Saturday 4 May 2013

Kate Nash and a whine about the weather

It's Friday night and I'm staring down a long weekend. I love me a long weekend, especially when the weather is meant to play ball.

I'm quietly devastated to realise that my transition to English life and living has been well and truly cemented by my now involuntary inability to have any kind of conversation without it involving talking about the goddamn weather. It might really be time to leave.


But seriously, this nearly, is it, is it, not quite, nearly, come on please, enough already spring time weather would have even the most sexually frustrated teenage boy sobbing with exhaustion by now. Something's got to give. I mean, you know you have Stockholm Syndrome when 18 degrees feels like Ibiza. See! Talking about the weather! Again!

Hopefully we'll be off on holidays in a couple of weeks but until then I'm keeping busy.




To that end, on Wednesday night Lovely Boy and I went to see Kate Nash in concert. I must have walked past the 100 Club on Oxford St, not quite a hundred times but something like that and yet I never noticed it, sandwiched as it is between Boots and Anne Summers at the scruffy Tottenham Court Road end of things.

It's actually a great little venue and Kate Nash, when she came on, was pretty spectacular. My very musically savvy friends back in Bondi put me on to her first album several years ago - I'm totally shit when it comes to discovering new music - and it got thrashed to death that new years eve on a long drive back from Melbourne in an over-heated car with broken air conditioning.


On Wednesday night she was loud and fabulous and mesmerising in her sparkly cats ears and jewelled temples and bass guitar.

The nanna in me winced at the excessive use of strobe lighting towards the end (too loud! too crazy!) but she had everyone singing along when she indulged the audience with some of her earliest classics, including Foundation and Mariella. Apparently she wrote the stroppy but catchy Mariella after realising she was too old to have tantrums and kick her mum in the face anymore. I do love a bit of anecdotal stage chat.


I also love a rousing pro-women speech and fell a little bit in love when she spoke at length about how we needed to stop hating on women and the way they look. She probably could have picked a more inspiring illustration than Kim Kardashian and her pregnant sartorial decisions but I think we all took her point.

I think every Wednesday night should involve singing and sparkly cats ears and a feminist call to action. I might work on that.

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