thing, or is she just a mini-Lily Allen? She talks to Tony Clayton-Lea.
THE TICKET is almost embarrassed (we stress the word almost), but for the first time in its history it is talking to a pop star who is in a serious state of undress. Kate Nash, this year's most fragrant female colloquial singer, is running a bath and is about to hop in. She's wearing what she describes as "ugly leggings - they're like my mum's back in the 1970s, purple and green chequered. Not cool. But it's only 10am, so no one has seen me yet." Nash is as unabashed as any assertive 19-year-old would be.
She is the epitome of the anti-Pop Idol teenager who would suck every last drop of blood from their mother's veins for fame and fortune; she wants to do things for herself and to be herself, and if this means being a little bit naïve and very much naturalistic - as opposed to dressing up like a Tweenies version of Frank Sinatra - then so be it.
Anyway, back to Pop Star Takes Bath Shocker. As the water gurgles in the background and creaky-hinged doors swing to and fro, Nash ponders the past 12 months. Just over a year ago, she was down in the dumps; despite a diploma from Croydon's BRIT school (former alumni include Amy Winehouse, The Kooks and Katie Melua) and two years of weekend graft at the renowned Sylvia Young Theatre School, budding thespian Nash was refused admission to the highly regarded Bristol Old Vic.
Trying to cheer herself up, she went to see Brokeback Mountain, arrived back home, fell down the stairs and broke her leg.
Within a few weeks Nash was strumming along reasonably proficiently on an electric guitar her parents had bought her to while away the boredom. Along with the guitar, Nash had her laptop fitted with the GarageBand program and acquired a dodgy microphone.
Before you could say "Dido? Feck off!" Nash had hammered out a few Art Brut pop songs that mixed the chavernacular of London's North Harrow with the folkie sensibility of Joni Mitchell.
Fast-forward just over a year, and Nash is in the unenviable position of being lazily touted as the "new" Lily Allen. Certainly, Nash's debut single, Caroline's A Victim, is Allen-esque - a little bit Pearly Queen in attitude, with lyrics that duck'n'dive over a fundamental song structure - but full judgment by comparison must be reserved until Nash's debut album is released in September.
In the meantime, surely even Nash is surprised at how quickly her career has progressed? "Yes, it is quite weird," she accepts. "I know it's been very quick to happen, yet it seems quite natural to me at the same time. Nothing has been too much too soon, I feel, at least not so far. I also think everything has clicked at the right time.
"I only started doing gigs last April, and from then I carted myself around London doing more. There was some interest from labels during and after that, then I got myself a manager, went off to Iceland, came back and got a publishing deal. It's a natural sequence of events - or so it seems to me - yet I still think it's totally bizarre what has happened to me."
The plan, says Nash, was to get into acting, even if it meant passing the time working at a fryer in a chippie or being a checkout girl on the tills at River Island. Fame - or even a modicum of it - was never her goal.
"I just wanted to enjoy the songs I was writing and to share them with people," she explains. "The intention was to release them in any way, even if that meant recording them in my bedroom. But it ended up that there was a lot more interest in the songs. I've been relaxed about it - some people can come across as too desperate, and you lose sight of the point of it all. I'm doing the music for me, so it's not about trying to please an audience. I didn't write songs just to get fans. I wrote the songs first, and then I got the fans."
So far, so good. The songs for Nash's debut album have been written, and between now and the summer they'll be whipped into shape by tours and festival appearances. The real trick of the enterprise, Nash implies, is to get through it without being patronised or manipulated. Or compared to Lily Allen.
"My music is eclectic, which is good because that's what I want, but that can make it difficult because producers can get hold of it and want to make it something that isn't me. So we really need to think about what it's going to be, whether I'm happy with it. It needs to be natural. It's too easy to dress up what I do and make it overtly poppy. Some people are saying that some of the songs need a bit of structure, but I don't want to give some songs structure because that's the way they were written.
"I stand my ground against that kind of pressure. I've always been pretty stubborn, passionate and strong minded about knowing what I want, so you have to say what you feel. I've experimented with songs sounding really nice, but sometimes that isn't me and so we're not using that approach. You need to let people know from the start what way you intend to go on.
"Some people think that just because I'm 19 and female that they might be able to manipulate me from day one, but no. I'm not difficult to work with and I'll try to work on things, to experiment, but it's pretty obvious that I know what's right for me and what isn't."
And the Lily Allen comparisons?
"I'm all right with it at the moment. At first, it was really cool to have the comparison, because it made people look at who I was and it got me a bit more attention. Then I went through a stage where I was pissed off at it. Now I'm chilled out because I know when the album comes out the comparisons will stop. My music is really quite different, so at the moment people can say whatever they want. Come September we'll see."
And what about all the other correlations that have been drummed up about her music, the reference-point pitches to A&R departments: Lady Sovereign meets Peaches, Mike Skinner busking in a miniskirt, Vicki Pollard possessed by the ghost of Regina Spektor. Handy labels or downgrades in quality control?
"Just because I'm from North Harrow some people want me to be a proper chav. At the moment, there are a lot of musicians from middle-class backgrounds doing really well - Just Jack, Jamie T, Lily Allen. They're all from reasonably well-off families, live in big houses, and so on. I'm not from a poor background, but we have a normal size house, and my mum is a nurse. I had to go to work otherwise I wouldn't be able to have done anything - there wasn't enough money for me to skive off. As for the Vicki Pollard thing - I don't let stuff like that bother me. I mean, she's a bit of a retard, isn't she?"
See/Hear
Listen to Kate Nash on www.myspace.com/katenashmusic
The video for Caroline is a Victim is on YouTube. Kate Nash plays Spring & Airbrake, Belfast, April 6; Róisín Dubh, Galway, April 7; Whelan's, Dublin, April 8
