“Don’t go for a job being famous. If I hadn’t done this I’d have been a marine biologist... or a pearl diver” In a taxi from photography studio to coffee shop, Natasha says how she’d like to accept certain invitations to art exhibitions and fashion shows (and she receives a lot of RSVPs), were it not for the red carpets that accompany them. Her spare time – especially throughout this year – is thin on the ground, so she prefers to spend it with old friends, not draped around a Little Boots as she leaves the launch party of Guitar Hero 5. Natasha glances over a cup of mint tea. “I find [‘being famous’] harder now, actually,” she says. “The more successful you are, the more you invite backlashes and the more people have ideas about you. I feel more vulnerable the more I get known. There are more opportunities there, and I’d like to take some of them for enjoyment. Y’know, I’d love to get to a point where I can meet Spike Jonze or something. That would be so exciting to meet artistic, amazing people – that would be a great perk to my job, but in terms of interacting with trendy, cool people and going out for nights, it doesn’t sit well with me because I don’t believe it. I’ve got really great friends who are artists and musicians in their own right but don’t parade it around. I’ve got people who mean a lot to me and they’re the people I like to spend time with, because I don’t get much time anyway. If I am going to lose the plot and party really hard I do it in my own private way. The idea of being an exhibitionist about it just seems a bit weird. I love to stay up all night, dance and be wild but that’s my secret, that’s nothing to do with the album or music.”
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igging around in a bulging suitcase, Natasha pulls out various garments and proposes different shots to our photographer. Red, we agree, is quite Christmas-y and apt for the temperature if not the month of November. She then toys with some white eye makeup and is ready, having arrived ten
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minutes ago. Like she says, she’s not “a diva-ish person”. At any one time there’s just six of us (including Natasha) present – no stylists, makeup artists, life gurus or swarms of assistants and assistants to the assistants. “I much prefer it like this,” she says. “It’s a lot more relaxed and personal; I don’t like it when there’s hundreds of people running around.” Although I now doubt it, she could have been being polite. Either way, all six of us (excluding, perhaps, her press officer and Natasha herself) have our Natasha Khan crushes confirmed. Apart from looking like she does, her hushed speaking voice is as alluring as you might hope it to be. She’s not shy but quietly confident, rather angelic and completely magnetic. Somehow she’s also totally normal; the famous singer who insists her job doesn’t prevent her from “going down to Waitrose in my slippers or walking around town without makeup on.” Her calm, self-assured confidence isn’t a result of the Mercury-nominated ‘Two Suns’, but rather a reason for the album’s success. She did, after all, write and record it behind doors closed to even her record label. “I started this album deciding that I wasn’t going to compromise anything and went completely with my own vision,” she explains. “I went to the recording studio and told the record company that they weren’t allowed to come. I got one email about feedback, asking me to drop certain tracks, and I said no. So I started off with a little bit of a thing thinking, well, this had better work because the record company were like, ‘well, you’ve been so stubborn,’ so it was all on my head.” And what did they think when you first played them the finished album? “I wasn’t there, but I got some texts. They said, ‘Natasha, you’ve made a great album.’ But there were a few mutterings around like, ‘Natasha you’ve made a great album, but what are we going to do with it? Radio aren’t going to play it, y’know?’ They were happy for me on an artistic level, but I made their job a lot harder.” The label [Parlophone], it seemed, must have missed track
4, ‘Daniel’. But not for long. A rich and flourishing pop song of ghostly wails and Fleetwood Mac melodies, it was (and is) Bat For Lashes at her most electronic yet. And her most accessible. And her most ready for the radio. But while ‘Daniel’ swooned on the surface as if in a 1975 carefree disco, its undercurrent – true to ‘Two Suns’’ ying/yang, light/dark core – remained sombre and ambiguous, the perfect single to invade the mainstream with while keeping Bat For Lashes’ credibility in tact. “I was a little bit concerned that people might think I’d sold out,” remembers Natasha now “but in the context of the album I felt like that song really had its place, and it’s really special to me. Even though a lot of the artists that I like are quite underground, I have a song-writing sensibility – I like to write a good chorus. And I didn’t want to shy away from that just to be cool on purpose. I thought, well, if I’m going to write a pop song, put a beat on it and make it lush. I could have dumbed it down and done it on a one string violin, or something, but it would have been wasted, and to be totally honest the record company did say, ‘Natasha, we need to use this single to hopefully get you on the radio, because otherwise this campaign could fall flat on its face and you’ve done all that hard work’. And it’s by no means a cheesy pop song – it’s quite dark. I’m glad. I tried to write a song that teenage girls could sing into their hair brushes, and I did that.” Along with ‘Daniel’, the rest of ‘Two Suns’ plays like a personal diary, set to often beautiful and poignant music, because that’s exactly what it is. With the exception of ‘Pearl’s Dream’ (which scans opposing landscapes to rising, semi-euphoric synthesisers), nothing quite touches the driving pop sensibilities of ‘Daniel’ but no track feels less autobiographical or ‘lived in’ than the next. Perhaps that’s why Natasha Khan has no problem discussing all things ‘Two Suns’ as openly and passionately as she does, holding your gaze with her big brown eyes. As Bat For Lashes, she’s played over 200 shows this year, to audiences in their thousands around the world
– what’s one more person in an east London coffee shop? As with all great albums though, questions about them are pretty pointless. Thankfully, Natasha Khan is everything I hoped the creator of our album of the year to be – modest, funny, passionate, honest. And if she had turned up snapping at an entourage that couldn’t move quick enough, boasting how she wrote this record “for a laugh”, it would have certainly been a huge disappointment, but ‘Two Suns’ could probably weather that. It really is that good.
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ny criticism that followed ‘Daniel’ largely towed the line of “why aren’t there more songs on the album like that one?”. But to want ten more instant pop hits was to miss the point of ‘Two Suns’, and indeed of Bat For Lashes. “When I started, I set out to make an album that was vocally stronger than the first,” Natasha explains “with more lush electronic sounds and tribal rhythms.” The opening ‘Glass’ almost crams all of that in within four and a half minutes. Beginning with an a cappella, ethereal reading from the Hebrew Bible, it quickly brags Bat For Lashes’ vocal range, from low and breathy to a high falsetto that has had critics banding a Kate Bush comparison around more than ever this year. African drums – attributed to Yeasayer who helped develop ‘Two Sun’’s bass and beats throughout Natasha’s time spent in Brooklyn – then seem to rumble and tumble as they wish, neither playing the same tune nor a completely different one. It’s world music meets icy ghost story about watchmen and emerald cities. The following ‘Sleep Alone’ first taps into a desire to introduce electronics. Held together with a deep, synth bassline that’s soon joined by electronic drum clasps and fleeting keyboard chords, it also features maracas, the occasional flurry of piano and continual string plucks. Initially you’d be forgiven for mistaking its melodies as a close relative to ‘Fur & Gold’’s ‘Trophy’, but on