But despite that early attention she was never really set on being a star. If fame had been the target she wouldn\u2019t have written Everybody\u2019s Gone to War, a ferociously catchy anti-war banger from 2006 born out of her anger with Tony Blair<\/a> and the UK\u2019s march to conflict in Iraq<\/a>. (It\u2019s a highlight of that new best-of, Fire Escape Symphonies.)<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m totally stubborn. It has definitely not been a benefit to my bank balance,\u201d she says. \u201cBut it\u2019s definitely been a benefit to my mental state and my self-esteem and my happiness and my freedom to create and my freedom to put out work when I want to, how I want to. I feel free. I only answer to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n Pallot grew up in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, where she was obsessed with the songwriting of Elton John<\/a> and Joni Mitchell. After moving to London in the late 1990s, she got an administrative job at the fashionable Mute Records while playing open-mic nights in her spare time.<\/p>\n All her stars appeared to have aligned when she was signed to Polydor, a major label whose roster around that time included Sophie Ellis-Bextor<\/a> and Girls Aloud<\/a>. But she was always resistant to attempts to smooth the edge off her writing \u2013 and struggled whenever the label suggested she work with big-name producers and songwriters.<\/p>\n \u201cThat wasn\u2019t so much a product of my stubbornness. I am stubborn in the sense that, like, businesswise, I can\u2019t pretend to work with assholes and have a nice time. I\u2019m just not going to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to co-write \u201cinnocently\u201d \u2013 to \u201ckeep commerce out of the room\u201d, Pallot says.<\/p>\n \u201cLabels and publishers send you to write with people because in the back of their mind they\u2019re looking for a hit. You walk into a room and there\u2019s this unspoken thing that maybe this will be a hit. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen you write on your own or you write with someone else who really gets you as a human … you write in a much more honest way. Any time I\u2019ve had a hit \u2013 which hasn\u2019t been that often, but I\u2019ve had a few hits \u2013 they have never been written thinking that I was going to write a hit. They just came out of me.\u201d<\/p>\n The irony is that Pallot has herself had success as a writer behind the scenes, most notably with Kylie Minogue, for whom she wrote two songs on Aphrodite, Minogue\u2019s 2010 LP<\/a> (the title track and the single Better Than Today). She doesn\u2019t crave Kylie\u2019s success, but she is impressed by the way the Australian star has remained at the top of a brutal business.<\/p>\n \u201cKylie\u2019s a really interesting case in point. She\u2019s amazing, and she has had, what, a 40-year career? She has had moments where nobody has been interested in her … How many reinventions has she had? Her country record didn\u2019t exactly get a kicking, but nobody was that excited about it. Then she comes back with Padam Padam. She\u2019s back on [BBC] Radio 1. People probably perceive her as a racehorse, but that woman is a workhorse.\u201d<\/p>\n [\u00a0Indie Kylie Minogue is back thanks to Snow Patrol. Can we keep her for a little while?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The early 2000s were a regressive time for women in music. It was all boys in rock bands living out their wildest 1970s fantasies: drugs, groupies, booze-fuelled self-destruction. Pallot was aware of operating in a blokey environment, and she recalls an unpleasant experience on the panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, when, she says, its host was horrible to her.<\/p>\n \u201cI just remember Simon Amstell being a really mean guy. We just sort of put up with it. I don\u2019t know him socially. I don\u2019t know what he\u2019s like personally. He was mean. And I wasn\u2019t the only woman he was mean to.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was their stock-in-trade. And loads of shows were like that. It was quite nasty, looking back, and I don\u2019t know that it was that necessary. It was pretty, pretty bad.\u201d<\/p>\n Pallot is talking to The Irish Times as the fallout continues from Ed Sheeran\u2019s parting of the ways with his support act Macklemore<\/a> after the US rapper voiced his backing for Palestine on stage in New Jersey.