FEATURE:
Modern-Day Queens
PHOTO CREDIT: Alice Baxley
Kate Nash, there are a number of reasons why I want to include her in this Modern-Day Queens. Even though she has not released a new single for a little while, she is one of our best artists. Her huge debut album, Made of Bricks, was released in 2007. Reaching number one in the U.K., it featured perhaps Nash’s most played and popular single: the phenomenal Foundations. Her most recent album, 2024’s 9 Sad Symphonies, is one I would recommend everyone check out. Not only do I want to celebrate this amazing artist. The Harrow-born icon is one of our most recognisable artists. There are some interviews that I want to bring down. Starting out with a couple from last year. A working-class artists who has lost money on tours and has spoken out about how artists are losing so much touring and it is a blight on the industry – she spoke to Adam Buxton recently and discussed the issue -, Nash chatted with the BBC about how she is making money from being on OnlyFans than she is touring:
“Singer Kate Nash says she thinks she will make more money from selling photos of her bottom on OnlyFans than she will from her concerts, after joining the platform because it's "a really difficult time for artists to tour".
Under the slogan "Butts for tour buses", the musician announced on Thursday that her OnlyFans income will subsidise her shows because "touring makes losses not profits".
"I also think it's bit of a punk protest as a woman to take control of my body and sell it to be able to fund my passion project, which is actually my 18-year career," she explained.
"I want to highlight that, and I want people to talk about it, and I want people to know the truth about what what's happening in the music business."
Nash, who has just finished a three-week US tour, started her UK dates in Glasgow on Thursday, and will then move on to Europe. Her date at London's Koko is sold out.
"I'm losing money from those tours," she told BBC News.
"The only way I could find to make a profit on the tour - you're either going, hopefully I sell enough T-shirts to cover the debt, or you cut people's wages, or you fire band and crew, or you travel dangerously."
She wasn't willing to cut corners or the quality of her shows, she said. "So that leaves me in a position where I'm not profiting from tours. So is this a job, or is it a passion project?"
She also said it was "an important time for women to take control and to feel empowered", and that she often posted photos of her posterior anyway.
The pictures she's posted on OnlyFans so far are revealing but not explicit.
"I think the arse is the perfect combination of comedy and sexuality," she said.
"I actually like bums. I think they're just quite great. I think it's funny. I enjoy taking pictures of my bum. Always been a bit of a flasher. So I'm going to enjoy doing it, and I'm already putting it online anyway.
"I'm going to probably make more money doing that than the music over the next three months”.
Kate Nash is so inspiring and important because she is raising issues in the industry. Around touring and how artists are losing money. The struggle that working-class artists face. How important grassroots venues are. At a time when venues are closing, Nash is speaking out and took a campaign to the road. In this interview with NME from last year, Nash talked about an important campaign, and how the Government needs to realise, now, a career in music for many is a dream rather than a reality:
“Kate Nash has spoken to NME about her ‘Butts For Tour Buses’ campaign, the online row with The Lottery Winners – and why things need to change for artists now to avoid “collapse”.
Nash recently made headlines when she launched her ‘Butts for Tour Buses’ campaign, which saw her join OnlyFans to protest the music industry and help raise money for her UK and European tour.
The singer-songwriter and GLOW actor then took her “bum on the back of a fire truck” protest to the London offices of Live Nation and Spotify as well as the Houses of Parliament to highlight the challenges facing artists arguing: “The industry is in crisis, the music industry has failed artists, and is completely unsustainable, and my arse is shining a light on that.”
This comes as the UK government recently backed the call for a ticket levy on arena gigs and above to feed the grassroots, with small venues in a perilous situation and artists struggling more than ever to make ends meet with the odds stacked against them. A deadline has since been set for March for the music industry to react in a meaningful way to the levy, before the government will be forced to step in and act. With the dialogue increasing in recent years, it appears to be coming to a point of real reckoning now.
“It’s exploding now because of my bum! No, I’m joking,” Nash told NME. “A lot of work has been done over the last five years by people in government, Tom Gray, Broken Record, Sam Duckworth, Music Venue Trust – they’ve been working on this with proper activism at a political level. The reason it’s tipping over is because we’re almost at collapse. It can only go on to be something we all complain about behind the scenes for so long until you start to see it crumble.”
She continued: “The reality is that touring is making losses, not profit. The grassroots is in absolute crisis. Venues are closing, festivals are being cancelled. People are thinking, ‘What’s the point in starting a band?’ and ‘How can I as an artist carry on?’
“Because of the massive inflation that everyone is experiencing outside of music, so many artists are asking themselves, ‘Is this just a hobby or a passion project?’ ‘Am I going to cross the threshold or is it time for something to get done on a governmental level?’”
The conversation around her campaign took an unexpected turn when The Lottery Winners’ Thom Rylance tweeted that Nash shouldn’t try to represent working class musicians, as well as criticising her background as a former pupil of the BRIT School, mistakenly labelling it a fee-paying establishment.
