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BAT FOR LASHES US musical auteur returns with new album and stripped-back live show
In the two-and-a-half years that she has been living in Los Angeles, Natasha Khan, aka the imaginative, inventive musical auteur Bat for Lashes, has taught meditation to pre-release prisoners, worked with teenagers at a continuation school to help them towards graduation, enrolled in a screenwriting course at UCLA and driven a heck of a lot – west to the coast for walks, nature trails and camping expeditions, and around the Mexican neighbourhoods where she lives in east LA.
The Goonies and all those west coast Steven Spielberg-style fi lms that I was obsessed with as a kid.’
Lost Girls is more John Carpenter than John Williams, with its analogue arpeggios and unabashed saxophone solos. Khan – who has already won an Ivor Novello award for her soundtrack to British TV horror series Requiem, contributed a track to the Stephen King adaptation Castle Rock and directed a couple of short fi lms – would love to script and score her own horror fi lm.
Specifi cally, her new home has inspired the latest Bat for But, ironically, this most fi lmic of albums will be promoted
Lashes album, the sleek, synthtastic Lost Girls, which is saturated in the (sub)urban romance and neon noir of LA’s diverse cityscape, as captured and celebrated so often on camera. with one of Khan’s most stripped-back shows to date, featuring just her, an additional synth player and little in the way of the projections, costumes or visuals which have embellished previous Bat for Lashes performances.
‘I was doing a lot of driving round at night and going to the ‘I haven’t done that since 2006 when I went out with just
beach,’ she says. ‘It was a very romantic period in my life, and living in these suburban areas in LA with all the pine trees and telegraph poles and mountains in the distance and kids riding bikes, I did feel like I was revisiting ET and The Karate Kid and a guitar and my beat machines,’ she says. ‘I’m nervous and scared but I think it’s good to push myself and let the music take people somewhere in their minds.’ (Fiona Shepherd) ■ Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, Sat 23 Nov.
1 Nov 2019–31 Jan 2020 THE LIST 103
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