So, a reasonably small gig (she can certainly sell out much bigger venues than this now - and has done so for later in the year), in front of a "home" crowd, on a Friday night, was always going to be good. The venue was the Bloomsbury Ballroom, in a massive building near Holborn station, which I had never really noticed before. The main room was very long and thin, so the stage covered pretty much the whole width of the room, but the room went back for ages. I suspect that the venue is used for more genteel events usually (there were nice thick carpets in the bar and toilets), a nice but strange venue for a gig. The stage had some interesting decoration, with lots of illuminated windows to make it look a bit like a house.
Inside the venue, it looked like over two thirds of the audience were girls. This is good in one respect, as it means no queues for the gents or the bar. But generally, it isn't a great sign if the audience is heavily female dominated. When Kate Nash came on stage, there was lots of screaming, much too much screaming in fact. In fact, there was lots of screaming throughout the show - the audience seemed to know most of the words to most of the songs, so there was lots of joining in for the choruses.
Kate Nash and the band were really, really good I thought, the songs are decent enough, but they really take on a different dimension when you hear them live. I also thought that everything was much more slick and polished than when I saw them at the Camden Crawl earlier in the year. A technically really good set, also including a fantastic cover of Cold War Kids' song Hang Me Up To Dry - which sadly, most of the crowd seemed to have no idea about.Despite the band being really good, I didn't really enjoy the gig all that much. Because a lot of Kate Nash lyrics are about life from a female perspective - men are horrible, my boyfriend treats me like shit, I am unlucky in love, etc - they seemed to whip the mostly female audience into a frenzy of man-hating. Many of the audience took it all far too seriously, and were screaming some of the more pointed lyrics at the tops of their voices. I was getting worried that, by the end, there would be a ritual chopping off of all penises in the venue, such was the degree of "girl power" on display.
I know that many gigs (at least many of the ones I go to), can be very male dominated, and often even quite laddy. This was the opposite, so it was unusual. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but if a male artist assembled a big crowd of blokes, and they all sang lyrics about how crap women are, it would rightly be called misogynistic and wrong (as indeed many R&B and reggae artists are rightly censured for their sexist lyrics). Of course, Kate Nash's lyrics are pretty witty and clever (and not written to explicitly attack the opposite sex), but many of the people at this gig just took the bluntest part of the meaning on board. Thank god my girlfriend doesn't like Kate Nash or her songs - otherwise I might start to fear for my life!
So, the songs were great, the band were excellent, and made the songs sound even better - really giving them a new dimension. The lyrics are witty and clever, and Kate Nash is deservedly now very famous - and will probably become even more so. A really good artist with great songs, but I probably won't go and see her again - because I just don't care very much for the crowd she now attracts.
Update: Looks like not all Kate Nash gigs are quite as female-dominated as the one I went to!
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