Kate Nash @ Oran Mor, Glasgow, 7 Feb
It’s been four years since Kate Nash graced our fair city with her all-female band playing to a packed King Tuts at the height of her riot grrrl renaissance. Nash was touring Girl Talk, an album the indie press had praised as an act of Top 40 'career suicide,' which saw her embracing her feminist icons from anarchic 90s punk bands, and reclaiming images of murderous babes in trashy B-movies. Her 2013 show was full of young grrrls – 'my first gig' punk rockers dancing and singing along to Nash’s new sound. It was a wonderful thing to behold, young women unapologetically at the centre of their scene enjoying explicitly feminist material.
We expect more of the same this time round, but find ourselves pleasantly surprised by Nash’s musical diversity. Whilst the Girl Talk tour was a well-honed, razor-sharp riot grrrl manifesto of unrelenting hard rock, 2017’s Nash – free of any album and accompanying aesthetic coherence as mission statement – puts on a multi-faceted show of genre-blending reinventions from across her decade-spanning career, from pre-fame B-sides to juicy snippets of fresh material yet to be pressed.
From the latter, Agenda is a particular favourite; a bouncy, indie disco-ready single that takes on the bullshit of unprecedented systematic bigotry in the Trump era. The spoken, angry chorus – 'I don’t give a fuck about your agenda' – typifies Nash’s ear for spinning the mundane and lazily colloquial into profound pop, a talent that made her career. Favourites like Foundations, that could have so easily been lazily, routinely performed due to their anthemic popularity and the resulting audience participation, are given new life with her two guitarists jamming spectacularly, cementing Nash’s band as not just back-up, but integral to her live sound.
If Nash’s razor-edge focus on riot grrrl aesthetics has faltered, her emphasis on the genre’s politics hasn’t. Passionately railing against the stigma surrounding mental health issues, Nash implores her audience to speak out before premiering new track Musical Theatre, a tense alt-rock number that slowly builds around the frantic 1-2-3s of Nash’s OCD experience, her anxiety and panic palpable. The angry OHMYGOD! follows, a visceral reaction to the experience of misogyny within the music industry.
Nash herself looks every inch the cabaret femme fetale in a green sequined mermaid dress, again playfully engaging with pop cultural visions of deadly femininity before undermining any Hollywood high gloss with reckless stage diving, tea sipping and relatably forgetting the words to the audience-requested Mariella. A particularly captivating moment is Nash’s near-acapella performance of her first B-side Birds, a witty, poignant singalong that displays her deadpan humour, as fresh as when it was first recorded in 2007.