And there's that element of escapism that she talks about in the film, she says-- she's all skinny and fucked up and you find out she gets strangled and killed at the end of the film and is found under a hotel bed, and nobody finds her for like a week, and nobody comes to identify her body-- and in the film she's like [ changes voice ], "One day I really hope to have a husband and a BMW and we're gonna live in the suburbs and we can adopt children and it's gonna be so amazing.
And she's out on the street with all these menacing, really fucking disgusting guys, and you're just like-- so it's that heartbreaking feeling, and I was really immersing myself in all of those inspirations, and moving to New York and feeling the vacuum, the void of that stuff.
Like, "Where is this old New York that I romanticized about? So I just went out and dressed up, because I wanted to be like Cindy Sherman or Diane Arbus, do something artistic that kind of represented a visual symbol of the old New York and what I wanted and kind of be my own Candy Darling for a moment or something like that.
And then she crept into the lyrics a little bit, and I was thinking about her, and she was such a good visual character that I wanted to incorporate her into the artwork. But it really is a project for me and not this premeditated promotional tool or something, which is just like, "Ohhhh. Please people, come on. We're not some crazy, like NK: The visual thing is always about budget and money, which I didn't get much of because my record company thought this album was not going to do very well [ laughs ].
Surprise, surprise. What we did instead was get Ali Pike our lighting and stage designer, who's just the coolest girl, she sourced loads of crazy shit off eBay which really is kind of reminiscent of the front cover of the album and the back cover. So we have TVs all lit up, with lights inside them, and loads of candles and deer heads and like weird Texas kind of voodoo-ey stage props and things like that.
Which I think looks beautiful, and that's what we're doing this time. Pitchfork: When you went to the record label, and you're like, "I've got this big sorta concept-y kind of album, that's around these dualities, and the Bible verses, and Scott Walker NK: They were very lovely. But I think in this climate, in this day and age, that is the problem, that's where the pressure arises.
The lack of support you get from people buying your record means, unfortunately, that even though I think it's great that people can download music for free and hear whatever they want, for someone like me it puts me in a really difficult position. Because the record company are saying, you know, "If Natasha sold , records, then we wouldn't interfere with her, we wouldn't try to make her fuck up her songs and butcher them for the radio because we wouldn't be so desperate and under so much pressure.
So it's been quite hard because they didn't expect it do well, which was great. They left me alone to make the record I wanted to make and I didn't have to compromise. But now that it's successful, it's getting harder for me to fight them off, and say, "I don't want to butcher my song for radio.
So I find that that's hard. At the same time, it's great that people are hearing it. So it's such a political, weird, and difficult dichotomy, and I think people view it as very black-and-white, and they're just like, "Why don't you just do a Radiohead and sell your thing for free? But your record company doesn't just give away money. They're not just giving me a free ride, you know? So it's this sort of thing of like, "Ohhh, I want to be successful," but when I'm successful it makes it really hard to keep the autonomy.
Who knows? Pitchfork: You studied visual art-- at what point does thinking about the video come into it? NK: I'm trying to organize the video for the next single ["Pearl's Dream"] at the moment. I'm really hoping that we can make it as good as we can. So that's exciting. And I do collaborate quite closely with the directors. I send out my general idea of the song, a visual idea I might have, and then I get responses back, and we have dialogue, and we talk, and I send them visual references.
It's really nice. I don't just go in cold with people. So there's always trying to put in elements, visual symbols that work with the concept of the record.
Pitchfork: Is that Karate Kid remake out yet? NK: What remake? God, I fucking hope not. God, the original is so good. Why would they want to do that? Pitchfork: So you love that-- along with E. NK: There's loads. Like, Stand By Me was really cool. The Wizard of Oz was very important. I mean, when I was 20 I saw The Virgin Suicides , Donnie Darko , Buffalo 66 , and Dancer in the Dark all in the space of a year, and that was the next influx of really cool, inspiring films.
That's really beautiful and sad and weird. Pitchfork: As far as the magical element of your music, were there books that you read growing up? Fantasy books, all that stuff? Where does that come in? NK: I had a very English upbringing except for when my dad was around and we went to Pakistan on holiday and stuff.
But in terms of reading books and living in England, I was super into Roald Dahl and weird fairy tales and really English stuff like Enid Blyton, and there are these Malory Towers books, and Anne of Green Gables , and all of that kind of girls' stuff.
But then I was also really into strange fairytale stories from all over the world. I used to have Inuit fairytale books, and Nordic fairytales, and Greek mythology, and obviously the Bible and the Koran are two amazingly strange books [ laughs ] that I kind of got exposed to. Pitchfork: You mentioned Anne of Green Gables all that "girls' stuff. I was wondering what you think about that, and who some dudes are that we should be comparing you to if we can look past gender.
Or who inspired you. NK: Yeah, yeah. Because I'm really more-- I mean, I love those women. I think they're amazing. I went to see the Berlin show in London, and I cried the whole way through, because that album was really special to me, and Street Hassle as well, when I was like 18 or And it was all guys!
And James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, and who else? It sounds almost like how the chapters of a novel would be mapped out. I knew exactly what each song had to say to move onto the next one to keep the character thread going.
