For the first time in six years, Kate Nash is releasing a new album, and despite the melancholy connotations of 9 Sad Symphonies’ title, the singer-songwriter seems in a good place.
“I'm really confident in my powers,” she says. “My live show is like my number one thing where I'm like, I'm really f**king good at it.”
I meet Nash for coffee at one of her favourite cafés near Primrose Hill; the singer-songwriter is still giddy from staging an incredibly surreal gig inspired by The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, and “old MGM studio Hollywood musicals” the night before.
Maintaining a speaking speed of approximately 100mph throughout our conversation, Nash tells me all about the whimsical world she wanted to create, complete with spinning podiums, fake trees, and the heavily metaphorical window she climbs through to reach the stage when she finds the main door locked.
“I always used to say during the Girl Talk era,” she says, referring back to the 2013 album she ended up funding out of her own pocket after parting ways with her former label. “I'd always be like: well if they don't let you in the front door, there's always a window around the back that you can try. Gotta get in there somehow.”
This resilient spirit runs through the singer’s new album, 9 Sad Symphonies – for which she signed to Kill Rock Stars, the cult US label best known for putting out music by alumni Bikini Kill, Gossip, and Sleater-Kinney.The new album is a bright, technicolour fantasy that seeks to unearth the beauty buried underneath dark times; it comes laden with rich hums of strings, and a healthy dollop of musical theatre influence. Tellingly, there are 10 tracks here, even though the title only references nine sad ones. The process of creating her first new album in six years seems to have proven incredibly cathartic.
“It's a f**king miracle every time you make a show happen when you're on tour it really is!”
Soon after we meet, Nash’s breakthrough single Foundations – first released in 2007 – goes viral, with TikTokkers who were in nappies the first time around earnestly hailing it as the ultimate Millennial Anthem. To be fair, they have a point.
Nash grew up in Harrow, and began writing songs after a broken foot put an end to her career as a Nando’s waitress. Propelled by the sizable buzz around emerging artists breaking through on Myspace, she signed a major record deal with Polydor when she was just 17.
Released in the wake of Lily Allen’s breakthrough, her 2007 debut album Made of Bricks tapped into a similar wave of wry, confessional music that stood out from the rest of the lad-dominated indie crowd.
To this day, many still know Nash best for her biggest hit Foundations. “I remember writing it in the little living room in my mum's house, just on guitar,” she remembers. “I was really into punk music and John Cooper Clarke and trying to be clever with mundanity; writing around your own life, but trying to be funny. It was a youthful version of that; trying to write lines about growing up in London and nights out at the pub.”
In one of Foundations’ many barbed one-liners, Nash despairs of somebody who got too wasted and threw up over her brand new trainers; but it turns out she was the real-life culprit. “I threw up on my mate Phil’s brother’s trainers in an alleyway!”
And the song’s best lyric of all recounts a drunken exchange at the pub. “You said I must eat so many lemons ‘cause I am so bitter,” she drawls. “I said, "I'd rather be with your friends, mate, 'Cause they are much fitter."
“As a woman you get so many insults if a guy is talking to you, and then you won’t go home with him. We’ve all had them: ‘Suddenly you don’t want to shag me, so you’re an ugly lesbian slut!’ Wait what!? I don’t think so! It was about those drunken arguments, and the stupid shit you say to each other in the youthful, hedonistic relationships you probably shouldn’t be in.”
Nash rocketed to fame while she was still a teenager after Foundations, which went to number two in the charts. But the tabloids were ferociously cruel and misogynistic: mercilessly mocking the appearances of Amy Winehouse, Allen, Nash, and other prominent female musicians of the era.
“People still don't love successful women,” Nash says. “I don’t think you can talk about women in the same way now in the media, but they still throw you to the wolves.”
While Made in Bricks went platinum, Nash’s subsequent albums never reached the same commercial heights, though she has gradually built an increasingly loyal and devoted fanbase over the course of her career.
“People still don't love successful women”
Along the way, she has overcome several big blows. Shortly after Nash finished recording her third album, 2013’s Girl Talk, she and her record label parted ways. She says that she was forced to sell her flat as a result, but pressed on as an independent artist, scraping together what she could to keep on touring.
Now, Nash has some ideas about how those behind the scenes at major labels can better relate to the artists they’re working with. “I have an opinion: anyone who works in music at a major label should have to do an East Coast winter tour in a van first. If you haven't done that, you don't know what an artist is putting up with.”
In visceral detail, Nash begins reeling off a succession of horror stories I suspect stem from personal experience: puke-covered pillows, finding pubes on the wall, showering in a venue and recoiling as “a clump of someone else's human hair falls on your wet naked body! It's a f**king miracle every time you make a show happen when you're on tour it really is,” she laughs, sharking her head.
She funded a fourth record, Yesterday Was Forever, with a successful Kickstarter campaign. Then, midway through documenting that album’s tour for 2020 documentary Underestimate The Girl, Nash had a major dispute with her former manager Gary Marella, with the parties eventually settling the matter out of court.
She credits one project in particular with helping to get her back on her feet after she was dropped by her original label. Landing a part in Netflix’s beloved comedy-drama Glow, which aired for the first time in 2017 and follows the trials and tribulations of a 1980s women’s wrestling group, “saved my f**king life, to be honest” Nash says.
“I was at such a low point, I didn’t even know how to carry on with music anymore,” she says. “I felt like such a worthless piece of rubbish, ready for the bin. The media in England had treated me really badly. I had no money left. I had nothing to show for all these years of work. I felt very worthless. My confidence was in the f**king gutter. And then these women came in, and we learned how to wrestle; they just loved me and respected me. It saved me.”
Two episodes into filming Season Four, Glow was cancelled amid COVID filming restrictions. “Getting cut short is really disappointing,” Nash says, “and I’m sad we didn’t get the ending. But you never know what will happen. I mean, like, apparently we’ve been held onto by Netflix for five years. Other networks wanted to buy us, I just found this out. So maybe in 2025, someone will pick it up and want to finish the story?”
Either way, Glow or not, Nash feels reinvigorated by the process of creating 9 Sad Symphonies, and is excited for the next musical chapter. “I wouldn't really want to go through all of it again, but I wouldn't change it,” Nash tells me. “It's made me who I am.”
