Just don't call her Lily

(Morning Star, Friday 20 April 2007)

LIVE: Kate Nash, Spring and Airbrake, Belfast

YOU might well know who pretty singer-songwriter Kate Nash is because of the column inches about her in newspaper supplements. Notably, she's often presented not as an artist in her own right so much as the "new Lily Allen."

The idea of a new Lily Allen is, in itself, preposterous. It's like there being a new new thing to replace a merely slightly less new thing.

Allen has barely straightened her legs and left the pot since releasing her Alright, Still debut to the masses last year.

This sort of lazy comparison is a tool that we music journos often employ when our critical faculties leave us. But, in this case, it springs only from the fact that Kate Nash, like La Allen, is female. And maybe because she likes to speak her mind through music. But that's where the similarities end.

The venue is awash with oestrogen, all young ladies in floaty, hippy clothes ready to bob along to Kate's floaty, hippy music. A few guys are dotted about but, to be honest, they look a bit shifty.

In actuality, Ms Nash is ballsier than a look at her audience would lead you to believe. Decked out in a red ruffled dress with auburn hair spilling over her petite shoulders, Nash makes flirting with the audience an art form, imploring them to move closer to her in the opening minutes of the show with a tinkle of her feminine laugh.

The shifty guys notably swoon at her eyelash-fluttering and the room suddenly envelopes the crowd warmly.

As the vision onstage romps through Caroline's a Victim, the mood is one of '80s electro-pop exuberance and at no other point is Kate's media-given queen of cool Laaandon persona more apparent - "Caroline sits in her room playing killah killah killah killah beats."

But the following mood change is swift and tangible with the introduction of Birds, a ballad of young love conducted in Nash's world, which involves teens sneaking onto public transport without paying and issuing Skins-style declarations of love.

The high point comes at the end, with the production of Merry Happy. A song with home-grown sweetness baked right in, it tells of a suddenly single girl who is trying to assure herself she doesn't need her boy, with the mantra, "I can watch the sunset on my own."

Nash probably feels this herself, but to compare her to Allen and nowt else does her a great disservice.

She must be assured success, with her guileless charm and tunes that successfully marry the banality of everyday life with the enchanting world of young love.

That, and she's one hell of a flirt.