This linear approach has led to some describing The Bride as a concept album, which she rightly dismisses. I just love those ways of having the spoken voice with music as the accompaniment. Khan took a course in short-story writing when she was a nursery school teacher and to prepare herself for the task of writing The Bride she revisited scriptwriting and read screenplays.
At this point she sings the verse, clapping out the rhythm as she does so. Equal parts hopeful, angry, and fearful, the combination of major and minor keys guide the listener through how The Bride is feeling when she realises something has gone horribly wrong on her wedding day. I hand her the list to see what she thinks. Even in supposedly arty films sometimes the character arc is really boring.
It feels like they each have a distance to cover, rather than having to say everything with one song, or one chapter or the last part of the film at the end. Singing the songs is my own personal process; it makes me feel more complete as a human being and helps me to understand things. I think that all it takes is listening.
My advice would be take some quiet time, step out of all this external craziness and just go and do a bit of gardening! Do you hear that? I think some of the sounds I choose and the way I feel when I sing a song often harks back to my childhood. I think without even realising it I drew on those influences, but it certainly wasn't conscious. It's probably the most direct, poppy song you've recorded.
Was that deliberate? I've always loved pop songs that are really catchy but also innovative and perhaps have a darker element. I think 'Running Up That Hill' by Kate Bush is one of the best pop songs ever written because it's just so uncompromisingly creative.
By no means do I think 'Daniel' is as good as that, but I was definitely challenging myself to write a pop song like that - something that sounds catchy on the radio but isn't compromising. Your first album was a big critical and cult success, but do you feel pressure to break into the mainstream this time around? Whatever happens I'm not going to change the way I make my music.
I feel like I'm in the process of creating a body of work and I've got enough criticism and issues of my own to keep pushing myself really hard. I want to get better but I want to do it in my own time. How do you think the new album is different to your debut? And if I was to just go out wearing normal stuff I'd feel like it was taking the power away and not giving others the same visual and symbolic references, and that excitement.
For me, when I've seen other people take some risks with the way they look and do things on stage, it helps me to believe in that thing. I don't think about that person having cups of tea and going shopping and being normal.
I think about them as a performer and I quite like that; that people will look at me as a performer and this otherworldly thing.
Prior to the album's release, back in January, she had seemed anxious at opening up the product of her emotional life to scrutiny. Her fears seem to have been unfounded. The first single from the album, Daniel, hit daytime radio with a vengeance. Two Suns has been lodged in the album charts since its release and received its own Mercury nomination.
And, in short order, Bat For Lashes has gone from cult act and critical darling to bona fide pop success. Even so, Khan professes to finds the whims of the music industry quite alien to her. She is also irked by the double standard that finds male artists approached on their own terms while female artists of all stripes are lumped into one genre. What feels more tangible to her is the reaction to the shows she has undertaken with her band. Khan seems to be constantly caught between the desire to offer an escape from the normal and the mundane — as much, one suspects, for herself as for her audience — and yet feels compelled to let us know that her music is firmly rooted in the reality of her emotional experience.
She's a mass of contradictions. The same kind of tensions caused by oppositional relationships and dualities are what drive her work: masculine versus feminine, city versus nature; love and desire, mind and body, fur and gold. Just as Pearl resides within Natasha, all these entities exist not in isolation but in confusion within one body, and Khan doesn't quite know how to resolve the situation. During the video shoot it becomes apparent that she has at least managed to overcome her anxiety towards dressing up as Pearl in public.
Later, wearing the blond wig, scarlet lipstick and a form-fitting black dress with elevated shoulders that wouldn't look amiss on Dynasty's Alexis Carrington, she sits among some bleacher seats and looks on imperiously, cackling at "Teen Wolf" Natasha.
But at least it provides a brief respite from being strung up in mid-air and hurled around by a wire. By the end of the hour shoot, the harness would leave her body bruised, while her throat was raw from the dry ice. Early August finds Khan sitting in her hotel room in downtown Minneapolis, preparing to embark on a month-long US tour, her third trek through the States in less than six months.
She's reflecting on what has been a long, strange couple of years and thinking about the future. She recently had an opportunity to view the finished documentary that has now been a year in the making and forms part of a special edition re-release of Two Suns. It was a bit of a labour of love, really, and then at the end it's quite sad and emotional because it just shows all the crazy places I was going. It seems like I was quite lost. I used to think. I'm just travelling about.
Only when you see it all condensed together do you realise how much work went into it. Now Khan has begun to think about what she wants to do when her schedule finally winds down following this month's Mercury prize ceremony. She is the second favourite at the bookies behind Florence and the Machine — who some might call kooky and witchy herself, as if the industry is now intent on foisting Bat for Lashes imitators upon us. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that Natasha Khan has her own new anxieties beginning to bloom.
She's not even sure that she wants to release another record in the same way again. Cleaning, washing. Chris Campion. Follow Natasha Khan, the artist known as Bat for Lashes, across a series of revealing interviews in New York and Britain as the cult artist hits the mainstream with her album Two Suns and a Mercury nomination.
Photograph: Neil Wilder. Topics Bat for Lashes The Observer features.
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