Sherri O'Connor
Style Idols: Kate Nash
Issue #35
The chart-topping London girl-next-door stocks up on super-deal getups while in the States
By Stacey Anderson
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 2:47pm
Kate Nash wants to change the world. I want to show her my feet. This isn’t as creepy as it sounds.
“It’s so important for young people to have opinions, write things, be creative, make mistakes, and fall over, not be afraid of stuff,” she says raptly, her hands cutting jeweled swaths dangerously close to my face. “It’s important to be able to do that and still be myself, to not have to change. I want to start a revolution and change society.”
Nash is kidding, somewhat — or as the Brits say, “puttin’ me on” — but this proves an excellent opportunity to show her my socks, which I purchased in London and which feature the carefully woven, slightly distorted visage of Che Guevara. She squeals with laughter and her earnest credo forks abruptly into fashion talk, punctuated by the drums sound-checking violently downstairs at New York’s Bowery Ballroom. (Her first Manhattan gig is this evening, and she’s hoping her idol Regina Spektor will attend.)
This sort of exchange seems indicative of Kate Nash — pensive but light-hearted, caffeinated on her own ideals, stump-speeching for all of womanhood at the grizzled age of 20. The sincere, unadorned lyrics in her glossy pop reflect those same wildly flurrying thoughts and over-jammed neuroses, and to success. Her debut album, Made of Bricks, reached No. 1 in her native U.K. and spawned the hit single “Foundations,” a conflicted, spackled-over lamentation about a withering relationship.
“Someone just told me my music was anti-folk, but I think it’s pop — honest, genuine pop,” she explains. “I’ve got roots in anti-folk, roots in punk, roots in folk, roots in classical. I think it’s pop music like how pop music used to be, with the Beatles or Motown, not in the sound but, like, genuine. Generally my music is stories, simple ditties. Autobiographical or totally made up, there’s always some element of truth in there.”
For that blunt, self-proselytizing approach, Nash draws an unhealthy amount of comparisons to another British bird, Lily Allen; they’re also connected on MySpace, as Allen championed Nash early on. Turns out, they’ve only met a few times. But while Allen was splurging her youth on Ibiza ecstasy binges, Nash was enjoying a more stable upbringing. Raised in comfortable Harrow, North London, she studied theater at the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology, England’s only free arts academy. “It wasn’t like Fame,” she insists. “It was actual people who wanted to work hard and get other stuff and be inspiring, not snobby or yucky in the least. I had a really good time there.”
Things got rougher after her graduation; after being rejected from theater programs and universities, she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her foot. The three immobile weeks afterward led her to songwriting on guitar, and her first gig followed a few weeks later. In early 2007, Nash signed to Fiction Records, which released Made of Bricks that summer; it was released stateside in January 2008. And the way she tells it, distribution in America has been especially good for one thing.
“Shopping!” she exclaims. “Oh my God, I’ve got dresses that were $15 that would be $80 in the U.K. It’s so good here — I focus on dresses, skirts, jackets, jumpers, vintage, T-shirts. I don’t really wear trousers. But then with my figure, I’ve got hips and boobs and a small waist, so if I wear trousers straight down, they don’t see things, I just look big all around. Whereas if I wear a dress and it tucks in at the right place, I just feel more comfortable in it. I used to love ’50s icons when I was growing up, like Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Bissett. I like watching old films; the women always look pretty.”
Nash’s style isn’t the only thing retro. Perhaps it is fitting that while so many people try to tell her story, only she can do it herself.
“I started a magazine; it’s called My Ignorant Youth. I wanted to do something cool to put my short stories and poems and bits of script in,” she says proudly, holding up a copied-and-collated white zine. “It’s got like an intro and my friends’ pieces on Islam and feminism, racism, recipes, recommendations. Anything I think is really cool or inspiring would make people think or laugh. We’ve just done a second issue, and I distribute them at gigs. It’s really cool to do something inspiring, something important with opinions.”
Full of ideas, chasing inspiration in style: that’s Kate Nash.
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