Kate Nash
'I'm not going to sweeten it for anyone: it really sucks,” says Kate Nash, asked in a new documentary about her experience as a woman in the music industry.
Barely into her 30s, she's seen a lot. And, according to a recent interview, “all the cliches about people in the music industry are true”.
Back in the mid-2000s, when major label bosses still had the money to turn a teenager making music on MySpace into a mainstream star in a matter of months, the flame-haired Brit School graduate was everywhere.
Her 2007 megahit Foundations had seemingly come from nowhere and was followed by Made Of Bricks, a collection of similarly witty, relateable pop that became a platinum-seller.
A Brit Award for best British female solo artist came the following year. But even before second album My Best Friend Is You hit the top 10, Nash found she was no longer flavour of the month.
“The men I worked with didn't look after me like this 20 year-old girl; they worked me like a donkey,” she remembers in the film. "I made loads of money for them, sold over a million records. It wasn't like I was trying to be a pop star. I just wanted to make songs. I decided: I don't care what you think, I'm going to make punk rock – and I was dropped from the record label.”
From the perspective of 2019, maybe that was for the best, though there was a cost.
In Underestimate The Girl, Hollywood filmmaker Amy Goldstein explores how the Harrow-born songwriter transformed herself from supposed showbiz reject into a “renegade outsider”; an independent artist who's just made her best record yet – and completed a third season starring in Glow, the Netflix hit about a troupe of female wrestlers.
Like its subject, Goldstein's film is intimate, warm, punky and human. Given its UK premiere earlier this month, it follows the Los Angeles-based Nash as she makes Yesterday Was Forever, her first album in five years.
Like 2013's Girl Talk album, it was crowd-funded, released independently and channels the defiant spirit of the riot grrl scene spearheaded by her heroine Kathleen Hannah.
Partly inspired by rereading her teenage diaries, there's nevertheless a new maturity to her songwriting, whether on the widescreen electro-pop of Hate You, grunge ballad California Poppies, the sozzled punk of Drink About You or even the bratty, semi-spoken thrash-about Life In Pink. Mental health is a common theme, with poetic spoken word track Musical Theatre finding Nash berating her inner sense of hope for temporarily having run away.
Nash has been open about her difficulties with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, and in a recent interview she described her greatest achievement as “surviving the music industry”.
All of which makes you want to see real-life wrestling groups spring up everywhere as an antidote to a culture which drains the life from many young women.
Because seeing Nash as Rhonda “Britannica” Richardson in Glow, the comedy based on 1980s women's professional wrestling promotion Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, simply makes you want to clap with joy.
Just as the show sees a group of actresses train to become wrestlers, Chavo Guerrero – a celebrated WWE wrestler for 10 years – taught the cast to grapple, slam and takedown.
Nash has recently commented how the physical training and on-set camaraderie has changed her outlook and boosted her health, telling GQ how “wrestling is just to be able to walk in and do the opposite of what I have been taught: be big, large, and loud and mental
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