"Everyone from Lily Allen to Lethal Bizzle think that Kate is great... We don't blame him, Kate deserves all the gunfinger salutes in the world." DAZED & CONFUSED
"The music of this 19 year old is fresh, honest and experimental... her simple reflections capture the essence of teenage London life" VOGUE
"Kate Nash knocks spots of the competition" NME
"This girl is going to go far" 3am THE MIRROR
"Hotly tipped by pal Lily Allen London based poppet Kate Nash is sure to be the next name to drop in the coming months. A blend of shimmery lo-fi soundscapes, lullabic vocals and sparse instrumentation has already marked her as a breed apart from the Myspace flotsam" HOT PRESS
"Getting people excited ... is Lily Allen's mate Kate Nash who is the subject of much interest from labels at the moment." MUSIC WEEK
You could say that fate has played a big part in directing 19-year-old Kate Nash towards music and the growing buzz around her: "Until this February 2006 I was auditioning on the reserve list of the Bristol Old Vic theatre as an actor - I got a rejection and the same day I went to the cinema to watch Broke Back Mountain on my own feeling really depressed. Same day I fell down some stairs and broke my foot. My Mum and Dad bought me a guitar to perk me up because I couldn't do anything so I spent three weeks writing and recording with it on my laptop, I was itching to do something creative."
And so she did.
Instead of falling down stairs Kate decided to throw herself into live gigs. With typical zeal she went for it, playing at open mic nights, an anti-folk festival in Brighton, spoken word evenings in the East End and helping out spoken word poets Aisle 16. Her first headline gig was at raucous underground night Potty Mouth.
All pretty daunting stuff without the invincibility of youth and a sack full of attitude but influenced by old punk like The Clash and The Negatives, current bands such as Kings of Leon and The Strokes, with a nod and wink to people's poets John Cooper Clarke, Brendan McCloud and Saul Williams. To seal the mix there was "Janis Joplin, Carole King and Irish folk music that my mum made me listen to on long car journeys" - Kate's live performances were spiked into a potent spell.
Perhaps sensing a kindred spirit, Lily Allen got hold of one of Kate's demos placing it in her Top 8 on Myspace and recommending Kate as a 'Woman on the Verge' (of Breaking) in HOT PRESS magazine. ("Apparently she's always bigging me up which is really nice" says Kate).
An undeniably charismatic creature, the songs that now appear on Kate's Myspace page (www.myspace.com/katenashmusic) are uncanny reminiscences of an awkward youth twisted through the prism of her dry as a bone wit, the minxish Miss Nash has grown up into quite the swan.
"Who'd be a 19 year-old girl? In the bug eyed mayhem of getting served at the bar, it might seem idyllic, but if London-born singer-songwriter sensation Kate Nash's harsh words are anything to go by, life really aint that great. Switching between keyboards and acoustic guitar, Kate's sharp observational lyrics describe the thoughts of an angry, sad and disappointed youth - kinda like Lily Allen switching cod reggae for scratchy anti-folk. Her eyes sparkle as she spits out witty commentary to the teen life in suburbia, while her voice jumps from staccato bursts to charming, floaty songbird melodies. Consider the brilliant 'The Nicest Thing' where she sounds like John Lyndon and Joni Mitchell hanging out in a bus shelter and taking the world to task.
"Like Lily Allen swapping cod-reggae for scratchy anti-folk. And brill, natch!" [NME Even More New Noise]
