‘Simon Amstell was horrible to me on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. He was mean’

Nerina Pallot is exactly where she wants to be: parked up outside a 400-capacity venue in Stroud, deep in England’s Cotswolds, where in a few hours she will play highlights from her new best-of album to an intimate gathering of fans.

“I know a lot of people don’t like this kind of touring. But this is my favourite, because I spend a lot of time going to places I wouldn’t see,” she says, smiling into her phone in advance of a short Irish tour in November. “Maybe I’m a weirdo.”

Pallot has always felt as if she didn’t fit in – even when she was heralded as one of the next big things in British music in the early 2000s, when her sophisticated singer-songwriter pop drew comparisons to Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon.

But despite that early attention she was never really set on being a star. If fame had been the target she wouldn’t have written Everybody’s Gone to War, a ferociously catchy anti-war banger from 2006 born out of her anger with Tony Blair and the UK’s march to conflict in Iraq. (It’s a highlight of that new best-of, Fire Escape Symphonies.)

“I’m totally stubborn. It has definitely not been a benefit to my bank balance,” she says. “But it’s 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.”

Pallot grew up in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, where she was obsessed with the songwriting of Elton John 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.

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 and Girls Aloud. But she was always resistant to attempts to smooth the edge off her writing – and struggled whenever the label suggested she work with big-name producers and songwriters.

“That wasn’t so much a product of my stubbornness. I am stubborn in the sense that, like, businesswise, I can’t pretend to work with assholes and have a nice time. I’m just not going to do that.”

It’s hard to co-write “innocently” – to “keep commerce out of the room”, Pallot says.

“Labels and publishers send you to write with people because in the back of their mind they’re looking for a hit. You walk into a room and there’s this unspoken thing that maybe this will be a hit.

“When 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’ve had a hit – which hasn’t been that often, but I’ve had a few hits – they have never been written thinking that I was going to write a hit. They just came out of me.”

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’s 2010 LP (the title track and the single Better Than Today). She doesn’t crave Kylie’s success, but she is impressed by the way the Australian star has remained at the top of a brutal business.

“Kylie’s a really interesting case in point. She’s 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’t exactly get a kicking, but nobody was that excited about it. Then she comes back with Padam Padam. She’s back on [BBC] Radio 1. People probably perceive her as a racehorse, but that woman is a workhorse.”

[ Indie Kylie Minogue is back thanks to Snow Patrol. Can we keep her for a little while?Opens in new window ]

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.

“I just remember Simon Amstell being a really mean guy. We just sort of put up with it. I don’t know him socially. I don’t know what he’s like personally. He was mean. And I wasn’t the only woman he was mean to.

“That was their stock-in-trade. And loads of shows were like that. It was quite nasty, looking back, and I don’t know that it was that necessary. It was pretty, pretty bad.”

Pallot is talking to The Irish Times as the fallout continues from Ed Sheeran’s parting of the ways with his support act Macklemore after the US rapper voiced his backing for Palestine on stage in New Jersey.

“I think he was naive,” she says of Sheeran. “I’m sure he knew what Macklemore stands for. He went ahead. This particular cause is really tricky for some people. I understand why people don’t want to go to a show and be political. We’re so saturated. One of the joys of being on the road is I’m not mainlining news like I usually do and being horrified. I feel a little bit lighter.”

Pallot has written lots of political songs, of which Everybody’s Gone to War is just the most prominent example. But she knows her audience doesn’t come to her concerts expecting a sermon.

“My fans who have been with me for 25 years know I’m a political person. I’ve never shied away from making work that was that. Not just about things like war or colonialism – things like feminism are really important to me. But I don’t 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.”

So she sympathises with Sheeran, but only to a point. “I get how he may have felt that, because a lot of his fans will be kids, they’ll be families. They haven’t necessarily come to be political, and I think there’s a lot of performativity going on right now.

“And 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’s horrible shit going on in Sudan. You can’t have a hierarchy of wars. I get why one could feel sorry for Ed Sheeran. At the same time, come on, he’s one of the biggest stars in the world. He’s not blind. He’s not naive.”

[ ‘Art should not be political’ is an argument made by those who haven’t thought enough about eitherOpens in new window ]

Pallot is pleased artists are taking a stand, but she notes that they don’t always put their politics into their music. Where, she wonders, is the substance behind the slogans?

“I 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’t address it, I had to take a risk,” she says.

“I wasn’t sure the radio would play Everybody’s Gone to War, but I was, like, ‘Fuck it! I really think this war is wrong. I think a lot of people are going to die for no good reason.’ I think, you know, postcolonial-period imperialism is really a blight on the world. We’re still paying the price for it now. Everything that’s happening in the Middle East has got a long history.”

She believes that artists who talk about social issues should also sing about them.

“The work should be explicit. I don’t think it’s enough for people to go, ‘Well, I’m donating the royalties,’ or ‘I’m doing this...’ You either, you know, to be crude, you eat shit or you get off the pot.

“You’ve got to take the risk. It’s not enough to wave a flag. We’re always going to need political music, unfortunately. The world does not show any signs of becoming less divided.

“The potential for danger ... I’ve never known it so bleak in my lifetime. It’s not enough to do the political talk. The work has to be political, if that’s what you feel.”

Fire Escape Symphonies: The Best of Nerina Pallot is released by Chrysalis Records. Nerina Pallot plays Empire Music Hall, Belfast, on Thursday, November 5th; Workmans Club, Dublin, on Friday, November 6; Róisín Dubh, Galway, on Saturday, November 7th; and Wavelength, Cork, on Sunday, November 8th