I don’t think you could get away now with the way people talked about me and Lily Allen,” says Kate Nash. “Now, if a journalist in their thirties writes about a 19-year-old girl being fat and ugly, someone would be like, ‘What?’ But you could literally say anything in 2007.”
That was the year Nash released her hit single “Foundations”, an indelible earworm about the breakdown of a bad relationship that was rarely off the radio. There aren’t many middle eights that every British adult could still recite 15 years later, but “You said I must eat so many lemons, ’cause I am so bitter” is surely one of them. Her debut album Made of Bricks came out the same year, went to No 1, and was soon certified platinum. But Nash didn’t get an easy ride. Not only did the tabloids deride her music – it was like “Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard set to cheap synths” read an article in the Daily Mail – but they picked apart her appearance, too: her clothes, her hair, her weight.
