More about: Bat For Lashes
There's a degree of joy in wallowing in pain and misery. Nirvana did it. The Smiths certainly did it. Joy Division did it, milked it, and nicked the cow afterwards. Misery loves company (preferably the kind that will play the heartstrings like a pensive cello), but people generally shrink from anything that forces them to actually engage with it. Far better leave it to three minutes of someone else's pain than facing up to your own. Right?
Wrong. While Cobain is her idol, the music of Natasha Khan, the 26-year-old Brighton-based musician behind the incomparably named Bat For Lashes (an alter-ego that "sounded right") is light-years away from the voyeurism of grunge's sullen yowl. "There's certain chords in things that make you go 'Oooh' inside," she says. "All my favourite songs have got that clinching little chord change, or instrumentation, or way of singing that makes me want to die through happiness."
Those "clinching little chord changes" got Khan supporting gigs with Low and My Latest Novel. They also attracted the attention of Devendra Banhart, who personally invited Bat For Lashes to join him at May's All Tomorrow's Parties and with good reason.
Her debut album 'Fur and Gold' is a cocktail of piano, theremin, thunderclap and poetry. Cold and soaring, it's evocative of spending the afternoon coasting inside the brain of someone with a much better bookshelf than you. It's emo, but for people with emotions rather than complicated haircuts. Khan calls it the celebration of sadness: "When you see the beauty in really painful things, it's like a freedom, you get released."Khan first found her sound when she saw a piano player improvising film soundtracks on TV as a kid. Fed up with regurgitating classical musicians on her piano, Khan decided to find something new. "I was having a very difficult time at home, and it became my saviour," she explains. Her father (part of the Khan squash-playing dynasty) left home when she was 11, and she began all-night solo music sessions as a way of dealing with it. "When you're a child, these things happen and you think 'Oh, it's really shit', but outside yourself there's an adult-self that can see the beauty. Your life has become a serious matter, and you're gonna move on."
10am on a Monday morning is not normally a time for having tears pricking your eyes simply by listening to a CD, but with Bat For Lashes, it happens. From the soaring compulsion of 'Bat's Mouth' to the pulsating refrain of forthcoming single 'Trophy', 'Fur and Gold' delivers a powerful emotional sucker punch. It's bewildering to listen to; drawing every ounce of grief, loss and vulnerability you've ever felt to the surface. Oh God, is this, like, therapy?
"Adults are emotionally retarded," says Khan, bluntly. "By the time you get to adulthood you're so closed to many avenues because you're frightened of judgement or being hurt. When you're small it's not all light and flowers, it's animalistic and fucked up.†She should know. Khan worked as a nursery nurse for two years and says it's the most fun she's ever had.
"Freud said that culture serves as our way to get back to pre-repression," she says. "You have to be repressed because I couldn't just run around screaming, or shake you or lick your face, but art is a way of getting back to that. And it's sad you can't do it on your own."
Then again, neither does she. While she writes all the music herself, she's just got another friend in to join the two already in the Bat For Lashes live band. "It's not my decision who I play with, it's the music's." She says this in such a matter of fact way that it only sounds odd some time afterwards. "The sound will tell me if it needs an orchestra, or a blues guitar player, or a girl. I never know."
Regardless, they manage to keep the pre-repression: when playing live the Bat For Lashes band look like they've covered themselves in glue and run through a primary school. Glitter, feathers and ornate headdresses are very much the order of the day, but rather than playing the Kylie Showgirl card, it's a way of not being distracted by the audience. "It's some kind of ritual," she says, citing Native American shaman practices as reasoning. "We put our head-dresses on and we get into this frame of mind and it's almost like a protection."
Could you not just raid an Oxfam shop?
"I just think the music's very visual anyway," she giggles. "If you were to just wear a suit on stage it might not seem very... honest." She laughs again, ironically. "I'd look like that guy on Big Brother, Russell [Brand]. I quite like him though."
Although her music, and way of explaining it, is exquisitely bonkers, Khan most certainly is not. However much she succeeds in making us feel through music, she probably wouldn't come up to you in the street and ask to cleanse your aura, for example.
"I'm not batty," she says, then, as if stepping outside herself for a second, she reconsiders: "OK, I am a little bit. It's just labels people give you. It's a derogatory thing for when someone does something that resonates with a bit of embarrassment. Something that's a little too raw, unstable, chaotic."
But is she all these things? "I'm pretty stable," she says, giggling. "I can't float around going 'I'm so fucking weird!' I wouldn't get anything done."
And that would be a fucking tragedy.
More about: Bat For Lashes
