As Bat for Lashes, Natasha Khan has marked herself out as one of the most colourful and compelling singers since Kate Bush. Her Mercury-nominated debut of 2006, Fur and Gold, pitched tales of suburban teenage angst against otherworldly gothic pop. For Two Suns in 2009 she adopted a femme-fatale alter ego called Pearl and evoked tales from the New York underground. The Bride (2016) was a concept album about a woman whose fiancé dies in a car crash on the way to the wedding. Everything Khan has done has been imaginative and romantic, operating in life’s grey areas. Didactic she is not.
“The thing is, I am a grey area,” says Khan, 39, who is the daughter of the Pakistani squash player Rehmat Khan