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"Natasha Khan, aka Bat for Lashes, is finally making it big. Why isn't she happy? The singer tells Maddy Costa why becoming famous is like 'opening your dressing gown' in public.
The music Natasha Khan makes under the name Bat for Lashes sounds enchanted, as though cauldrons and wands were as instrumental to its making as synthesisers and guitars. So it's no surprise to discover that Khan's home looks quite different from its surroundings - but it's different in disappointing ways. A drab 1960s building, it squats unattractively between elegant Victorian houses. The rooms are neutral in colour and sparsely furnished; pinned to the kitchen noticeboard is a cleaning rota. It's all surprisingly ordinary. But then you spot a tarnished crown in the sitting room, acquired by Khan on a recent trip to the US, and a gauzy, rainbow-hued dress, apparently made of butterfly wings, hanging by the front door, and you think: that's more like it.
When Khan walks through her adopted home town, Brighton, girls sashay into earshot singing her finest, best-known song, What's a Girl to Do. Most importantly, success means that the 28-year-old can now leave this rented house and move into her own flat. "I've yearned for that security all my life," she says. "To have somewhere to call my own is all I've ever wanted. Now everything else is a bonus."
Fur and Gold beguiled critics on its release in September 2006. Otherworldly in feel, it carries lyrics loaded with images from Khan's dreams and her reading in Jungian theory, while its dark, sensual sounds evoke everything from 1960s pop to Native American rituals. Despite the positive reviews, however, it went relatively unnoticed by the general public - until the Mercury nominations were announced several months later. Khan is thankful for the slow burn: "It allowed me to get used to the idea of opening your dressing gown in front of lots of people." As a child, she never wished to be famous. "When I was younger, there wasn't that spotlight on celebrity and its workings. When I played piano, I wasn't performing for anyone. I played because it gave me goosebumps all over my body. I was able to express the overwhelming tides of emotion that wanted to come out."
Over the past year, she says, she has felt overwhelmed by emotion again, as she has attempted to deal with the demands of touring - and then, over the winter, the sudden absence of that routine. She played her final Fur and Gold show last October at London's Koko, a magical evening in which the stage was transformed into a glittering forest inhabited by sprites. After that, she spent some time with her family, then with her boyfriend (a musician in the New York band Moon and Moon), and had "a bit of a nervous breakdown. It was the first time in two years where nothing was needed of me. It's as though you're the queen at the top of your tower, and suddenly you're flung out the window. Actually, it was really good for me to just be Natasha for a while, to have an everyday life and slow down. But I can imagine why people in that situation need to get fucked up."
Books pulled her through. She has a pile beside her as we talk: Heroes and Villains, by Angela Carter; We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love, by the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson; a biography entitled Victor Hugo's Conversations With the Spirit World, about which she is particularly enthused. The French novelist spent three years in exile in Jersey, during which he communed with the spirits of the ocean, rocks, animals, Galileo, Jesus, you name it. The book has tapped into Khan's own beliefs about "the connectedness of all things. It strikes me over and over again how physics and love and creativity and physical birth are all the same thing."
Khan has always felt a little bit different. Her mother and aunts mostly do secretarial work (although her mother recently completed a degree in criminal psychology), but the teenage Natasha wanted to be "a painter or a writer", and decided that life experience would serve her better than university. She spent two years working in offices and factories, saving enough to travel to New York, San Francisco, Mexico and Canada. It was then that she realised how important music was to her - something she previously "wasn't cognisant of, even though I was playing piano all the time, and writing poems and books of lyrics".
She surprised her family by signing up for a degree in music and visual art at Brighton University. "Mum says that, since I was a tiny baby, I've had the most strong-willed and stubborn personality known to man. Although that was a real pain for her, she admired my resolve. It can be frightening to turn your back on what others think is right. But I'm not the same as a lot of people - I'm quite artistic and quite eccentric sometimes. If you honour that, you fit into yourself better - and people accept you for what you are."
"Dad was an amazing storyteller and illustrator, which he did in his spare time - very inspiring and dramatic." He instilled a wanderlust in Natasha. "I'd travel the world with him and watch him compete. I think that's why I'm really free-spirited: I'd been all over the world by the time I was three."
She's able to talk calmly of the fact that her father abandoned the family when she was just 11, and has rationalised it as "that moment when life becomes serious, and you realise you're a soul on a journey", an experience she believes everyone shares. But she also admits: "I'll always be someone who is frightened of being abandoned, and finds it difficult to trust people."
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It's a tricky time for Khan: she is ready to settle down, yet determined to pursue her wayward career. She longs to have children, yet can't even commit to a pet cat. Children were a big part of her pre-Bat life: after university, she trained as a nursery-school teacher, and spent three years in the job. "I loved it. I'd pile up on bean bags with a load of three-year-olds and tell them stories about witches and gargoyles and thunder dragons, and they would squeal in delight. There's something in me that loves to inspire people: when I'm playing music, I imagine all this sparkly stardust going through everyone. I want to make people come alive."
She has mixed emotions about returning to the promotional merry-go-round. "I feel creatively at my strongest, but this is quite a sad, scary time, too. Last night, I spent half an hour writing down all the things I'm grateful for. To be able to put out things that I think will be beneficial, in a world that is transient and difficult, is very rare."
She hasn't yet designed the visual world for the new album (she's a firm believer that image is as important as sound), but has fond memories of creating Bat for Lashes in the first place. "I was really naive and excited. It was like being a child taken up into the loft, and finding 50 million boxes of whatever you could imagine - musical instruments, books, dressing-up clothes."
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