“I didn’t really understand that,” Nash told NME. “What’s the argument about the BRIT School? It’s a free performing arts school. An important message to get out there is that the BRIT School is for everyone. You don’t have to pay to go there. If you heard and got confused, don’t be discouraged from applying. Free performing arts access to young people is so important”.
Before coming to some interviews from this year, I want to bring in an interview from The Line of Best Fit from last summer. They spoke with Kate Nash around the release of 9 Sad Symphonies. Following terrible times and exploitation from labels in the past, she reflected on being on a new label – the iconic Kill Rock Stars. Nash also looked back fondly on her earliest work:
“ Sad Symphonies is Nash’s first album since 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, which she funded through Kickstarter. She never intended to have such a large gap between albums – after shooting a season of Netflix’s GLOW, she was ready to write another album, and then COVID-19 shut everything down.
Did the pandemic end up influencing the album? “Maybe it did,” Nash ponders. “There’s a lot of depression in the album; a loss of spark. It was a moment in life to relearn how to value yourself without the thing you do, because our jobs define a lot of our lives, especially with what I do. Not being able to do it was a weird feeling. How do you keep yourself feeling positive? It did make you have to go back to [thinking] what is the purpose of life? When it gets taken away it was like, well, who am I without this?”
This existential reflection comes through in the record; it’s a bit slower than Nash’s previous work, perhaps more melancholic in places. During the time between albums, Nash also released a number of singles herself. Three of them – ’Misery’, ‘Horsie’, and ‘Wasteman’ – are on 9 Sad Symphonies’s tracklist.
“I wasn’t signed [at the time],” Nash explains, “I was just distributing songs that I wanted to push forward. I put it out there that I didn’t have a label and realised I was ready for one again, but I wasn't sure who the right partner was.”
So she went out to find the right fit, which turned out to be Kill Rock Stars, an independent label based in the Pacific Northwest that’s heavily associated with Riot grrrl and has boasted the likes of Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney and Gossip over the years.
It was through TikTok (which Nash began to take seriously after it partnered with the BRIT Awards to allow people to vote through the platform) that she found the label. Though she's not a fan of labels telling their artists to try and make music with TikTok virality in mind, she finds it beneficial in terms of making herself and her music more familiar to a younger demographic.
It’s been almost 17 years since she released her debut album, Made of Bricks, which she describes as being “like my child.” Many of the people on TikTok coming across Nash, now 36, weren’t even born then, but through the app they’ve become fans. There are certainly parallels between this and the way in which Nash and many of her contemporaries - Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen among them - gained popularity through sites such as Myspace in the mid-2000s.
“I feel like I need to explain who I am and to talk about my story, and it's funny because every time I do that, people are like, ‘You don't need to explain who you are,’ and I'm like ‘I do, because every time I do, it gets more views and it reaches people,’” she laughs.
Nash actually toured Made of Bricks for its tenth anniversary in 2017, something she describes as “very healing” due to the negative associations she’d attached to the album.
“When I was coming out in 2007, older men in journalism would be like, ‘Oh, silly little teenage girl writing in her fucking diary, how boring. We want men who talk about real things like being drunk and girls,” she remarks dryly. “But I’m talking about being drunk and boys. Like, what?”
Though her past critics might not have been ideal, Nash does describe her fans as "the best in the world", and it’s clear that she loves seeing such a wide variety of people at her shows. If you were a teenager when Nash first stormed onto the charts, you’d be in your early thirties by now. Many fans from this generation (and beyond) still remain, but there are teenagers too.
Some of the biggest stars on the planet right now are young women who blew up at a similar age to Nash – take Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, now 22 and 21 respectively. But Nash isn’t sure whether or not she sees herself as a role model for younger artists coming through, as much as she’s a huge fan of artists in their twenties, such as Connie Constance and Joy Crookes.
She waxes lyrical about the former – “I fucking love Connie, she’s one of my favourites” – who recently opened for her. “When I found out she was a fan of me, I was like, ‘I can’t believe this,’” she says, “The kids that grew up listening to me are that cool, because she’s so fucking cool to me.”
Meanwhile, Crookes even emulated Nash’s haircut as a child. “She sent me this photo, trying to get my haircut. She used to draw me! These are the coolest artists around. So I feel very honoured to be of any sort of inspiration. They’re amazing”.
I am going to finish I think with just one interview from this year (rather than two). Recently, Kate Nash spoke with Viva! about veganism, capitalism and the commodification of mortality. It is a fascinating interview that reveals new sides and layers to an incredible artist. Someone who should be talked about more:
“Beyond music, she gained recognition for her role as Rhonda ‘Britannica ’Richardson in the Netflix series GLOW. An advocate for women’s empowerment, Nash champions breaking stereotypes in the entertainment industry – and she’s also a committed vegan and animal rights supporter!
