Born in Dublin on July 6, 1987, Kate Nash moved to Harrow in North London while she was still a child. She learned to play the piano at school and took an early interest in acting, but a rejection from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School dashed her hopes of a career in theater. Following a foot injury that forced her to remain at home while the bones healed, Nash turned her focus to songwriting instead. She booked herself a local gig to showcase the songs she had written while housebound, and performed these alongside covers of current hits. Eventually, Nash uploaded some of her own compositions to the MySpace website, where she began to receive support for the storytelling nature of her songs; they were told in a distinctive London accent in a very similar way to Lily Allen, who had broken through to the mainstream earlier in the year.