Natasha Khan on her ambition to direct a horror film and the influence of
California on her new record Lost GirlsBat for Lashes is the stage name of Natasha Khan, who was born in
London in 1979 to an English mother and a Pakistani father. Raised in Hertfordshire, she studied
music and visual arts at the University of Brighton and worked as a nursery school teacher for four years before committing to music full-time. A rich seam of theatricality was woven into her songwriting from the start, taking shape in elaborate outfits and intense stage performances. Three of her four Bat for Lashes albums to date, including 2006 debut Fur and Gold, have been nominated for the Mercury prize (Khan also released an album via her side project Sexwitch in 2015). Her latest album, Lost Girls, comes out next month.
You’ve talked about wanting this new album to be fun, full of romance and more commercial. How did it come about?I had moved away from London, where I’d lived for seven years, and finished my contract with EMI. My plan initially was to go to
Los Angeles to focus on scriptwriting and doing music for film. The first song on the album, Kids in the Dark, was actually written for a Stephen King TV series [Castle Rock] – but the music supervisor Charles [Scott] and I had such a good time that we decided to keep meeting. I didn’t even know whether I was going to make an album again – I wanted to have a real break and leave everything behind me. And so when this album started happening, it was sort of a secret – and nobody really knew about it until it was nearly done.