Nadine Shah (English singer-songwriter)

Nadine Petra Katarina Shah (born 16 January 1986) is an English singer-songwriter from Whitburn, Tyne and Wear. Her most recent studio album, Filthy Underneath, was released in 2024. Shah was born in 1986 in Whitburn, South Tyneside, England, to parents Heather and Imtiaz. Her mother was born in the UK to a Norwegian father, who worked as a sea captain. Shah's father, a Muslim, was born in Pakistan and immigrated to England in 1971, working at a number of factories until his older brother joined him to start their own curtain businesses. Having found financial success, Shah's parents chose to enroll her at various private schools. Her upbringing was less rooted in the Norwegian side of the family, as her mother did not speak the language. She mostly identified with her father's culture and often thought of herself more as "the foreign kid" at school. A large portion of her extended Pakistani family also resides in the North East of England. Shah continued to be raised in Whitburn, a coastal village, in a home next to clifftops that oversee the North Sea. Shah moved away from home to London at the age of seventeen to pursue a career as a jazz singer. When she was younger, she would imitate American singers' accents, but once she starting singing jazz, she found that utilising a Geordie accent worked more in her favour: "It was kind of a joke at first, really, but then I realised that I could get these huge vowel sounds. ... it's an accent that a lot of people kinda laugh at, but I didn’t want it to sound [like a] novelty." After Shah moved to London, her northern accent had disappeared. In 2021, she told The Guardian that people began to question her background, so "I immediately adopted this thick, Cheryl Cole-esque accent because I didn't want to disappoint them. I've kept it up ever since." While in London, she became close friends with fellow jazz vocalist Amy Winehouse, who lived nearby. The pair frequently spent time together in Camden as drinking partners, and at one point, Shah listened to early demos for what would become Winehouse's debut record Frank (2003). Three months into their friendship, she used Winehouse's backing band for a gig, angering the latter and causing the two to part ways. Shah has since credited the Frank demos as a key factor into wanting to write music of her own. Eventually, she became disinterested with the jazz standards she had become accustomed to because she was performing other people's material. By nineteen years old, Shah had started attending art school, initially specialising in painting and then switching to photography. One of her lecturers heard her singing and recommended that she should implement it into her own art, and at that point, she officially started writing her own music. She then dropped out of college to pursue a career in music full-time. At nineteen years old, Shah decided to start her career and began writing her own songs. Shah had long searched for a producer, but was dissatisfied with her options: "They all seemed very old school and wanted to put strings all over my songs, put the vocal really far forward with heavy reverb." Eventually, she grew more discouraged, but one of her songs, the "Dreary Town" demo, eventually lead to Shah finally securing a producer. A friends had listened to it and sent it to a manager, who ended up managing Shah and relayed the song to Ben Hillier, a producer who had worked with bands such as Blur, Depeche Mode, and the Horrors. Shah had long been aware of Hillier, but it was his work on Blur's Think Tank in particular that made the prospect of collaborating with him most appealing to her. Through management, Shah met with Hillier for a cup of coffee, discovering that they shared a similar thought process and taste in music, such as a mutual appreciation for the band Can. Despite having just heard the one song that had been sent to him, Hillier agreed to make a full album with her. For their first session together, they recorded at Shah's home and wrote the demo for the song "Aching Bones". Hillier said that, at that point, he knew for sure they would continue to work together. To date, they have collaborated together for all of her music. Before releasing her first record, Shah decided the spend about three years performing live to hone her skills, mostly in small pubs. The first of these gigs took place at the Electric Boogaloo in Manchester during the In the City festival, which garnered an enthusiastic review on BBC Introducing. By the time she released her debut album, entitled Love Your Dum and Mad, it had been essentially complete for three years, and its songs were written as early as eight years prior. With the public knowledge that Shah was preparing to release the album, Shah preceded it with her debut extended play, entitled Aching Bones, on 19 November 2012 under Label Fandango. Its three songs, all written a relatively short three years beforehand, had started more as acoustic compositions, but Shah, aware that it would be her first release, made significant changes to it before it was finished. In the interim preceding the album, Shah issued a second EP, entitled Dreary Town, on 15 April 2013, this time on Apollo Records. Love Your Dum and Mad was released on 22 July 2013, again on Apollo Records. and it was met with critical acclaim. Much of the writing was informed by two young men who were Shah's close friends and had both died by suicide. The title is derived from a painting that one of the two men, Michael, made, which was then used for the cover art. The record often addresses social stigmas towards those suffering from mental health illnesses. The first half of the record was performed with a backing band, whereas the other half was performed mostly by herself on vocals and piano. The following September, the song "Aching Bones" was used in a trailer for the video game Dark Souls II. Led by the single "Stealing Cars" in late 2014, Shah's second album, Fast Food, was released on 6 April 2015, again through Apollo Records. It marked her debut on the UK Albums Chart, reaching number 48. While musically similar to Love Your Dum and Mad, the lyrics saw Shah shift focus away from the subject of mental health stigmas in favour of relationships. Due in part to the lengthy process of her debut album, she spent only two months writing Fast Food. Also in 2015, Shah contributed a brand new track, "Cannot Leave", to New Moon Vol. III, a compilation album curated by Ally McCrae and released on the London record label Killing Moon. That year, she also appeared on London-based hip-hop artist Ghostpoet's album, Shedding Skin, providing vocals on the tracks "X Marks the Spot" and "That Ring down the Drain Kind of Feeling". In February 2016, it was announced that Shah had scored music for the Northern Stage adaptation of the 1971 British crime drama film Get Carter. This included original pieces and re-imaginings of songs by the 1960s band the Animals. Preceded by the lead single "Out the Way" and three other tracks, Shah's third studio album, Holiday Destination, was released on 25 August 2017 via 1965 Records. The lyrics took more of a political focus than before, largely inspired by the Syrian refugee crisis. She had previously scored music for an Al Jazeera documentary entitled No Strings (directed by her brother Karim), which depicts a puppeteering company that went to a refugee camp on the border of Turkey and Syria in an effort to aid children who were distrustful of adults. The particular incident that caused Shah to write new music was a TV report that showed tourists on holiday in Kos lacking empathy for the refugees who had been migrating there. Due to the political subject matter and a desire to vary her output, Shah consciously decided to make the music more upbeat and dance-oriented than her previous work. In an interview with Music Week, she said that "rather than having people standing around stroking their chins, I'd rather make a