Heaven's Kate

Music has always come naturally to Kate Walsh. She grew up in a house full of Pink Floyd, old English folk, Jimi Hendrix and The Beach Boys, and she barely remembers a time when she wasn’t playing classical piano.

She studied composition and expected she’d end up composing music for films, maybe writing songs for other people. Her songs don’t sound very big, just small, sweet and earnest, the way she likes to make them. Kate’s breezy melancholy has been compared with Joni Mitchell, because that’s how lazy people usually describe female singer-songwriters. Quite like Joni, however, Kate is suspicious of the music industry, but she’s so far managed to navigate the business without losing creative control.
A few years ago, producer Lee Russell got his hands on a recording she made for her Music A-levels. “I didn’t know him, but somebody gave it to somebody else who gave it to somebody else," she says. “He just called me up out of the blue and said, ‘What do you want to do with the rest of your life?’ So we made an album.”
Kate was surprised, not because she was being ‘discovered’, but because she didn’t know that she could sing; she never considered herself a performer. “When I was making the first album, the idea of getting on stage and singing and playing to people was like jumping out of an aeroplane," she says. “It was never going to happen.” She still has to take homeopathic tablets for her nerves, her supply topped up every few months by a lady she met while working in a soap shop.
She grew up in a seaside town in Essex, but if you didn’t know she lived in Brighton now, you might guess from her demeanour. She is quietly confident: there’s no, “Who, me?” about her. No, to suggest it is something other than hard work (and definitely a bit of luck) that brought her to the top of a UK download chart would be to perpetuate a dangerous myth of musical success. Kate has always made music, and she’d be making music even if it weren’t making her a living. She released her album Tim’s House in March, and was able to quit her job the following month. Now that she’s re-released it under new licence with Mercury, she seems more eager to see what happens than worried about what might not.
There’s no great secret. “I try and tell so many people, if you have the means, just make your own record before anybody else gets involved. But so many people still believe that having this record contract, this piece of paper that you sign means so much more and it doesn’t.”
She’s struggling in her own way, though, in the manner that many artists struggle when they find themselves a little bit successful: being happy isn’t always conducive to producing the kind of work that brought you to that point in the first place. “I’m not writing a thing," she says. “It’s when I’m melancholy that I have to get the feelings out of me, but I have no use for it right now – I’m content.” Her head’s screwed on straight, it’s not very big, and the sounds that come out of it are paying for her dinner. “Everything that’s happening now is just a bonus,” says Kate.