Kate Nash wants you to put your phone away. “Every time you go online, the billionaires are getting richer by collecting your data, that's it,” she tells me during our interview at Condé Nast’s London office in late April. I nod in agreement, my own phone sandwiched between my thighs.
But before we get on to the billionaires, we start with the matter at hand. I've caught up with Nash to chat about her latest single, a cover of the late Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor's ‘Famine’ (1994), which educates about An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. The song opens, “Okay, I want to talk about Ireland / Specifically, I want to talk about the famine / About the fact that there never really was one / There was no famine.”
If you studied at an English school, you may be unfamiliar with this defining period of Anglo-Irish history, despite the fact that it directly concerns the actions (and fatal inaction) of the British government at the time. “See Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes,” sings O'Connor. “All of the other food / Meat, fish, vegetables / Were shipped out of the country under armed guard /To England while the Irish people starved.” In Nash's music video for her take on ‘Famine’, she floats around Westminster with artist and activist Tia O’Donnell, carrying a duvet embroidered with the words, “The English Don’t Know Their History.”
“It's a big responsibility,” says Nash when I ask about her decision to cover a Sinéad O'Connor song. “I was revisiting her catalogue when she died in 2023, and I was also starting to think about my next album and diving into my Irish heritage.” Nash holds dual nationality; her mother, Marie, was born in Ballymun, Dublin, but moved to Newcastle as a child, eventually building a family of her own in England. “I went to Ireland every summer holiday when I was a kid, and my sisters and I were like, ‘Ugh’,” says Nash. But with the benefit of hindsight, she's able to look at those memories through new eyes. “Ireland's one of the most beautiful countries in the world. We had so much freedom. We just ran around with our cousins for hours and hours… just running off into the countryside.”
Nash added her own verse to ‘Famine’ to acknowledge her dual heritage and comment on how she feels about England. She opens with the lyrics, “England doesn't take responsibility for the destruction that it's caused / For its empire, and now Commonwealth / They left us uninformed.”
It reminds her of a conversation she had with the ‘GLOW girls’, AKA the cast of Netflix's taken-too-soon TV series, GLOW, about the wacky world of women's wrestling in the '80s, which Nash starred in as Rhonda "Britannica" Richardson for three seasons. “We're not taught anything at school, but we're also not taught it at home. There's this realisation of how we talk about things here like, if Irish people come here, Londoners will still make jokes to them about the IRA.” She recalls chatting to GLOW castmates Ellen Wong and Shakira Barrera about the passage of generational trauma. “We talked about the point where you as a young person go 'Well, what's my identity? Why did these things happen? What's going on here?' And your parents have protected you because they want things to be better for you. But actually it's a natural thing to go, ‘Where am I from?’”
Education is something of a focal point throughout Nash's artistry. She recites O'Connor's lyrics: “If there is ever going to be healing / There has to be remembering and grieving / So that there then can be forgiving / There has to be knowledge and understanding.” She explains, “I like to come at these things with as much empathy as possible because we're losing that. To read the comments section of literally anything, you see how badly people are talking to each other, and it's really damaging.
“We feel like the world's going to end and it's hard to have hope for the future because everything feels really quick and the world is run by paedophiles, and tech's going to take all of our jobs and lives and robots will kill us all. It can easily feel like we're already in this dystopian future and we're being told the end is coming or whatever by the CEO of a… What's that podcast? Diary of a CEO.”
Now we're getting to the billionaires. “It's so stressful to be alive right now,” Nash continues. “And most of it is just being clipped up and used as people's personal content to promote and boost their own platforms. It's like, guys, we just need to calm the fuck down. We've really bought into this personal branding thing where we've become products, and we're just selling ourselves all the time.”
Nash has rallied against the pressure to commodify herself since the release of her hit single, ‘Foundations’ in 2007. “There was a natural impulse in me when I got famous to be like, ‘Ah God, I actually f*cking hate this’,” she reflects. This aversion to fame saw her running backstage at a prestigious awards ceremony in 2008, setting off every fire alarm on her way. “I was so uncomfortable in these environments,” she reflects. “I just would go and have weird interactions with other celebrities.” At this particular industry event, she “ended up getting so pissed off at something that happened” – she can't describe the incident on the record, but suffice to say, “Some shit went down, and I was like, ‘Fuck this.’ So when I left, security were running through the building,” says Nash.
She describes her initial reaction to fame as one of “discomfort and anger”, which could also be said for her thoughts on how the influencer economy has made micro-celebrities of us all. “I'm sick of people marketing themselves to the point of becoming fucking Coca-Cola,” says Nash. “Your personal branding is not that fucking important. We're not brands, we're human beings. You don't even want to go viral. Everyone's a cunt online. What the fuck do you want to go viral for?”
Returning to her Irish heritage has helped Nash make sense of this “messy world”. “It felt like a really good place to start with honouring Sinead," she adds. “She's one of the most important Irish artists out there.”
O'Connor was famously critical of the Catholic Church, using her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live to tear up a photograph of Pope John Paul II, as part of a protest against institutional sexual abuse – a decade before The Boston Globe published a devastating exposé of clerical abuse and cover-ups by the Church. “Fight the real enemy,” she said, staring straight down the camera lens.
Kate Nash was also raised to be a Catholic. “I'm not religious now, but I think if you're Catholic, you're Catholic forever,” she explains. “I went to Catholic school, I did my communion and had my confirmation.” She pauses. "I remember I was like anti-abortion because we got shown propaganda at school. When I was 14, I was like, ‘I think abortion is wrong’. And I remember a girl at school saying to me, "Oh, just think about kissing a girl. It'd just be so disgusting." And I was like, ‘Yeah, me too.’"
Fast-forward a few decades, and Nash's artistry is defiantly political. See her single, ‘GERM’, released in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling that the definition of a ‘woman’ is based on biological sex. “Trans people exist, they have the right to exist,” she says. “They're not a threat to me.” She adds, “Since when was being a bully cool?”
Nash charts her political awakening through her adolescent years. “I was against abortion until I became a teenager and wanted to express and explore things. I went to the BRIT school and met a bunch of people who opened my eyes to the world.” However, she adds, “My root comes from that Irish religion and I've carried that with me throughout my whole life.”
Nash's reexamination of her Irish heritage isn't merely an intellectual exercise. She has performed in Parliament, sat in on the Good Friday agreement committee, and been invited to Teach Laighean (Leinster House, the seat of the Oireachtas, the parliament of Ireland) by Sinn Féin TD Pa Daly. “My granddad was pro the Irish revolution,” Nash says, “He died young, so he didn't get to see any of this. That image of me playing a tin whistle [in the Famine video] symbolises how music has prevailed over all this shit that he would have been pissed off about. Irish music was banned, brought under British rule, and there I am fucking playing it. It's an act of resistance.”
“We need joy,” Nash finishes. “What else do we have if we don't have basically culture and nature? We need nature to feel connected to the earth, and we need culture to feel joy and be inspired. We need to find ways to really have fun, and not make it all about promoting ourselves. Put your fucking phone away,” she adds. “Put your fucking phone away.”
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra or on TikTok at @lucyalexxandra.
