Interview: Kate Nash, singer

PICTURE the scene: a bunch of country artists are touring the United States on a feminist ticket as part of the recently revived, respected institution that is the Lilith Fair festival. They are expecting a ride as safe and comfortable as their establishment music. But there's this irksome English girl on the bill playing shrieky lo-fi punky pop songs and flailing the life out of a keyboard which she has draped in a banner proclaiming that "A C*** Is A Useful Thing".

• Nash is a founding director, along with the likes of Billy Bragg and Blur's Dave Rowntree, of the Featured Artists Coalition, a not-for-profit organisation set up to lobby for musicians' rights in the digital age. Picture: Getty Images

And who wants someone who's prepared to challenge the status quo at a feminist festival anyway?

Lilith Fair didn't care for Kate Nash. The feeling was mutual. "I was really excited about touring with all these female performers, but it actually sucked," Nash is happy to say. "And they ended up hating me because I got so angry with the wet, wishy-washy country music and it made my performance more aggressive. I thought everybody would be challenging each other, and it would be very liberated. But it actually felt very suppressed." As she rails against her experience in hindsight, there is a sense that she almost got a kick out of provoking the festival organisers. "I did enjoy being a bit 'screw you'," she says.

What happened to Kate Nash? The girl next door who fell down the stairs, broke her foot, wrote some songs on a keyboard while she was laid up, had a No 1 album on her hands a year later and a Brit Award six months after that? Who wore vintage dresses and sang twee but colloquial songs about typical teenage concerns with a pinch of sarcasm or a certain high-street romance? She grew some teeth and bit back – at the roadies who would leer and sneer at her, at the sexism she encountered throughout the music industry and beyond. Take those confounded members of the press, for example.

"Women don't get written about in the same way as guys," she says. "I get asked a lot about my personal life, my boyfriend. Sometimes I'm asked to do things that I don't feel I'd be asked if I was a guy with four other guys in a band, but that's just made me very headstrong and assertive. My mum's brought me up to be very savvy and clued in to things. And as well as growing up, I've soaked up everything that's happened to me over the last few years, soaked up a lot of different music."

And yet, perfectly illustrating her point about being treated in a patronising manner, there are those who have disrespectfully suggested that Nash's musical development into a politically engaged punk poetess on her current album My Best Friend Is You could only have been achieved thanks to the guiding influence of that boyfriend she's always being asked about – Ryan Jarman, frontman of indie rockers The Cribs.

Instead, like many young women before her, Nash has been fired up by the music and attitude of influential US punk heroines Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, and the grassroots riot grrrl movement they spawned in the 1990s, and has responded with her own astute mix of feral femmepunk calls-to-arms and cutesy 60s girl group-inspired pop about relationship paranoia.

Nash is now 23 but still writes from a believably adolescent perspective. Unsurprisingly, she has particularly struck a chord with teenage girls, looking for a credible role model in a pop world infested with glossy, airbrushed wind-up dolls such as Katy Perry, Rihanna and The Saturdays.

"I would never be a self-proclaimed role model," says Nash. "But I've always believed that anyone in the public eye has a responsibility, the fact that people are looking up to you. I'll never claim to be anyone who's not going to make mistakes but I wouldn't really censor myself either just because it's a young audience."

Presumably that stage banner won't be packed away just yet. Nash also cites the example of Mansion Song on her current album, an aggressive partly spoken-word track about groupie culture which stands out for its ferocity and explicit language.

"Actually if you listen to the song and don't underestimate the intelligence of young people, it's a really empowering, positive message about having self-respect and not feeling like doing sexual favours is the only way you can have an interesting life or feel good about yourself. I'm not nave to the fact that some people might not want their kids to hear that language but I don't think there's anything as damaging in that lyric as 'don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?' and all these pop songs where a girl is singing about being sexy for a guy or stealing someone's boyfriend away or any of those crappy pop lyrics that no one thinks twice about. Obviously kids should be educated about sex and women should have the freedom to do that. But who are you doing it for and why?"

As an alternative to the flesh-fest of some of the mainstream female pop stars, Nash recommends her new favourite band Supercute! – three teenage girls from New York, including Rachel Trachtenburg from Fringe favourites The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players – who make intelligent, satirical twee pop, and their own stage outfits. She also enthuses about artist Sarah Maple who makes work on sexuality and religion inspired by her Muslim upbringing.

Nash is emerging as a cultural agitator in her own right. She is a founding director, along with the likes of Billy Bragg and Blur's Dave Rowntree, of the Featured Artists Coalition, a not-for-profit organisation set up to lobby for musicians' rights in the digital age. She says she would love to collaborate with Maple and other like minds on their own feminist event or festival but wonders if the grassroots impetus is there. Calling all riot grrrls…

"I'm searching for it," she says. "But I dunno – I feel like there are some people who are afraid of the negative connotations that come with the word 'feminism'. For me it just means believing in equality and I want more girls to get involved in that." Like KT Tunstall, Nash is wondering why there are still so relatively few girls in bands. "Although there is a lot of celebration about there being loads of female artists in the charts, it almost reminds me of a step back to the 60s – there are a lot of girls right now who are marketed as being these creatively in control independent artists but aren't. I think in five years' time we are going to see the ones who are really doing their own thing on their own terms rather than being scouted by record labels because females are in right now and that's what's selling."

Talking to Nash, I get the impression that there are not enough hours in the day for her to pursue all her ideas. She is already pondering her next musical step, toying with two contrasting paths – one which forces her to work within limiting parameters and one which allows her to shoot off in new directions. She also plays bass in a punk band called The Receeders, is considering a return to acting, which she studied at college before immersing herself in music, and would like to infiltrate the nation's classrooms in the next year. "I'm trying to figure out a way of inspiring young kids to believe: 'Actually I can write my own stuff, and I want to be in a band or I want to get involved in the music industry,'" she says. "I'm hoping to create more of that feel with whoever wants to do it with me." Join her club.

• Kate Nash plays ABC, Glasgow on 14 October. My Best Friend Is You is out now on Fiction Records