The Brag

Bat For Lashes
Homebody
By Caitlin Welsh

In Bat for Lashes, Natasha Khan has created a powerful artistic persona. Darkly ethereal and steeped in intuition and mythology, as earthy and feminine as it is hauntingly alien; Bowie and Kate Bush and The Cure and something else altogether, trussed up in tribal headdresses and shadowy reverb and her sweetly husky voice, at once choirgirl-pure and world-weary.

“Oh, MOPSY!”

…So it’s hard not to marvel at the stark contrast between person and persona, hearing Khan scold her new kitten in a schoolgirlish, matter-of-fact London accent. Every now and then there’ll be a kitten-sized crash on the other end, and Khan will interrupt a serious discussion of the feminine divine to burst into exasperated giggles. “Every time I’m on the phone she’s like, [tiny kitten voice] ‘Play with me! Look at me! Why aren’t you talking to me?’” she laughs. “She’s all jealous.”

It might not be glamorous, but chasing a mewling ball of grey fluff around her Brighton flat is exactly where Khan wants to be right now. She’s just returned from ten days in northern Italy, where she and “a whole bunch of [her] favourite musicians” have been holed up, working on and recording tracks for her third album. Before that, though, there were nearly five years straight of touring, recording, performing, writing and, in preparation for her 2009 sophomore record Two Suns, living in New York City as her extroverted, hyper-feminine alter-ego Pearl – just to see what would happen. “Well, this [new album] has sort of been a project of being at home, really, for the last year. Just being in Brighton with my old friends,” she explains. “I think the second album was definitely quite a transient record, it came out of quite a tumultuous place, and looking back on the sort of methods I used to get into it, they were also methods I used to sort of get through a lot of upheavals, a lot of travelling, a lot of distance between me and my loved ones, so that – [crash] Oh, Mops! Sorry! – But now I think I feel a lot more grounded. I’m not so much living the actual characters.”

Her first album, 2006’s Fur & Gold, received some of the most meaningful accolades available to a British musician, from a Mercury Prize nomination to a personal endorsement by Thom Yorke. But it was a product of a very different environment to that of Two Suns, Khan says. “I think no matter what you’re doing when you’re making creative work, you do sort of have to follow your psychic – your psyche’s needs, and already then [just after Two Suns], I was feeling this pull away from this really chaotic lifestyle and I was just really wanting to hibernate, hone it back in and come back into myself,” she muses. When she wrote Fur & Gold, Khan was living with her boyfriend and working as a nursery school teacher. “I think that [calm, domestic lifestyle] really gives life to the imagination – to me, anyway. It really works, gives you something to work against. But when your life is full of chaos and colourful characters and movement all the time, I feel like you don’t get that headspace and that reflection to let something really develop.”

On the new songs, Khan is looking within herself and into her identity as a product of various dualities – from the male-female relationships of her ancestors, to the interaction between her Pakistani and English origins and how that relationship is reflected in British society. “It’s like England is in me and it just feels like coming home, really – it’s not something that I have to go out to find and explore,” she explains. “It’s like actually regressing back into myself and my ancestral home.”

As for the actual music of the new material, Khan’s mostly hoarding sounds that fascinate her, and seeing what emerges. “I’m really connecting with my ancestral links to England and to Pakistan, where my dad comes from. Going back to quite early folk music, whether it’s from Pakistan, or Ireland or England – it all starts to sound quite similar. There are these amazing scales, and things like that – old English folk music – but a lot of it’s really dancey, really up and quite liberated,” she says. She’s also exploring her interest in programmed percussion “and then getting live drums to come in and put really live, really human cross-beats over the drum machines.

“So God knows what it’s going to turn out like,” she adds cheerfully, “but I feel like it’s coming from a much more grounded place, and I’ve really enjoyed that.”

Khan’s interest in blending disparate styles is, she acknowledges, in line with a wider trend in music at the moment. “I mean, I’m not really on top of what’s happening in music all the time,” she admits, “but when I listen to James Blake I don’t think, ‘Oh he’s a white guy or a black guy’, I just think his voice is really soulful. And Kanye West is using piano sounds that hark back to old, folky English music… The world is becoming very small and tightly woven in some ways, and I think there’s only so far you can go with combining everything before a whole new genre will come about, or before people start regressing back to wanting to make more purist forms of music. And so that’s going to be another intriguing transition: what happens after you can’t mix it up any more? Like, if you mix all the colours they become this brown sludge,” she explains. “People will want bright, primary colours again.”

Where: Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
When: June 3 and June 4, 9pm