RAW POWER
“What my album’s done for a lot of people is lend a voice to their own activism.” If 2018 was the year that pushed a selection of fresh, politically-charged voices to the fore, then none used their newfound platform with as much righteous gusto as Nadine Shah: an eloquent, outspoken force to be reckoned with. Words: Lisa Wright. Photos: Phil Smithies.
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here’s an oft-used phrase in creative circles of an artist “finding their voice”. Where after a period of testing the waters, learning to be brave, working out how to trust their instincts and so on and so forth, they finally work out their own personal recipe and the world responds in tandem. Nadine Shah is not one of these artists. Though it’s only in the last 12 months, with the release of now-Mercury-nominated third album ‘Holiday Destination’, that the wider world has pricked up its ears to the Sunderland-born, London-based singer, her story is less one of someone finding their voice and more one of people finally being ready to listen to it. Back in 2013, she released debut LP ‘Love Your Dum and Mad’. Written following the deaths of two former boyfriends to suicide, it showed a musician imbued with the same sense of social compassion and empathy as the one reacting to the refugee crisis on her most recent album. But back even five years ago, conversations around mental health weren’t nearly as open and progressive as
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they are now and the record only resonated out to a small degree. “It’s a vicious cycle because what I was trying to do was discuss the fact that these stigmas around mental health exist, but these stigmas exist because people don’t wanna discuss it,” assesses the singer of the record’s impact. “It didn’t really do what I wanted it to do, and although it did do some beautiful things for some people, a bit of me’s like - what if they’d heard it now? I think people didn’t know where to put what I was making, they didn’t know where to place it.” With 2015 follow up ‘Fast Food’, she still found that people were placing her wrongly. Penning dark, brooding tales of internal turmoil and making weighty, cathartic noise with a full band, she’d regularly find herself put on bills alongside a bunch of acoustic singer-songwriters whose only similarity was that they too were female. “At festivals, because my stage name is a female’s name, people assumed it was gonna be me by myself or with a ukulele and I’d be put on the folk tent,” she recalls, her generally cheery, effusive demeanour temporarily capped at the memory. “The most significant thing this year has been playing main stages at festivals and being put in the right slot instead of being put on the ‘all female’ stage.” She continues: “I used to get Laura Marling comparisons all the time, which personally I mean... I wish. She’s the best lyricist of all time and I’m her biggest fan. But sonically it’s a completely different world to the one I
