Attitude is big business in pop right now. The airwaves are about to be assaulted by Love Me or Hate Me, the new single from “the biggest midget in the game”, Lady Sovereign, in which she comes over all Catherine Tate and says: “If you love me, then thank you; if you hate me, then f*** you.” Lily Allen ruled the charts last year with a similarly confrontational, “Am I bovvered?” take on teenage preoccupations. Lippy and stroppy, both raise a middle finger at life.

Kate Nash, a 19-year-old singer from northwest London, is currently the object of much attention from the major record labels, which doubtless have the digit-raising demographic in mind. A gig at a London pub on a bleak Sunday night, the rain pouring down outside, is heaving, and the A&R fraternity eye one another glacially as they force a path up to the tiny room where Nash is about to play. Inevitably, the self-consciously cool crowd, having expended so much effort to gain entry, then talk loudly and ostentatiously through the opening section of the show.

In such inauspicious circumstances, Nash launches into her minimalistic, pointillist beatbox folk-pop, and — hilarious, given the been-there-seen-it-done-it mien of the audience — her very insouciance is what ultimately transfixes them. The buzz words about her tend to include Allen, who bigged up Nash on her own MySpace site last year and set the hype machine rolling. Hard-eyed label bosses will be running their slide rules over this equation and hoping they’ve found a duplicate. Nash, unsurprisingly, is having none of it.

“Some of them have had meetings with me,” she says, “and I don’t know why they’re wasting my time. They’re like, ‘We like what you’re doing, but we really need three pop songs that are going to sell.’ There was one person — I played him a new song, and he was e-mailing, not really listening. I thought, ‘Nobody should be that cocky. You think I’m really desperate for this, that I’m the one asking to meet you. Never, ever, am I going to sign with you. No way.’”

In truth, Nash and the songs she writes are not nearly as in-your-face as that anecdote, or her singing voice, suggests. In conversation, she substitutes, say, “fink” for “think” only when she remembers to. Is it worth getting exercised about such phonetic licence in an age when catch-phrase comedy has much of the nation trying on slangy dialects for size? Moreover, the accents Nash adopts in her songs, the way that she plays with her voice, attest both to her actor’s training and to the strong narrative strands that run through her material.

If there’s an instructive comparison to be made, it is to Regina Spektor: eccentricity and observational acuity, with musical settings that veer from the pop-tinny to the battily baroque.

Nash studied at the Brit school for performing arts (alumni include Amy Winehouse, the Kooks, Katie Melua and the Feeling), in Surrey. “Some of it was cool; some of it wasn’t,” she says. “It sounds cheesy, but it was a real journey, discovering yourself and becoming comfortable.

“I remember the first time I did a play with my parents there — I was almost throwing up. But I was doing five main parts by the end of that year.”

The songwriting came about because she failed an audition for the Bristol Old Vic theatre school and was then laid up after falling downstairs and breaking her foot, with only a guitar and a laptop for company. Her sound is lo-fi and threadbare, she says, simply because “that’s all I had”. And her academic work in film- and playwriting has coloured her lyrics and vocal delivery. “A lot of my songs are stories,” she stresses. “They’re theatrical, in a way.”

Birds, one of the two songs on her indie-label debut single, captures those aspects of her work. Two about-to-be-lovers, travelling on a bus, negotiate a way into the language of intimacy and away from self-absorption, and Nash zeroes in on the vulnerability that always cowers beneath the couldn’t-care bluster in such situations. The man stumbles on his first approach, and Nash the actor times to perfection the woman’s incredulous response: “She said, ‘What?’” That the song continues “Birds can fly so high/Or they can shit on your head,” lends some weight to those Allen name-checks. But what’s most exciting about Nash is that she sounds genuinely her own person. Nowhere in her music do you sense an agenda being worked to, a sound or a style being mimicked. Listen to Caroline’s a Victim, the first song on the single, and I challenge you to “place” its thrillingly bizarre blend of harsh vocals, twitching-the-net-curtains storytelling and squelching techno beats.

Nash credits MySpace with getting her to the point she is at now — how could she not? But, she emphasises, it is merely a tool available to her generation, a quicker way, if you like, of fly-posting, albeit with a far wider reach. The notion that the website has created a new artistic movement — and there are some who argue so — is, she says, “absurd”. It was there already. As to where it’s helped to propel her, she’s both wide-eyed and wary: “I’ve been thinking about this year. As much as I’m excited, there’s also a little bit of fear — because it could be quite lonely.”

Six months ago, Nash had never met a record producer, now she is fighting them off. Recent sessions have seen her holed up with Future Cut (Lily Allen), Paul Epworth (Bloc Party) and Valgeir Sigurdsson (Björk). She’s not just scrapping with record labels: in the studio, she is having to learn how to defend her artistic aims against big names with their own visions. “I was really frightened,” she admits. “I had to let them go with what their ideas were for a bit, and I found that difficult; actually, to the point where I wanted to cry.”

So, is she bovvered? Yes, very much so. Has she got cause for concern? Oh, I think not. Nash knows where she’s going, and who is — and isn’t — going with her. She’s not a Mk II anyone; she’s the first Kate Nash.

The single Caroline’s a Victim/ Birds is released on February 5 on Moshi Moshi

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