<\/p>\n \u201cI think he was naive,\u201d she says of Sheeran. \u201cI\u2019m sure he knew what Macklemore stands for. He went ahead. This particular cause is really tricky for some people. I understand why people don\u2019t want to go to a show and be political. We\u2019re so saturated. One of the joys of being on the road is I\u2019m not mainlining news like I usually do and being horrified. I feel a little bit lighter.\u201d<\/p>\n Pallot has written lots of political songs, of which Everybody\u2019s Gone to War is just the most prominent example. But she knows her audience doesn\u2019t come to her concerts expecting a sermon.<\/p>\n \u201cMy fans who have been with me for 25 years know I\u2019m a political person. I\u2019ve never shied away from making work that was that. Not just about things like war or colonialism \u2013 things like feminism are really important to me. But I don\u2019t want them to come to a show that is explicitly political. They come because maybe like me, they find the world hard and they need to just escape for a couple of hours.\u201d<\/p>\n So she sympathises with Sheeran, but only to a point. \u201cI get how he may have felt that, because a lot of his fans will be kids, they\u2019ll be families. They haven\u2019t necessarily come to be political, and I think there\u2019s a lot of performativity going on right now.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I sometimes wonder where are all the victims of these wars in this. People seem to have a fashionable war. One war is more fashionable than the other. You know, there\u2019s horrible shit going on in Sudan. You can\u2019t have a hierarchy of wars. I get why one could feel sorry for Ed Sheeran. At the same time, come on, he\u2019s one of the biggest stars in the world. He\u2019s not blind. He\u2019s not naive.\u201d<\/p>\n [\u00a0\u2018Art should not be political\u2019 is an argument made by those who haven\u2019t thought enough about eitherOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Pallot is pleased artists are taking a stand, but she notes that they don\u2019t always put their politics into their music. Where, she wonders, is the substance behind the slogans? <\/p>\n \u201cI never hid my political views. But unlike a lot of the kids today who think they stick a scarf on, or a badge, but their music doesn\u2019t address it, I had to take a risk,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cI wasn\u2019t sure the radio would play Everybody\u2019s Gone to War, but I was, like, \u2018Fuck it! I really think this war is wrong. I think a lot of people are going to die for no good reason.\u2019 I think, you know, postcolonial-period imperialism is really a blight on the world. We\u2019re still paying the price for it now. Everything that\u2019s happening in the Middle East has got a long history.\u201d<\/p>\n She believes that artists who talk about social issues should also sing about them. <\/p>\n \u201cThe work should be explicit. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s enough for people to go, \u2018Well, I\u2019m donating the royalties,\u2019 or \u2018I\u2019m doing this…\u2019 You either, you know, to be crude, you eat shit or you get off the pot. <\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got to take the risk. It\u2019s not enough to wave a flag. We\u2019re always going to need political music, unfortunately. The world does not show any signs of becoming less divided. <\/p>\n \u201cThe potential for danger … I\u2019ve never known it so bleak in my lifetime. It\u2019s not enough to do the political talk. The work has to be political, if that\u2019s what you feel.\u201d<\/p>\n Fire Escape Symphonies: The Best of Nerina Pallot is released by Chrysalis Records. Nerina Pallot plays Empire Music Hall<\/a>, Belfast, on Thursday, November 5th; Workmans Club<\/a>, Dublin, on Friday, November 6; R\u00f3is\u00edn Dubh<\/a>, Galway, on Saturday, November 7th; and Wavelength<\/a>, Cork, on Sunday, November 8th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nerina Pallot is exactly where she wants to be: parked up outside a 400-capacity venue in Stroud, deep…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673517,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[256313,8720,93,631,34428,61,60,88918,32038,264671,57583,72180,15888],"class_list":["post-673516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-carole-king","tag-ed-sheeran","tag-entertainment","tag-for-you","tag-girls-aloud","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-joni-mitchell","tag-kylie-minogue","tag-macklemore","tag-paul-simon","tag-sophie-ellis-bextor","tag-tony-blair"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"British](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/PIWLTTS6QRBKBFR3P2STPMWBOU.jpg\")
British singer-songwriter Nerina Pallot. Photograph: Tommy Reynolds <\/p>\n