It’s hard not to admire Kate Nash as beneath her catchy tunes and bold lyrics lies a woman constantly challenging the insidious forces of modern life. Her stance on veganism, for example – rooted in something deep and complex: anxiety. We live in a world fraught with uncertainty, the dread of environmental destruction and mass exploitation which can push us into making radical lifestyle changes – like choosing to remove all animal products from our diet. For Nash, veganism isn’t just a diet, it’s an act of defiance against a system that thrives on cruelty and commodification.
“I was vegetarian for about eight years,” Nash tells me, leaning in with the kind of unfiltered honesty that makes her music resonate so deeply. “That was because I had a bunny rabbit called Fluffy and she was connected to my OCD and anxiety issues… I made a deal with the universe: if I do this, then this won’t happen.” Fluffy the bunny unwittingly became a totem of Nash’s fraught relationship with control. The decision to become vegetarian wasn’t just an ethical choice, it was a form of personal exorcism: “I started thinking, ‘if I don’t eat animals, then she’ll be okay.’”
But it didn’t stop there. A pivotal turning point arrived in the shape of the film Okja. For those unfamiliar, Okja is a satirical dystopia about factory farming and a genetically modified super-pig called Okja, destined for slaughter, whose bond with the young girl who raised her sets off a cross-continental rescue mission. It’s a masterpiece of moral ambiguity and capitalism’s grim handshake with consumerism. “I’d avoided all the documentaries about cruelty and mass farming,” Nash says, “then I watched Okja and I guess I was in a vulnerable place. That final scene really struck me… After that, I just thought, ‘I don’t want to be part of this destruction.’” The film ends with Mija and Okja metaphorically disappearing into the sunset back to their tiny Korean farm.
It was easy to trace the thought processes in Nash’s journey from vegetarian to vegan as she continued to peel back layers of her own ethical engagement. “My mum grew up on a farm so I understand farming roots. There’s this idea that once, humans killed animals out of necessity and the animals were sacred. Now it’s just insane cruelty on a massive scale. I didn’t want to participate in that anymore.”
It’s the ethical quandary many of us avoid, even as we devour documentaries and climate reports from the comfort of our sofas. Nash sees veganism as a clean break – not just from eating animals but from a system that commodifies life in every form. “What I like about being vegan is that it’s a very easy way to do something good. It’s like a political statement,” she explains.
“I don’t think where we’ve got to is okay. I think it’s so unethical and cruel and it’s not even food at this point.”
If the way Nash describes meat-eating sounds a bit like the dystopian nightmare of Okja, that’s because, to her, it is. “I can’t always guarantee I’m not participating in cruelty unless I remove myself from it altogether. I don’t live near a farm; I don’t have friends who can hand me eggs from chickens they’ve looked after properly. So I just stepped out.”
And here’s the uncomfortable bit for omnivores, who like to tell themselves that ethics are too complicated to untangle – an argument Nash knows too well. “We’ve mass-produced everything. Carrots originally weren’t even orange, they were purple! Something to do with the Protestants… but basically, it’s all been manipulated, and we’re so far from nature that it’s not just about eating animals anymore, it’s about the entire system of how we’re living.”
She pauses, clearly aware of how deep the rabbit hole of ethical living goes. “I think we’ve pushed capitalism to the max. There are food banks in supermarkets but they throw food away at the end of the day. What are we doing?” It’s not just the absurdity of the system that bothers Nash but the sheer helplessness one feels when trying to rebel against it.
This piece was originally published in Viva!life, our exclusive quarterly magazine for Viva! members. Viva!life features editorials on our latest campaigns and investigations, exclusive celebrity interviews, ethical businesses, health news, plant-based cookery, and vegan trends.
By joining Viva! for as little as £1.50 a month, you will get Viva!life magazine delivered straight to your door four times a year, so you can be the first to read our new features — as well as lots of other great benefits!
Which brings us to the vegan industrial complex, because yes, that’s a thing now too. “There’s so much positivity around vegan products,” she acknowledges, “but the vegan community needs to be a little more critical. Mass-produced food – whether it’s meat or vegan – isn’t good for us. If you don’t learn to cook from scratch, you’re just buying into another processed-food industry. It feels like capitalism is taking advantage of people being vegan and are just pumping out crap”.
For those who maybe heard Kate Nash back in 2007 or only really check out the big songs, there is so much more to her. An advocate for working-class artists, the plight of grassroots venues and making the industry better. Her OnlyFans account gives her some power and control. Inspiring other artists and women. Someone who is a definite force for good. An incredible spokesperson, actor, musician and voice in the industry, Kate Nash was straight at the front of my mind when I was looking around for the next incredible female artist in Modern-Day Queens. I am not sure what is next for Nash. There will be more music and touring, though I think she will continue to speak out against the perils in music and how artists are struggling. Venues disappearing and tours not earning artists money – many losing a lot of money. If Kate Nash is not there already, make sure that she is…
ON your radar.
_____________
Follow Kate Nash
