Naked Ambition

There’s no polite way of asking a critically lauded pop star why she decided to get her lady-bits out for public delectation. Though, to be accurate, you can’t actually see any of Natasha Khan’s wobblier parts on the cover of her new album – everything’s terribly tasteful and moody and arty, as she tells you at length when really all you’re after is the answer to a simple query. “What were you thinking, Natasha?” The image in question is classy naked, for sure. But proper, NSFW naked all the same.

How did you respond to it?” says the Bat For Lashes singer, as if discussing a pretentious movie we’ve both just sat through rather than the sleeve shot accompanying The Haunted Man for which – have we mentioned this already? – she stands before the world sad eyed and disrobed, a pasty-arsed randomer slung, game-hunter-style, over her shoulder. Er… says Hot Press, blushing like a schoolboy. We thought you looked very... nude...
“Well, it’s obviously an extremely vulnerable picture,” she says, her voice the quavering coo of someone not 100% sure of themselves. “I’m proud of the power in that. It looks very different from the way women are presented in the media. Women are portrayed in a sexual, glossy and provocative way. I wanted to represents aspects of female nudity different from what you’d see in Nuts.”
The provocative snap was taken by art-house photographer Ryan McGinley. The shoot lasted five hours and mostly involved Khan in her birthday suit hefting an underfed chap chosen for his lightness of limb.
“Initially I felt shy,” she admits. “I wasn’t performing. I was part in a piece of art. I think the results are honest. I’m not assuming any airs or graces or anything like that.”
The Haunted Man is a big moment for Khan. Over the past few years she has built a respectable cult following (Thom Yorke and Scott Walker are fans) without ever quite breaking through, Florence and the Machine-style. Her songs – the poppier ones anyway – are catchy and fascinating, an intriguing mix of Kate Bush, Siouxsie & The Banshees and, on her 2009 sort-of-hit ‘Daniel’ especially, Fleetwood Mac. But she can’t bring herself to play the game, to submit to the compromises of a pop career. She’s too bruised and coy to fit comfortably in the mould of conventional star.
Still, for all her reticence, Natasha is entitled to feel aggrieved watching Florence and a myriad of wannabes pass her out and storm the mass-market. Some have accused Flossie et al of lifting Bat For Lashes’ pagan princess chic, all hippy bandanas and golden face-paint, and giving it a populist gloss. Does she gaze enviously at the charts, thinking it should have been her?
“It’s hard for me to think like that,” reflects Khan who, for all intents and purposes is Bat For Lashes. “I don’t know... I guess Florence and I are very different artists. A lot of the people who emerged in my wake are more mainstream than I was. I’d like to sell more records. I’m not willing to do the same sort of things in order to sell them. I won’t compromise my vision.”
Ooh, is that the hint of a diss?
“I don’t listen to much of that music so I can’t comment. I do understand what you’re saying. I still think I’ll always be on the fringes. That’s something I’m going to have to accept.”
It’s funny. Her record company was cool with the naked cover (on the understanding the nudity fell short of parent-bothering). But there is tension – principally over her reluctance to commit fully to the tiresome business of flogging shed-loads of records. She can, if minded, pen a cracking pop tune (the aforementioned ‘Daniel’, new single ‘All Your Gold’). Why, wonders EMI , doesn’t she do it more often?
“The label is supportive of my vision as an artist. I struggle with them sometimes on the pop song side. In terms of the visuals they are trusting. They were behind me on the nudity. Obviously we couldn’t have full nakedness. That would have caused too many problems. I didn’t feel my vision was compromised.”
Natasha has pouty good looks and an angular haircut that might be described as high-hipster. She’s middle-class, was born into a storied family, being distantly related to Pakistan cricket playboy-turned-budding politician Imran Khan and daughter of famous squash player Rahmat Khan. Given all of that, the temptation is to dismiss her melancholy, that storm-tossed waywardness, as a pose. Who can resist a little girl lost with a silky voice and big, sad gaze?
The problem with this way of looking at things is that, in her own mild, very English way, Khan does actually seem a bit messed up. She certainly isn’t blessed with world conquering self-belief. You wonder how much of that has to do with a childhood blighted by tension between her Muslim father and her secular mother. When she was 11 Rahmat left the family. Khan won’t talk about it and yet you can sense the shadow of the separation in her work.
She’s never been especially confident, she says. It all came to a head as she sat down and tried to write a follow-up to her 2009 LP Two Suns. That record brought a Mercury nomination and the unabashed love of the high fashion set. Rather than pushing on however, the spotlight freaked her out, so much so that she began to wonder if she had it in her to sweat out another album.
Khan tried and tried to pen new material and nothing happened. The harder she worked, the emptier she felt. There was stuff she wanted to say – she’d recently split from her boyfriend, so it wasn’t as if she lacked motivation on that front. But no, the songs weren’t flowing. Maybe they never would.
“I went home and felt exhausted,” she recalls. “I was tired and creatively strung out. I attempted to nurture myself. I forced myself to go to lots of drawing classes. I shot some dance films. I wrote a script. I did ballet and cooking. I bought a kitchen and struck a pact with myself to stay at home and be nurturing. That was the first step towards regaining creative health.
“Once or twice I thought I didn’t have the ability to write a record, It never crossed my mind that I had nothing to say. I wondered if I had the ability to do it. You are constantly plagued with self-doubt. It’s part of the creative journey. On occasion it’s hard. Extremely hard.”
Coming to terms with (relative) fame was the toughest part. At one stage promoting Two Suns she almost compared herself to Madonna. However, she soon swung the other way with a vengeance, and became profoundly uncomfortable with her status as a public figure. Her response is the stripped down, almost minimalist, persona she presents on The Haunted Man.
“I found it overwhelming in phases. I quickly realised it’s all an illusion. How the outside world sees you is generally illusory and fickle. I was sick of getting into a battle with that, of being disrupted by it. Once I started on the new album, I put other people’s perceptions of me to the back of my mind.
“I was also uncomfortable with how [her quirky image] turned very mainstream. It got adopted very quickly. Also, I just got bored with it, with myself.”
In a way she wrote The Haunted Man as a last resort. After nearly ten years of Bat For Lashes, really, there was nothing else for the 31-year-old to do. It wasn’t as if she didn’t search for an alternative. She’d attempted to resume her career as a primary school art teacher, only to be stymied by departmental red-tape. A vague notion to volunteer at a hospital didn’t work out either. In the end, desperate for solitude, she took a job as an assistant to a gardener, at Monk’s House, outside London – the stately pile owned by Virginia Woolf’s sister and synonymous with the Bloomsbury literally circle.
“I went a couple of times a week,” she laughs. “I weeded and planted dahlias and onions and helped Mark the gardener. Spent loads of time outdoors with the dog. All good and healthy. Along the way I figured a lot of stuff out. I got myself back on track.”
In earlier interviews she’s talked about struggling with self-loathing. Today Khan dials back a little, saying the doubt never got to the point where she started to hate who she was. Sometimes it was a close thing, though.
“I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think that way,” she asserts. “It’s part of the human condition. What I had to do was learn how to love myself. Sometimes you feel self-pity – not self-loathing, I wouldn’t describe it as that deep. But you are unsure and lonely and sad. You don’t know quite how to deal with emotions. I realised that in the music business, it’s about
staying focused, about keeping going. It’s a long race you know, not a sprint.”
Naked or not, it is, you suspect, a race she’s determined to run all the way to the end.