Relentless

New World Order: Bat For Lashes

Lycanthropy, shape-shifting, the power of the moon, the tidal flow of blood. These are mythologies embedded deep in the female psyche, mysteries of flesh and soul connecting even the most modern woman to her darkest, primal self. Angela Carter knew this, creating feminist transfigurations of traditional fairy tales in her volume, The Bloody Chamber, later adapted into Neil Jordan’s film The Company of Wolves. Natasha Khan knows it too. As Bat for Lashes, she weaves this dark imagery of transformation and possession into music.

Over two albums, the half-Pakistani former nursery school teacher from Hertfordshire (via Brighton) has developed the shadowy, pastoral mysticism of her debut Fur and Gold into the harsher, more direct and urban lyricism of Two Suns. Here, Natasha becomes Pearl, a debauched, coquettish, self-destructive blonde from a Diane Arbus photo or an Andy Warhol screen test. “I was interested in the garishness and the enforced feminine attributes that transvestites have,” she says. “Drag queens are amazing, but they’re just these eyes and lips and skin, and it’s quite horrific in some ways. It reminds me of Halloween.”

Using facepaint, glitter, animal masks, junkshop jewels and feathers, Natasha metamorphoses into erotic, exotic and otherworldly disguises. Blink again and she’s dressed in a simple, streetwise hoodie looking like a boxer in training – a shape-shifting shaman again defying our expectations. In person, she’s girl-next-door pretty, engaging, intelligent and softly spoken. Yet stand her in front of a camera and she’s transformed, becoming the beautiful and bewitching Bat for Lashes of legend. 

Musically, Natasha draws on the dark pop soundtrack of mid-eighties Britain: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Kate Bush, David Bowie and Robert Smith. “A lot of my favourite artists straddled that strange place between innovation and eccentricity,” Natasha admits. “Weird, inventive pop music, like The Cure… Arthur Baker doing dark, disco remixes and that subterranean New York feeling… and also, I chose those sounds because it reminds me of that time, and it makes me really happy. So it is kind of nostalgic, in a way.”

Bat for Lashes seems rooted in that initial moment of feminine self-awareness: the time of first blood, of pubescent rites of passage, of an emergent savagery and sexuality as the body’s wrenched into a more animalistic form, sprouting dark hairs and exuding strange new scents. But the adult Natasha knows that she’ll emerge freer and more alive than before, glorying in her true beast nature as she sloughs off the dead skin of childhood. “Everybody goes through relationship break-ups, or losing their sense of home, or losing themselves,” Natasha says. “And I think the job of an artist is to be brave enough to say, ‘I feel that too. You’re not alone.’”

Website: www.batforlashes.com
Lastfm channel: www.last.fm/music/Bat+for+Lashes
Spotify Link: www.spotify.com/artist/6l77PmL5iuEEcYjGl8K6s7