wears the trousers magazine

words in edgeways with natasha khan

If you haven’t heard of Bat For Lashes by now then where on earth have you been? What the dickens have you been doing? Not reading Wears The Trousers, obviously, because we’ve been championing Natasha Khan, the lady behind the mysterious moniker (”it’s kind of onomatopoeic in that it sounds like the music but doesn’t really mean much”), for the last 18 months. She was one of our picks for 2006 along with fellow successes The Pipettes, The Organ (RIP), Tilly & The Wall and Joan As Police Woman, and even nabbed herself a five-star album review for her bewitching debut Fur & Gold.

2007 has been even kinder to Ms Khan. On signing to major label imprint Parlophone and completing her first UK headline tour with her all-girl band Caroline Weeks, Abi Fry and Lizzie Carey (and garnering no small amount of acclaim in the process), she was invited to take part in Vogue magazine’s latest ‘Women Who Rock’ feature alongside Cat Power, M.I.A. and, of course, the ubiquitous Beth Ditto, cementing her position as one of our most visually arresting and interesting artists.

With an outward appearance inspired by eccentric jazz musician Sun Ra (he used to list his place of birth as Saturn), among others, and a style derived from countless influences and her fascinating formative years, Khan is exhilaratingly unique and, seemingly, in a constant state of artistic flux. Take her new single ‘What’s A Girl To Do’, for instance; it’s the third release from Fur & Gold and the second in a row to be retooled in the studio as Khan continues to blossom and develop her ideas. With tongue nestled sweetly in cheek, it’s a triumphant nod to the ’60s girl group genre complete with deeply thundering drums, foreboding synths and tambourines that shimmer and clatter beneath the spoken-word verses, nagging chorus and affecting coos of despair.

Professional cynics might accuse Khan of bandwagon jumping with last year’s prominent revival in the girl group sound but she shrugs it off. “When I was making the album I don’t think I was aware of what was going on outside, what was current. I think it was more about my mum bringing me up on Motown and the Shangri-Las and stuff like that. Especially the Shangri-Las. What got me into that was hearing Kim Gordon’s version of their song ‘One Little Girl’. That was her sort of tribute to the band and it made me inquisitive about them; those backing vocals, the claps, those Phil Spector-y drums and reverbs. It was more of a nostalgia thing.”

Mary Weiss would surely be proud of Khan and co’s carrying of the heartbreaking, under three-minute, teenage melodrama torch. Think of this sultry break up song as what might have happened if the leader of the pack hadn’t died beneath the wheels of another, had got the girl, then, after a few months, bored her to tears with his overt masculinity and obsession with go-faster stripes. “My bat lightning heart wants to fly away,” she sighs, and you’re right there with her.

When I met up with Natasha in a Shoreditch drinking establishment we talked a little about what comes next. She’s quite frank about getting the second album fear and feeling under pressure to match the success of Fur & Gold. “I want to take risks and…push the boundaries. So I might not fulfil everyone’s needs to have a specific type of record but I think you just have to go with your honest desires. Basically, I will always remain true to what I want to make and I’m not going to stick to what I know.”

She’s a big fan of Joanna Newsom’s Ys, calling it “classic” and a “masterpiece”, and confesses to having a strong urge to write an album of epic songs that incorporate poetry but acknowledges that she first needs to travel a little further down the road of more conventional songwriting. Not too conventional of course. “I’ve always been about becoming a good songwriter first, about creating an amazing song in traditional song structure but adding something that then brings in a whole myriad of weirdness. I think songwriting and pop songs in themselves are very powerful things and you can make them creative and interesting. So I want to become that first and then maybe I would like to do film soundtracks and stuff like that. But I think the next album will still be epic, in a way.”

As well as Newsom, Natasha has long professed an admiration for other proponents of the New Weird America ‘movement’ like CocoRosie (who gave Khan her first high-profile support slot in December 2005) and Devendra Banhart (”When I met him I felt like he was a kindred old spirit and that I’d known him for many lifetimes”). That these artists have patronaged Natasha to a certain degree and helped to raise her profile is something of an incongruous development in her career given that her music falls some distance outside of the alt-folk circles, a fact she’s well aware of. “We’re not in the same kind of music, no. It’s just lovely to have support and family, especially when you’re doing something that is a little bit on the edge or a bit different, maybe. It’s good to be with like-minded people who are of the same ilk. It’s a lovely family feeling.”

She cites Judee Sill and Kate Bush among the more classic songwriters she admires, along with Neil Young, David Bowie and Lou Reed. As a film studies graduate, she’s also heavily influenced by the sounds of cinema; The ‘ET: Extra Terrestrial’ soundtrack is one of her all-time favourite albums, with ‘The Karate Kid’ in hot pursuit. “The soundtracks are so nostalgic and evocative and heartstring-pulling, but in a quite earthy ’70s/’80s way; those minor chords, the swells and suspense. All those films have dark undertones and sad and disturbing parts too, so it’s always fully major. They have a twinkling mystical curiosity and it harkens back to the sense of wonderment you have as a kid, discovering worlds outside of your small microcosmic childhood world. ‘Donnie Darko’ and ‘The Virgin Suicides’ did the same kind of thing.

“I have my birthday very near Halloween so I think that fuelled my love of symbolism and surrealism. I love people like Daniel Johnston drawing funny monsters and fucked up superheroes and Chris Ware who does comic book drawings. Tim Burton, fairytales, Hans Christian Andersen; all of those things are part of folklore. It’s about magic and imagination. Using monsters as symbols for the everyday, like bigger, more ferocious versions of what we, as humans, sort of fear. Cartoons do that all the time. You know Mickey Mouse has loads of surrealism.

“When I was growing up I really liked fairytales like ‘The Princess & The Pea’ and ‘The Red Shoes’, but as an adult I’ve gotten more into the original versions of fairytales that are more barbaric, like Angela Carter stuff with her bloody chambers. Oh, and there’s a book called ‘Women Who Run With The Wolves’ that retells a lot of really old, archaic fairytale stories and brings in Jungian philosophies and their meanings. I love that!”

There’ll be plenty of time for reading and watching films on the tour bus this summer as Bat For Lashes hits the festival circuit like never before. With a triumphant appearance at All Tomorrow’s Parties already under her belt, she headlines the second day of this weekend’s Homefires IV festival, topping a fantastic bill that includes Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton, Andrew Bird and Basia Bulat. Later this month she’ll be putting in an appearance at Glastonbury, followed by Latitude in July and Bestival in September, among others. Then there’s Rock En Seine in Paris in August where none other than Björk herself personally requested Bat For Lashes as her opening act, having seen Natasha’s recent live show and branding it “amazing”. She is, understandably, rather chuffed by this but there’s a part of her that is really looking forward to winding down this summer and “learning to be a human being again”. And, of course, working on that second album. “I’m peeling back the layers,” she adds as a slightly mysterious, faraway look steals across her eyes. I wonder what’s inside.

Alan Pedder
originally published June 1st, 2007, as part of our Homefires IV special