Kate Nash

Born in Dublin on July 6, 1987, Kate Nash moved to Harrow in North London while she was still a child. She learned to play the piano at school and took an early interest in acting, but a rejection from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School dashed her hopes of a career in theater. Following a foot injury that forced her to remain at home while the bones healed, Nash turned her focus to songwriting instead. She booked herself a local gig to showcase the songs she had written while housebound, and performed these alongside covers of current hits. Eventually, Nash uploaded some of her own compositions to the MySpace website, where she began to receive support for the storytelling nature of her songs; they were told in a distinctive London accent in a very similar way to Lily Allen, who had broken through to the mainstream earlier in the year. Indeed, the two women became real friends via their respective MySpace sites, each recommending the other's music. Nash's debut release was a 7" vinyl-only pressing of the song "Caroline's a Victim", backed with the acoustic track "Birds" and released on the London independent label Moshi Moshi Records. This led to a major-label deal with Fiction, an offshoot of Polydor with releases from mainstream artists such as the Cure and Snow Patrol. The label released her first single, "Foundations," which surprised everyone by becoming a smash hit, reaching number two on the U.K. charts and remaining there for five weeks in the summer of 2007. Nash appeared at various festivals that summer, including the O2 Wireless Festival, Isle of Wight, Glastonbury, and the Latitude Festival; she also made several television appearances (Later with Jools Holland, The Jack Daniels Set, Popworld, and The Friday Night Project). Following the success of the single, her debut album, Made of Bricks, was rush-released in August 2007. It entered the U.K. charts at number one, with sales of nearly 60,000 copies during its first week, and was released in America the following January. ~ Sharon Mawer, All Music Guide