Natasha Khan: The woman behind Bat for Lashes

Natasha Khan does not feel herself. She is standing in the living room of a cramped Brooklyn apartment on a frosty January morning. If first impressions count, then the 29-year-old performer is not sure that she is making the right one.

She is wearing a blonde bob wig and scarlet lipstick. She is feeling the discomfort of strangers seeing her in a mode that up until now has been reserved only for intimates.

There are seven people in this tiny flat, including a three-man film crew led by a bolshie Scottish director who is determined to get his shot. They have been making a documentary about her musical project, Bat For Lashes, that traces the making of her second album, Two Suns, which revolves loosely around the battle of wills between Natasha and an alternate personality: a blonde femme fatale named Pearl.

It's a journey that has taken Khan from her home in Brighton to the coast at Big Sur in California, and from the Welsh valleys to the Joshua Tree desert. The film crew will follow her for the rest of the year as she tours to promote the album. But here and now, they are with her in the fashionable enclave of Williamsburg, in an apartment that Khan roomed in for a few months last year during a brief period in which she moved to New York.

Unrequited love

Bat For Lashes emerged out of nowhere in 2006 and shortly after seemed to be everywhere. Khan first received serious notice in 2007 for a hallucinatory single, What's a Girl to Do, which took elements from two classic pop songs the perfectly accented drumbeat that kicks off the Ronettes' Be My Baby and the vocal monologue from the Shangri-Las' Remember (Walking in the Sand) and merged them with a twilight zone melody that circled a tale of unrequited love in suburbia.

It was accompanied by a spooky video that hit all the right cultural reference points E.T., Donnie Darko, David Lynch, '80s shell suits and BMX bikes, with Khan riding her bike through an eerie, wooded street while stunt bikers wearing bunny heads followed in formation behind her.

Her debut album, Fur and Gold, delved further into the same realm: dreamy but teetering on the edge of nightmare. When it received a Mercury prize nomination, much of the attention focused on her Anglo-Asian heritage. Khan emerged when the UK music scene seemed to be overrun by gangs of drab young boys armed with guitars and mockney accents but nothing much to say. Because she didn't fit the stereotypes, she was treated like some exotic creature, put into the box reserved for kooky, spooky, witchy women and patronised by hyperbole. One early press account went so far as to describe her as possessed of "an ancient power... she is in part shamanic".

In person there's nothing particularly witchy or weird about Khan at all. She's remarkably down to earth. The only wicked thing about her is her laugh, and Khan laughs a lot. There's a warmth and openness that immediately puts you at ease. But that same openness also suggests that she doesn't put up barriers between herself and her emotions, and it hints at the vulnerability that is such a compelling part of her music.

She began recording her own music inspired by the experimental "tape music" of minimalist composer Steve Reich. At first, this was a solitary pleasure, purely for her own entertainment. Then she began to play small solo shows in Brighton, her compulsive desire to share the songs winning out over her innate shyness.

In attendance at one those early gigs was Dick O'Dell, former manager of the Slits and the Pop Group and founder of influential early '80s indie label Y Records. His enthusiasm remarkably undimmed for someone who has spent years in the music industry, O'Dell first turned up to see the band Khan was supporting.

"I was actually at the bar while she was playing," he recalls. "Then these two kids came out of the venue. One said to the other, ‘That girl's weird' My ears pricked up when I heard that. I went in to have a listen, realised immediately that there was something quite special about Natasha and approached her afterwards to ask if she had considered working with a manager."

Increasingly claustrophobic

O'Dell says that he knew Khan had reached a turning point in her career when she received her first Mercury nomination in July 2007. The deluge of attention proved him right. Not unreasonably, Khan felt overwhelmed by the hype and pressured to produce another record. She decided to step back and reclaim her anonymity.

Determined to start anew with her then boyfriend, Will Lemon, she upped sticks to New York and began to work on new songs.

"When I moved there I was very lonely," Khan recalls, "and I just remember reading [Last Exit] for hours, every day, trying to finish it and savouring it. It had that ‘edge' that was really synonymous with how I was feeling."

Khan says she also felt increasingly claustrophobic in the city smothered by the concrete and smoke, walled in by the glass and steel and disconnected from nature. She began to make frequent trips to the Museum of Natural History across from Central Park, where she would wander absent-mindedly.

On one such trip, she resolved that her New York adventure was now over. This clarity of purpose translated into a burst of creativity. Over the next couple of days she wrote the last few songs of what would become Two Suns. One of these, Moon and Moon, was a love song that sounded more like a lament.

Another, Glass, took the form of a sung fable that links the album's themes together; it tells the story of two suns, two lovers colliding, the two sides of Natasha Khan vying for dominance and attention.

Khan returned to Brighton and pieced together recordings for the album over the next few months during sessions with co-producer David Kosten, in London and at a residential studio in Wales, looking out on to the hills and mountains of Snowdonia. She also took trips back to the States, making atmospheric field recordings.

The music on the album became a travelogue of the experiences she had while making it. Listening to it is an immersive experience. Layer upon layer of rhythms, self-made field recordings and musique concrete are merged with sparkling pop melodies awash with '80s synths and the stark emotions of Khan's voice. Khan seeks to strike a balance between the intimate, the personal and the universal, to slip her avant-garde interests into the mainstream.

"I want to communicate to the everyday person. I don't want to just roll around in my own avant-garde pool of coolness," she laughs. "I feel like the greatest people to me, and the ones that have touched me, were through the radio when I was 11 years old."

People like Prince, Elvis and Michael Jackson, she says.

Prior to the album's release she had seemed anxious at opening up the product of her emotional life to scrutiny. Her fears seem to have been unfounded. The first single from the album, Daniel, hit daytime radio with a vengeance. Two Suns was lodged in the album charts since its release and received its own Mercury nomination. Even so, Khan professes to finds the whims of the music industry quite alien.

"I'm surprised and happy that it's done so well but I'm quite suspicious of it, too, because I feel that's more to do with marketing," she says with a hard-nosed candour that sounds, equally, as if she is trying to steel herself against disappointment. "I think to myself, ‘Would I do that well if I didn't have this big record company trying everything they can to get it out there?' It doesn't make me feel validated as an artist."

She is also irked by the double standard that finds male artists approached on their own terms while female artists of all stripes are lumped into one genre. "I'm getting f****** tired of people saying that I sound like Tori Amos just because I play the piano," she snaps and then, characteristically, laughs it off. "It's just so shallow and weird and inaccurate."

What feels more tangible to her is the reaction to the shows she has undertaken with her band. "I feel like the more you sing out that stuff and the more it becomes part of this communal ritual experience, it kind of diffused the intensity of it on a tragic, personal level and becomes something that's swirling around in the universe." Now Khan has begun to think about what she wants to do when her schedule finally winds down.

It's perhaps not surprising that Khan has new anxieties beginning to bloom. She's not even sure that she wants to release another record in the same way again.

"I feel like there's so much more I want to do and I don't even know if it's anything to do with making albums," she says when we speak for the final time.

"I get worried that I'll just write something rubbish, because if you don't listen to your needs and your desire to nourish and learn and rejuvenate your spiritual or creative side, then you're not really living it."