|
|
 |
| |
| |
Kate Nash |
Is there more to Nash than meets the eye?
REVIEW: KATE NASH
BOOGALOO BAR
ABOUT a year ago I wrote a piece about Lily Allen, and about how she was raving about some girl called Kate Nash.
Well, last week Nash was on the front of the Evening Standard magazine, and riding high in the charts with her debut single, Foundations.
She has, to borrow that over-used phrase, “blown up”.
Her simple songs about simple things that grabbed the attention of thousands of Myspacers have jettisoned her into the mainstream.
In her hit tune Foundations – a likeable slab of pop via HMV’s hip hop section – she talks about some wayward scrap of a boyfriend throwing up on her trainers, and how she fancies his mates more than him because they’re “fitter” (that’s youth terminology for attractive, darling).
Oh, haven’t we all been there.
She’s got the same ‘realness’ that drove fans by the busload towards Lily Allen, and in that way you can see why similarities have been drawn between the two – but she seems a more reluctant star.
At her gig at the famed Boogaloo bar in Archway, popular with the Moss/Doherty fraternity, she was half an hour late onstage and I couldn’t work out if the crowd were being rowdy or rude.
Her ad libs (“save Camden market” ad infinitum) and her songs were well received and there was a call for hush during the more subdued numbers, but were people bored with her slightly reedy voice?
Another well-worn phrase: I wasn’t blown away.
And I also wondered if I’d turned into a bitch when her manager fed me a sob story about how she didn’t want any pictures taken. Forgive me, I thought, but isn’t this a press event? Are they not handing out press releases at the stage?
“We left an art gallery earlier on today,” he feebly explained. “And all these photographers were suddenly outside, papping her. It freaked her out. It’s the first time it’s really happened to her.”
A nice middle-class girl from Harrow who broke her foot and got trapped at home to convalesce, she got into writing music when her parents gave her a guitar to keep her distracted.
And whatever the girl was going to write in her diary got turned into a song: “Saturday night I watched channel 5 – I particularly like CSI” (We Get On).
It’s hard to dislike Kate, but whether her success is a flash in the pan or something long lasting depends on her. For now her songs have charm in their simplicity, but I suspect they will need more depth if she is wants to stick it out. |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
