Kate Nash kicks off her North American headline tour Tuesday night at the Center for Arts at the Armory in Somerville, bringing a stripped-down backing band, a set list drawn from two decades of hits, and an unusually candid backstory about how she's paying for it all. The show runs from 7 to 10 p.m. and marks the first stop on a run that will carry her across the country in support of her upcoming sixth studio album.
A Tour Launch Years in the Making
According to Arts at the Armory, Tuesday's performance may feature fiddles, flutes, bodhrán, harp and banjo, with Nash herself picking up the tin whistle. The venue also notes that locally sourced food and drink will be available at the Performance Hall bar when doors open, typically an hour before showtime. As Pollstar reports, the Somerville date launches a tour that will later hit Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.
The tour supports Nash's sixth studio album, Cailín, due out Jan. 22, 2027, on Kill Rock Stars, per the same Pollstar report. The record was recorded on Ireland's west coast at Stiúideo Cuan and produced by KoOoLkOjAk alongside trad musician Charlie Lennon. Nash, who won the BRIT Award for British Female Solo Artist in 2008, holds dual British and Irish nationality, Pollstar notes.
From GarageBand Loops to Hits and GLOW
Nash's recording career traces back to 2007, when she released her debut single, “Caroline's a Victim,” about a friend's love for the music of the Killers, according to the Boston Herald. She has said that experimenting with GarageBand and looping helped her begin writing songs in the first place, the Herald reports. Decades later, she released two new singles this year: “Spilt Milk” and a cover of Sinéad O'Connor's “Famine.”
Nash's path has also run through Hollywood. She's said that acting in the Netflix series GLOW changed her life by showing her a professional, unionized environment, a contrast she described to the Guardian: “I feel so much more protected because if there's a serious issue, I have someone I can talk to.”
Funding the Road With OnlyFans Subscriptions
Despite two decades in the industry, selling thousands of tickets and racking up millions of streams, Nash has said she could not ethically pay her band and crew through touring income alone, according to the Boston Herald. She has said the music business failed her and other artists, and that she began making risqué photos available on OnlyFans specifically to help finance a tour — an effort she ran under the name Butts for Tour Buses, which she has called a success, per the Herald.
Nash told Rolling Stone that charging $9.99 a month on OnlyFans solved her financial problems in seven days, comfortably funding her 9 Sad Symphonies tour through the U.K. and Europe. She estimated each live performance costs her roughly $10,000 in production expenses, even with 972,983 monthly listeners on Spotify at the time. “I can tour the world. But I cannot make a profit from those tours. I'm in the red. I'm losing money,” she told the magazine.
She has also said that selling photos of herself online got her into Parliament twice and into Belfast City Hall to talk about the problems facing musicians, and that she wants the industry to improve without letting politicians crush culture, according to the Herald. She has said OnlyFans users were more respectful toward her than people she had had sex with, the Herald reports.
A Squeeze Felt Across the Industry
Nash has tied her own finances to broader pressures she says are squeezing touring musicians: dynamic ticket pricing, stagnant performance wages, and rising costs for travel, lodging, food and gas, she told Rolling Stone. Those pressures aren't unique to her. The Music Venue Trust reported that 125 grassroots music venues in the United Kingdom permanently closed to live music in 2023, an average of two per week, while 38 percent of those that remained reported a financial loss despite increased ticket demand.
The trust also found that average rents for member venues rose 37 percent that year, even as energy costs stayed high. Collectively, the roughly 835 venues in the Music Venues Alliance generated more than £500 million in revenue in 2023 but kept only £2.5 million in profit — a margin of just 0.5 percent, according to the trust's figures.
Nash has floated one possible fix: diverting £1 from every stadium and arena ticket sold toward grassroots venues, which she estimated to Rolling Stone could generate about £30 million a year for midsize and independent stages. She pointed to France as a working model, telling the magazine that a music levy there has brought in roughly €30 million annually to support French music and musicians for more than a decade.
