Bat for Lashes: ‘I was rootless and lost in a way, and being buffeted around by music being looked at as a business’
“I had her at home with no drugs at all. I threw myself in 200 per cent,” says Khan, whose collaborators have included Beck and. “I’m going to go for this and feel it all and grab it. I went into it with a very careful, quite disciplined preparation – to get to the point where I could let go and let it take me. I felt like I was making really weird sounds, moving my body. Trying to wriggle out the pain in a way – move her down. I was in the bath at home for a lot of it.
Khan is speaking over Zoom, where she is fresh-faced and dressed in understated beiges and whites. It’s quite a change from her early career, when she would pose in photoshoots wearing sparkling headbands with streaks of glitter beneath her eyes, as if she had come straight from an all-night rave inspired by Edwardian children’s fiction.
The suggestion came down that Khan might consider working with outside songwriters – a new approach for her but standard practice with major pop stars. She agreed to give it a shot and wrote with the Rihanna and Lana Del Rey collaborator Justin Parker on Laura, a single for her 2012 album, The Haunted Man. While it’s a beautiful song, it wasn’t a hit, and she was not keen to repeat the experience.
Parenthood can lead us to reassess our own childhoods – to cast old memories in a new light. So it was with Khan, who grew up in the commuter town of Rickmansworth, on the northwestern fringes of London, the daughter of a champion squash coach from Pakistan. Her parents separated when she was 11, at which point her bedroom became her refuge from the outside world.
That isn’t to say that Khan takes issue with songs that say exactly what they mean or that she thinks Swift or Olivia Rodrigo are committing musical heresy by writing lyrics that express their feelings in very literal terms. It’s okay to be on the nose – as long as you are coming from a place of integrity.