Nadine Shah has shared the video for new single ‘Ladies for Babies (Goats for Love)’ ahead of the release of new album ‘Kitchen Sink’ on 5 June via Infectious Music.
‘Ladies for Babies (Goats for Love)’ has a darkly menacing sound to start, with a brooding bass line and intense tribal drumming as Nadine spits out lines with venom about what society (and especially men) expects from women: ‘He wants his lady to be a lady. To care less, be hairless. All he wants in fairness is a baby, a little baby’. She demands the man in question ‘play the daddy’ amidst a burst of riffs and Los Campesinos!/Marika Hackman-esque shoutalongs of the track’s title before settling back into the darker territory as she puts her important points about this treatment across: ‘Take full credit for me’; ‘You want to rear me as though you fear me. Put me in your pocket, then take me to market’.
Speaking about the song, Nadine says: ‘My brother was making a comment on sexism when he was younger and made a painting of a man embracing a goat with the phrase ‘ladies for babies, goats for love’. It always stuck with me, I guess cause it sounded daft but really because even back then I knew its true meaning and intent. I was also thinking about a lot of the songs I would have been listening to at the time, songs I sang along to innocently without question of the meaning. ‘Ladies for Babies’ is a direct response to ‘All That She Wants’ by Ace of Base. I reversed the gender and I poke fun at a husband who expects nothing more from me, as a wife, than to carry his child and perform the role of the obeying subservient trophy wife. Only this time the mistress is a farmyard animal. A lot of my album explores subjects of sexism and tradition. It’s not all about beastiality, I promise.’
