Kate Nash is in the not-so-envious position of being the UK’s latest next-big-thing. Lily Allen who is already championing the 20-year-old Londoner is her closest reference point musically and lyrically while NME has already tagged her “like Mike Skinner [The Streets] busking in a mini skirt”. Depending on your perspective this may all sound terribly unfortunate or terrifically tantalising. The reality, as it turns out, is considerably better than expected.

Kate Nash is a not-so-talkative, certainly not lippy, pragmatic young woman with a degree in honesty. Her debut album, Made Of Bricks, debuted at #1 in the UK after the single, Foundations, spent seven weeks in the top 3. The second single, Mouthwash, is even better and boasts a killer piano line. remarkably, her first single release, Caroline’s A Victim only came out in February on the independent Moshi Moshi label. Four months later, Polydor offshoot Fiction Records - home of The Cure and Snow Patrol amongst others - signed her, immediately released Foundations and then brought her album release forward to August in the UK. Hello, overnight sensation.

Nash, who’s talking from the tour bus which is on the outskirts of the famous (for its pottery) English town of Stoke, says, “The speed things have gone has totally surprised me. It was such a … you know, you’re shocked. There’s no other word for it. Frankly, it’s weird to have a #1 debut. All of a sudden everybody knows who you are and I’ve stopped going to HMV because it’s too embarrassing.

“It can be hard to grasp on reality when things happen like this. You have to keep your friends and family around you, work with people you trust. But I’ve been brought up really well, my mum’s a nurse, I come from a good family. I’ve never been disillusioned about life and death. I have standards. It’s up to you to turn into a tart. I decided not to. Some people do and I think you start to live in la la land then, but I won’t. I don’t like grossness. I see no need for it.”

“It’s up to you to turn into a tart. I decided not to.“

Fabulous. It’s my favourite quote of the year and really defines the woman behind the songs.

It also gives substance to the sense of honesty behind songs such as Dickhead which opens with Kate singing jauntily, “Why you being a dickhead? Stop being a dickhead” or the tongue-in-cheek, Shit Song, which sits on a piano melody that sounds like its been at least half-knicked from ABBA’s SOS and finds her declaring “Darling, don’t give me shit ’cause you know you’re full of it”. Not that everybody is buying into the Kate Nash phenomenon. The UK’s Independent bluntly said Made Of Bricks was in “pole position for worst album of the year”.

A more than cursory scan of the lyrics of the album’s 12 songs (+ bonus track) leads to the rather obvious conclusion that Nash likes to write about the microcosm, the small event that represents the larger universality; the minutiae of life is her main course. She rapidly agrees. “Yeah, I’m happy you can see that. They are the things that get left behind or swept under the carpet yet often they are the most resounding and sweet things. Often it’s the tiny things people do for you that are the most precious. The things that people do for you and when you do see them it’s like ‘thanks, that’s so nice’.”

Not that Nash is a soft option, a goody goody two shoes who is travelling down the yellow brick road to the end of the rainbow. She understands implicitly that this is business and she needs to draw a line in the sand, which is somewhat remarkable for anybody who’s just turned 20. “When I signed my deal with Fiction I made it very clear that it was all about what I created myself, how I set things up, and if somebody wanted to destroy that then it wouldn’t work. For instance, my sister does all the photography, my best friend did the album artwork and I only work with people I trust. You have to be able to say ‘no’ to things and be prepared to say what you want.

“I started to realise recently that I’m the boss, all these people work for me so I can tell them what I want. It’s such a learning experience and you’ve got to learn quickly if you want to survive.”

She’s remarkably mature for her years. A statement that provokes the equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders from her. Even stranger is that being a singer/songwriter wasn’t her original game plan. Kate Nash set out to be an actress, despite learning the piano in her Harrow home as a child. In her teens she attended the BRIT School for performing arts and technology, where she studied theatre and she unsuccessfully auditioned at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Following that rejection, at a time when she working as a sales assistant she fell down some stairs and broke her foot. Told to keep her foot up for three weeks, she started songwriting. Her parents bought her a bass guitar and she put together enough songs to start gigging. Her first show was at a goth club where she was paid about $75. She quit her job the next day, put her songs on MySpace where it began to gather fans immediately and started looking for both a manager and a producer. But mono-dimensional she isn’t. Music maybe paying the bills right now but Nash has bigger plans. “I do write a lot,” she says. “But I write a lot of things other than music. I just started a fanzine called Ignorant Youth, which is another way of getting my stuff out. I think I love writing, I like poetry, I like creative writing. I like picking up the detail and understanding it thoroughly. Perhaps I’ll write some plays in the future. I did at school, but that’s real future stuff. For now I want to write another album, do more live shows and grow as a writer and an artist. I want to keep it all creative fresh and exciting.”

She’s certainly started well.