Kate Nash

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Leeds Festival 2007

Friday 24th to Sunday 26th August 2007
Bramham Park, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS23 6ND, England MAP
£145 for weekend (including camping), £62.50 for any day each day - Sat & Sun tix only

Daily capacity: 55,000

After managing to avoid Kate Nash for the entire summer festival season, today I finally relented. I wasn't expecting much more than a poor Lily Allen clone, and my pen was sharpened further when I saw the twee flags being handed around the tent advising people on one side to 'get drunk and get dancing' and on the other, an advert for Nash's new album, 'Made of Bricks'. I was ready to hate this set, and as the young Londoner took to the stage, I was already preparing a list of cutting epithets with which to tear the set to pieces.

But then she started singing, and it all disappeared, and I was enchanted. It turns out that Kate Nash is not a poor Lily Allen clone at all, but a superbly talented songstress who can turn the most mundane experiences into a charming, hummable, life affirming thing of beauty.



The set was a short one, clocking in at around thirty minutes, but in that time she gained a tent full of new fans. Opening with 'Shit Song', a tale of scorned love and the resulting excesses, Nash immediately got the crowd onside. The delivery was a perfectly measured mix of heartbreaking melancholy and sarcastic scorn, and it simply worked, from then on in it was child's play.

'Skeleton Song' was the clear highlight of the set, although it was 'Foundations' which was received most warmly, probably due to a level of radio overkill which meant that everyone on earth now knows this song by rote.

Overall this was a surprising set which will have done much to elevate Nash above her peers. She truly is a talent to be reckoned with, and proof conclusive that sometimes, just sometimes, first impressions can be deceiving.