![]() She’s charming, insightful, articulate and potty mouthed. Her humour is as off kilter as her dicky bow. “I just pulled it together for your call. Her face is bare except for a flash of electric blue eyeshadow, her auburn hair in a simple, messy bob. It’s 10am West Coast time but she’s dressed in a vintage 1980s-glam pink, button-down satin shirt with a red dicky bow. She sips a cup of builder’s tea behind her laptop screen, a banana skin on her desk – a hasty pre-interview breakfast. Nash is speaking from LA, where she’s ridden out the pandemic, shortly before being finally allowed to fly home to London where our photographer meets her. ![]() It’s that fucked up and the music industry itself should be ashamed of itself because it prides itself as being at the forefront of culture and being so fucking cool and yet it’s said nothing about the Me Too movement. It’s normal for older men to take teenagers out, get them drunk, have them sign contracts they’ll be in until they’re in their forties or fifties. It’s a completely unprofessional industry. “Just like your managers aren’t coming from like the ‘Association of Managers’, there’s no music industry HR department. Her label dropped her and she went on to make music and tour with a group of female musicians independently, releasing her third album, Girl Talk, on her own label in 2013. Underestimate the Girl channeled Nash’s punk spirit and was a pivotal moment. When her second album, 2010’s My Best Friend Is You, wasn’t as commercially successful, Nash responded by self-releasing a single that refused to contain itself to the box she’d been squeezed into. He was one of a string of bad managers who have used her, stolen from her and taken advantage of her – and that’s just one rung of the industry ladder. ![]() She recalls one incident where she reported him to a hotel reception for partying until 6am in the room next door when she had to work the next day. “I feel now, looking back, it was almost like I was treated like a girlfriend but without anything sexual – just very overly personal, lots of alcohol and drugs around.” “My manager was a nightmare,” says the now 34 year old. Her record label made the most of it, with a relentless two-year touring schedule – a “completely crazy environment” where nobody advocated for her and “where it’s really normal to be drunk at your job full time”. Her first album, Made of Bricks, with its earworm lead single Foundations, propelled the 19 year old to mainstream success. She’s been speaking truth to power since she barged her way into the music industry in 2007, with an established MySpace fanbase executives couldn’t ignore. It’s perhaps not surprising that Kate Nash’s new music is being released independently. In the rest of the world now it’s 2021 but the music industry’s still like: ‘But we can still shag everyone, right?’” “The music industry is like Mad Men and the era of the boss shagging everyone in the office and it’s fine because it’s the 1950s.
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