‘I was called fat, too ugly, too spotty’
Kate Nash went to number one, then disappeared. Now she is back in a hit TV show. She talks to Patrick Smith
For a brief moment, there was no avoiding Kate Nash. With her cockneyfied vernacular and catchy, kitchen-sink vignettes about the mundanities of life and love, the singer-songwriter came from nowhere to become one of the sounds of 2007. Yet, no sooner had she triumphed at the Brit Awards thanks to her platinum-selling first album, Made of Bricks, than a backlash began – and by 2010, her star had waned. It looked as if Nash was down and out.
Until recently, that is. For one thing, she’s about to embark on a European tour celebrating her debut record’s 10th anniversary. But even more instrumental in resuscitating her career has been the new US comedy drama GLOW. The show, which premiered on Netflix last month, is set in the world of women’s wrestling in 1985 Los Angeles. And Nash is a revelation as Rhonda Richardson, a struggling actress who is cast alongside a bunch of fellow misfits in the pilot for a low-rent TV series, The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Critics, by and large, have been overwhelmingly positive, praising GLOW’S mix of body-slamming melodrama and sharp commentary on the sexism of the Eighties, while Nash’s performance itself has been called “dazzling”.
“I found it so empowering,” says the 30-year-old. “I wanted to look like a good wrestler more than just look good, and that was cool because women are normally so obsessed with trying to perfect themselves, and hating ourselves for the way we look.”
As Rhonda, with her lithe frame, towering quiff and high-cut leotards, Nash is unrecognisable: gone are the oversized cardigans, the russet fringe and the vintage floral dresses. But, the scene that has inevitably attracted the most comment – in the tabloids at least – is one midway through the series in which Nash appears naked.
Nash finds this infuriating. “I saw images of me in The Sun with my tits out, and the headline was like, ‘Kate Nash’s steamy TV show’, and I was just like, ‘That’s not what this is’,” she says. “I did that scene with 13 other women by my side, really believing what we’re doing, which is telling the story of real women being honest, vulnerable and exposing ourselves through wrestling.”
Still, it’s hard to imagine this is the same person who spoke vociferously about the pressures of size-zero culture and once slated The Pussycat Dolls for encouraging “sexualisation” in young girls. What’s changed?
“Being 19 in the music industry, I didn’t want people to [sexualise] me, because it just felt wrong, and people are trying to force that on people all the time,” she explains. “I’m working
‘My management didn’t care about my health. They were just men who wanted to make money off me’
on a show with women, about women, and showing that women’s bodies are not this terrible thing that we should never show. So the difference is choice – because I didn’t want to then, and now I do, and I’m doing it with women I trust.” Asking Nash a question is like lighting a Catherine wheel: you sit back and enjoy the sparkling confessions and diatribes, reeled off in the north London accent for which she’s renowned.
We’re in the members’ bar at Tate Modern. Nash is wearing a grey Nike tracksuit with her auburn hair swept up in a ponytail; her red nail polish is chipped. There’s a mug of lemongrass and ginger in front of her. “I gave up alcohol last year as part of my training, and I’ve just kept it up,” she says.
That she’s thrown herself into her first role so wholeheartedly is not surprising: acting was her goal growing up. As a teenager, Nash – who was born and raised in Harrow – enrolled as a theatre student at the Brit School in Croydon, whose alumnae include Adele and Amy Winehouse. After graduating, Nash was rejected by several drama colleges – Rada, among them – before turning her attention to the songs that she’d begun writing when she was 15.
While working as a waitress at Nando’s, she started uploading her music onto Myspace, catching the attention of Lily Allen. Success quickly followed. By June 2007, aged 19, she had her first hit with Foundations, which includes the indelible lyrics “You said I must eat so many lemons/ ‘cause I am so bitter” (“people still throw lemons at me onstage,” Nash admits). A couple of months later, Made of Bricks was released.
Looking back, Nash thinks the reason why that chart-topping album – built on peppy piano riffs and sardonic introspection – resonated so well was that it “came at a time when people wanted real voices. It was the last time that truly independent artists, doing their own thing, were ruling the airwaves. Now, every artist in the charts has a bunch of songwriters and producers behind even one song.”
If Nash’s rise to the top was meteoric, so, too, was the descent into obscurity. Indeed, even by today’s standards, with the internet filled with toxicity, the opprobrium she attracted back then would have been tough for anyone to bounce back from. “I was called fat, too ugly, too spotty,” she recalls. “And I didn’t have anyone in my team who said, ‘Are you OK?’ They didn’t care about me or my health. I just had men making money off me.”
After her second album, 2010’s My Best Friend is You, failed to match the commercial success of Made of Bricks, she was dropped by her label via text (“It was horrible”). Undeterred, she crowdfunded her next record, Girl Talk, before swapping east London for LA a year later. It’s at this point she began attending auditions, the most notable of which was for Orange is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan and director Gus Van Sant. Although their pilot, The Devil You Know, was never picked up, Kohan was impressed enough by Nash to recommend her for GLOW (Kohan is executive producer).
Besides that and the forthcoming tour, Nash has been working on a fourth album, for which she’s using Kickstarter. “I feel like there’s so many artists now doing it by themselves,” she says. “I’ve had some meetings with people at labels, and just didn’t feel very inspired. To be honest, I feel like the music industry hasn’t figured itself out yet in the tech age.”
However the record fares when it’s released in February, Nash at least now has a better support network. “I just keep a lot of women around me,” she explains. “And we’re in such a cool time. We have the voice of the internet, and although there’s plenty of trolling online, if people write about women in a certain way, we all band together and call it out. There’s unity.”
Of course, technology has its downsides. “It’s so addictive,” she says. “I suppose it’s something we’ve never been educated on and we’ve got to be careful with it. You know when you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s an acid casualty from the Sixties’? People could say about us, ‘Oh, there’s a tech casualty from the Noughties!’” She smiles. “It’s like some sort of drug.”