Music

Last summer, life went crazy for Kate Nash when her debut album – a collection of gutsy, sparsely experimental ditties about girls, boys and post-party bus-stop exchanges – was rush-released and went straight to No 1. So this year, she’s planning to take it easy… well, sort of. There’s a second album to record, the Get Loaded festival to play, charitable schemes to launch, exhibitions to visit, a twenty-first birthday to plan and, er, celebrity scarves to knit. We caught up with the Brit Award-winning mistress of vernacular vim to discover her rules for having the perfect summer.

RULE 1 Get a summer job
She may be talking to me in her Harrow bedroom, surrounded by heaps of vintage dresses, foreign records and ‘well tacky’ objets d’art, but this year Nash has seen the world: she has played tin whistle with The Pogues in New York, swum with huge sharks and a huger hangover in Australia and seen a cabaret involving ‘a tiny dwarf and a woman popping a Russian doll out of her fanny’ on the Lower East Side. She hopes to get some quality summer time in London, but it’s tricky: she’s just back from Paris, where she’s been working on her new album with producer Gonzales, and later this month she will make her first trip to Japan, to play Fuji Rocks – and she’s very excited.

‘I can’t wait to go into a shop and just not even know what anything is,’ she says. ‘You can get these packets of crisps, except they’re not crisps – they’re little crunchy squids!’ Feature continues

RULE 2 Get out of the house
After that, though, Nash is homeward bound for summer. On August 24, she will play a homecoming gig at Time Out-affiliated all-dayer Get Loaded in the Park, on Clapham Common, alongside the likes of The Stooges, The Gossip and Supergrass. Not surprisingly, she’s decided to pull out all the stops. ‘I’ve got this amazing stage set being designed – oh my God!’ she says. ‘It’s underwater-themed – because ‘Octopus’s Garden’ is, like, my favourite song – with a big seahorse and lots of coral, and the piano will be in a big oyster shell with a shipwreck in the background. Does that sound a bit much?’

When not performing herself, Nash is looking forward to reconnecting with her theatrical background (she studied theatre at the BRIT school) with some lazy days watching Shakespeare at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park and the street performers on the South Bank. ‘And I want to go to that whole Summer Screen series at Somerset House. It’s so beautiful there and they’ve got “The Exorcist” and “Scarface”. Horror films are the best.’

RULE 3 Stock up on ice cream
When Nash was little she wanted to work in an ice-cream van. Despite a nasty incident at last year’s Sundae on the Common festival, when she and her violinist ate seven tubs of Ben & Jerry’s and were nearly too sick to play, she’s still obsessed. If her music career folds, she says, she’ll open her own ice-cream parlour, where she’ll put on little nights and serve up ‘proper’ knickerbocker glories with luminous green sauce while wearing a cute checked apron. You can tell she’s serious because she mentions ice cream at least another seven times during our conversation.

RULE 4 Make hay while the sun shines
‘Don’t make me sound like a cheesebag,’ says Nash when we bring up the subject of her boyfriend, Ryan Jarman, frontman with Yorkshire scuzz-popsters The Cribs. The pair met on ‘Later… With Jools Holland’ last year and Jarman soon ingratiated himself with Nash’s fans by lobbing a pint glass at a sleazy heckler during one of her shows at the Barfly in Camden.

‘We started hanging out when Ryan came to my birthday party in Harrow last summer,’ she says. ‘If you fancy someone, I think you should throw them in the deep end straight away. So I sent my mum to pick him up at the station.’ Though she’s sceptical about soppy holiday romances. ‘In books, girls always have their first French kiss with a nice boy on holiday,’ Nash laughs. ‘When I was 16, all I got was men trying to buy me off my family with camels in Morocco. They’re well tight with their camels there. One guy offered nine camels, and I was like, shut up, how about 29? What’s my mum going to do with camels, anyway?’

RULE 5 Don’t go to Newquay
Nash’s holiday from hell is a toss-up between the summer she had to have heart surgery for palpitations – staying conscious while tubes were threaded from her groin to her chest, and only getting a week off from her job at Nando’s to recover – and the one where she went to Newquay.

‘It’s such a cliché, right?’ says Nash. ‘One end’s full of surfer dudes and the other end’s full of chavs going out in school uniforms. It’s so gross. Then we went to the summer solstice at Stonehenge, and someone nicked my Adidas jacket. I used to like the idea of hippies, but it’s often just quite rich people getting fucked on drugs and wearing no bras, and I’m, like, you’re not creating peace and love there, are you?’

I ask if Nash will be seeing ‘Donkey Punch’, Oliver Blackburn’s sexually explicit new horror film about British teens on holiday in the Med. ‘I’m going to have to. Someone in a pub told me what a donkey punch was. It is totally sick! But dark stuff does happen. There’s always someone at school who gets into trouble in the bushes. You’ve just got to be careful – don’t have orgies and, yeah, don’t have a ponytail!’

RULE 6 Always plan for rainy days
‘I like keeping it pasty,’ says Nash. ‘I’m, like, factor 70 with a big umbrella.’ Should it piss it down all summer, then, Nash is well equipped. First, she’s a big fan of museums – great places to daydream and find inspiration – and she plans to check out all the big summer exhibitions (including ‘Hadrian: Empire and Conflict’ at the British Museum, because her mum once took her to see Hadrian’s Wall and ‘Romans were totally brutal; they actually used to eat dormice’). Second, she’s working on the next issue of her fanzine, My Ignorant Youth, which is to include an article by her new pal Billy Bragg – with whom she’s performed several surprise duets recently. Nash has also started setting up her own arts grant, offering help to struggling artists, which she hopes to have in place by the end of the summer.

‘The BRIT school proved to me how important art is – it helps get people off the streets. I don’t want to bum around and try to get more famous at fashion parties; I want to be productive and put my money into something good.’

And if that’s not enough to keep her busy, Nash has also taken up knitting. ‘It’s great – I can do all my Christmas presents now,’ she says. ‘I made Ryan a mutant scarf and now I’m knitting one for Beyoncé. I really want to be friends with her, and I think it’ll be a good way to break the ice. Imagine if I see her in OK! wearing my scarf! I can’t do letters yet so I might just write “BEYONCE” on afterwards with a Sharpie.’

RULE 7 Get Billy Bragg into his trunks
Nash plans to mark turning 21 this month with a party in her new place. ‘I’m looking for somewhere on my own, just a little house with a piano and a bath with legs and a garden so my dogs can stay,’ she says. ‘Then I’ll get my mates round for a barbecue with cakes and piña coladas you serve in coconuts. I’m going to get the paddling pool out so we can sit in that till it gets dark, and then we’ll probably go in and watch zombie films.’ Is Billy Bragg invited? ‘Oh my God, yeah, I’ve totally got to get Billy Bragg round. Me and Billy could have a jamming session in the paddling pool. That actually would be the perfect birthday!’

Kate Nash headlines Get Loaded in the Park at Clapham Common on Aug 24. For more info and tickets visit www.getloadedinthepark.com or call 0844 847 2467. Until July 15, Time Out readers can get tickets for an exclusive price.