Within three minutes of sitting down opposite Nadine Shah, the musician is trying to sell the house on the Kent coast she still shares with her ex-husband to me, or indeed anyone reading this. “No one wants it, so I’m going to try and make this article an advertisement for how Ramsgate is amazing,” she jokes.
Shah is a singular force in British rock, as funny and charismatic in person as she is on stage and in song. The Tyneside songwriter’s atmospheric, tragicomedic post-punk songs tackle tough themes with an acid tongue, and find absurdity in bleakness: her 2017 Mercury prize-nominated album Holiday Destination had songs about the Syrian refugee crisis and Islamophobia. The follow-up, Kitchen Sink, sent up the sexism she has experienced as a woman in her 30s, and depicted men selecting mistresses as if they were livestock.
