Kate Nash Returns to Her Roots, and to Sinéad O'Connor, at Fleadh Cheoil
The singer-songwriter joins the fringe programme at Belfast's The Mac, reckoning with Irish heritage and the legacy of a fellow outspoken artist
By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Kate Nash is bringing her show to The Mac in Belfast this year as part of the fringe programme for Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, Ireland's largest traditional music festival — a booking that puts the British singer-songwriter, known for her frank, diaristic pop, in conversation with a very different musical tradition, and with her own Irish heritage.
Part of that reckoning includes covering Sinéad O'Connor, the singer whose fearlessness and refusal to soften her politics for an audience made her one of the most consequential and polarizing Irish artists of the past half-century. Pairing Nash's confessional songwriting with O'Connor's catalogue is a pointed choice — both built careers on saying the uncomfortable thing plainly, in public, and paying for it.
The available reporting doesn't detail which O'Connor songs Nash will perform, nor the specifics of what Nash has said about her own Irish history and heritage beyond the fact that the conversation is happening. That's worth naming plainly: this is a preview of an appearance, not a review of one, and the fuller story of what Nash draws from O'Connor's example will only be told once she's actually on stage.
Still, a fringe slot at Fleadh Cheoil is no small thing. The festival draws traditionalists from across Ireland and beyond, and a pop artist using that stage to sit with O'Connor's legacy suggests an evening less interested in nostalgia than in reckoning — with what it costs an artist to refuse to be quiet.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I'll know for certain once I've heard how she handles the covers. Until then, mark the date.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.
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