Formed in: 2004, Brighton, England
Key Albums: Fur and Gold (2006), Two Suns (2009)
Natasha Khan (born 25 October 1979) is an English songwriter who records as Bat for Lashes. Incredibly photogenic and fashion-minded, Khan is a glamorous figure for the alternative music realm; a seeming star-in-waiting, successor to that mystical/sexual rock-heroine crown. Bat for Lashes' music has been championed by Björk, Radiohead, M.I.A., Kanye West, and Devendra Banhart.
Background
Khan was born to a Pakistani father and an English mother. Her father, Rahmat, is a member of the Khan squash-playing dynasty; her cousin, Jahangir, is the most famous squash-player of all time. Raised in Wembley, then Rickmansworth, but often tripping to Pakistan to visit extended family, Khan’s childhood was split between the two countries, and torn between the two cultures. Describing herself as being “really geeky and sad at school”, Khan spent her days, on either continent, “daydreaming in the garden”, playing with tadpoles, spiders, and dogs, and "praying to aliens."
When her parents divorced when she was 12, Khan turned to music, drawing inspiration from Björk and Kate Bush, two artists to whom she has been frequently compared. “Growing up, Bjork and Kate Bush were really important to me,” offers Khan. “I get tired of being compared to them, and I hope that, as time goes on, I’m going to peel away more and more layers of myself to the point where I’ve made something, and become something, that isn’t comparable. But I understand why it happens.
“As a young teenaged girl, I already had a relationship with music, and had already written my own compositions on piano. But until I discovered those artists, it felt like I was missing part of my family. To know your ancestry, to know those who’ve gone before, is hugely important to any budding, young creative people.
“When I first heard [Björk and Kate Bush], I thought: ‘oh, so it’s okay’. I saw how other people had been interested in the same things as me, and had felt as much passion and emotion for sensuality, or spiritual things, or magical, invisible things as I did. Things turned them on the same way they turned me on. It was like getting a pat on the head from an older sister.”
Befitting someone whose art-school dissertation was on “the artist’s preoccupation with childhood and the subconscious” —a thesis in which she spoke of Michel Gondry and Tim Burton— Khan still draws on those days in her songs.
“Nick Cave has that quote that ‘the child invites tragedy into its life in order that its life become a serious matter’, and I think that’s a really fundamental idea to a lot of my work,” she explains. “My music isn’t something I plonk out on a guitar in a quest to be famous. It’s deeply-rooted in the things I need to discuss about my childhood, growing up conflicted between two cultures.”
Beginnings
Khan began recording songs as Bat for Lashes in 2004, when working as a kindergarten teacher. After playing her first major show, supporting CocoRosie in London in December '05, Khan's music was embraced by CocoRosie and Devendra Banhart, and roughly grouped into the freak-folk movement.
But, working with producer David 'Faultline' Kosten, Khan was working on a big, commercially accessible 'forest-pop' sound. Many of the songs on her debut album, Fur and Gold, were inspired by dreams. "That’s how I often feel about my songs: they’re these brief glimpses into my subconsciousness, and I have to catch them as quickly as possible, before they vanish,” says Khan.
Arrival
Initially released in 2006, Fur and Gold was reissued in 2007, replete with a gender-switching cover of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" added as bonus. Fur and Gold was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, and Khan received two more nominations at the 2008 Brit awards.
By 2008, she was living in Brooklyn's hipster mecca, Williamsburg, with then boyfriend Will Lemon; the frontman of Moon and Moon (and the subject of Banhart's song "Will is My Friend"). "They have a particularly hedonistic Peter Pan lifestyle over there," Khan told The Telegraph, in regards to her New York time. "I thought it was going to be really fun but I found it even lonelier than before."
Khan's second Bat for Lashes album, Two Suns, documented much of Khan's loneliness, and the eventual break-up of her relationship with Lemon, whilst upping the woodland-sprite mysticism first explored on Fur and Gold. The album features collaborations with members of Yeasayer, and legendary, reclusive iconoclast Scott Walker.
"I emailed him the track with some notes, almost as a dare," Khan recounts. The two began trading emails —and never meeting— before Walker emailed her his vocal part for the closing cut, "The Big Sleep." "He wrote, 'I really hope it works for you. I thought about it a great deal and tried to get into character.'"
Khan herself plays a character across Two Suns, trying on the blonde alter-ego Pearl; a sure sign of her rampant theatricality. Years later, Khan's imaginary friends are still her most vital.
