0.42.1 - Just get a female opener, that'll fill the quota
Also, I need to take myself to task a little. I balk at the idea of writing up the albums I am listening to because I've spent multiple hours across multiple days crafting long winded blog posts which, really, are just overwhelming for everyone. I look back at what I was writing in January and realise that doing something punchy - in, out, the core thesis and a short digression about feelings or memory, done, publish - is the way forward. So this week, in an attempt to shake my malaise and get back to not writing twenty thousand word posts, I have a bunch of single artist or topic blocks, each 3 or 4 albums only, and I am going to try and do one at least every other day or so, and I am going to set myself a time limit of one hour to write it. Let see where we can get with just a single hours writing; the scope should be narrow enough that I can wrap up my thoughts in a nice bow, and start to generate some positive momentum going into December.
So, I've set a timer on my phone (that stuff above doesn't count towards the time limit), and one hour starts...now.
(I wrote those words about a week ago and haven't found a single hour where I have had the motivation or time to sit and write. Here I am, days later, with my first real window).
I never know how to feel about what it must be to be a support act on a tour. There are so many aspects of it which feel like they might be a relentlessly negative experience - you're performing your music to a crowd of people who are explicitly not here for you; you're likely performing in venues and to crowds you can't attract yourself, either because your level of exposure isn't big enough to fill a venue, or your time as a headline act has passed into the distance but you still want to go out there and perform. I've got long and complicated feelings about the general behaviour and decorum of concert crowds in the year of our lord 2025 and those can only be made worse if you are the support, singing soulful ballads into the face of three thousand discrete conversations all of which tell you "we're not really listening". You play in a hasty setup on half a stage and your time is woefully short.
Despite all these assumptions I've made based on seeing a whole bunch of bands play support for a whole bunch of other bands, the institution remains, a holdover from the days when record companies would bring whole troupes of their artists on tour together to co-promote them (and save money doing it). I don't think I've seen a show in the last two years which didn't have a support (though I now think Billie Eilish didn't have one), and generally I'm a fan of a support act. I guess being a support gives you an excuse to hang out with other musicians you admire, an opportunity to hone those performance chops, and you probably get paid (not much) and there's always the chance you could somehow reach out and touch someone in the audience unexpectedly with the power of your music.
Enter Nadine Shah.
Two weeks ago we went to see Self Esteem play at Sheffield Arena, and despite my complicated feelings about her A Complicated Woman album, there's no doubt in the value she brings as a live performer. This was the fourth time we've seen her live, and outside of not being wild about the setlist, I can't fault the performance or the audience engagement. Everyone was there for a good time (apart from the man who threw a full plastic cup of beer down Catherine's back at the start of the main set forcing her to change T-shirts in the dark of the arena to wear the merch shirt I'd bought an hour beforehand) and the audience went wild in the appropriate places.
Before that, I'd already got my money's worth seeing Nadine Shah perform tracks from her most recent album Filthy Underneath as the support act. I had nothing but the vaguest knowledge of who she was; I'd heard the name a couple of times a decade ago; I'd heard her described as a cross between M.I.A. and Amy Winehouse and I wasn't sure that was for me - and, it turns out, reductive comparisons do very little to illuminate what an actual performance can be.
From the moment she came on stage and the bass-laden, pulsing malevolent rumble of her set kicked off, I went from "Oh, this is interesting....wait...no, this kicks ass...this might be the best support act I've seen for over a year". Her performance was hypnotic and visceral; her stage movements commanded attention, her melodic contralto growl giving life to lyrics political and personal. She struck me as the opposite of the boygenius set; Nadine Shah confronts her emotions and her regrets not with wistful acoustic guitar ballads but with grinding guitars and barked exclamations. Not quite metal, not quite industrial, too accessible, too digestible to fit those labels, nonetheless Nadine Shah and her band made music which sounded like it would be played in a club as the world ended. It left quite the impression.
My remaining listening list in all its glory
By the following day, I'd set my course. Even though I'd carefully curated a list of albums and artists which would make up the final 150 albums I listened too, three of those names got erased so I could listen to Holiday Destination, Kitchen Sink and Filthy Underneath, and while none of the studio performances matched the electricity of seeing the live show (as it so rarely does with great performers), the musical depth and the brutal honesty of her lyrics made every album a compelling listen. Holiday Destination presciently calls out the devastation in Palastine and the plight of refugees around the world, and the rising tide of hate and resentment directed at them - an album now eight years old but could have been written yesterday. Kitchen Sink talks to her own experience, an immigrant woman in her late 30's living in London and experiencing the judgements directed at each of those aspects of her being, both externally and her own sardonic self-judgement. She's incredible at capturing a kind of bitter irony in her situations and observations; Nadine Shah is beautifully angry, and often the person she's maddest at is herself.
Filthy Underneath is the most recent, and most devastating album. Between Kitchen Sink and Filthy Underneath she'd seen her marriage end, her mother stolen away by cancer, two years of COVID lockdown, substance abuse problems, and an attempt on her own life. Somehow, out of those horrors, she dragged herself back to her feet with an album filled with the kind of anger such a selection of catastrophes truly deserves. Unwilling to let herself off the hook, she lyrically skewers herself and her decisions with surgical detail, recalling some of the best lyrical flourishes of Nick Cave or Jarvis Cocker. It's the musical equivalent of someone unloading all their baggage on you on a first date. "Here's all my shit, I'm owning it, and if you still want to proceed knowing all these things, at least you know there's nothing waiting for you in the dark".
I remain completely compelled by her. If I weren't staring down the barrel of a quickly approaching deadline, I would have spent a week cycling through these albums on repeat to etch them more permanently onto my memory. Instead now I forge on, move past them while looking forward to the first few months of 2026, where all these amazing records I've discovered over the past year get a more lengthy and well deserved interrogation.
OK, 47 minutes, that's a good pace. I know I promised Limp Bizkit last article and that is coming, but tomorrow (or Saturday) I've going to write about the Lily Allen album everyone is talking about, and maybe catch you up to speed as to how close to completion I am...
I'll be back soon.
