Indie Rock's Bewitching New Siren

David Sherry With a hit album and an ethereal look, Natasha Khan of Bat for Lashes is fast becoming another Stevie Nicks. She talks to Rachel Syme about mysticism, her drag-queen fetish, and an unquenchable crush on Ralph Macchio.

Looking around at the sea of feathers and sequins in the crowd at New York’s Bowery Ballroom last week, it would have been easy to confuse the current event—a performance by Natasha Khan, who goes by the band name Bat for Lashes—with another taking place across town, the Night of a Thousand Stevies, an annual Dionysian drag-queen celebration devoted to all things velvet, lace, and Stevie Nicks. The girls huddled in the venue together in small covens awaiting Khan’s arrival, many wearing sparkly headpieces and peacock flourishes, glitter dusted around their eyes—playing dress-up for each other in the dark.

“My mystical side came from growing up in England, and reading a lot of fairy tales. You know, swimming in lakes, collecting miniature butterflies and putting them in boxes and writing letters to nymphs.”

When Khan finally took the stage—wearing an oversize Victorian ruff around her neck, a dripping mass of gold chains, animal prints, leather leggings, white lace gloves, and sparkly war paint on her brow bones—the feathered flock went mute. The singer crouched down at the foot of the stage to light some candles and arrange her set-up of Virgin Mary figurines and other idols, singing an a cappella incantation into her microphone about walking city streets alone and encountering crystal towers. Her drummer joined in, filling the room with a booming electronic beat. Back in the crowd, several fans looked as if their hearts had just clicked back on. Khan smiled wide, and sang on about emerald cities, hot white diamonds, and burning rainbows. She played for over an hour, jumping up and down from her piano, dancing out front to synthesizers, strumming on a vintage Marxophone—and obliging two encores.

The whole affair (faux-bohemian fangirls, talks of crystal revelations) felt decidedly retro, and that is exactly how Khan wants it. The 29-year-old from Brighton, England, now touring on her acclaimed sophomore album, Two Suns, seems like a woman from another era—unapologetically fancy, enchanted by fairies and exotic birds, and interested in mysticism and Christian iconography. She cites as her inspirations the darker works of Cindy Sherman and Diane Arbus, and cheesy 1980s cult films (much of her new record is dedicated to Ralph Macchio’s character from The Karate Kid—“Give me a boy in a cut-off grey sweatsuit and he’s mine!” she coos), and though she takes advantage of modern technologies to make her music, she is not much interested in 2009.

“I live in an old house in Brighton; it’s from 1860,” she says to me later, as she dines on “a little nibbly” of pheasant pate at Brooklyn’s Hotel Delmano, a reimagined Prohibition-era cocktail bar. “There is this old lady downstairs called Maude, and she keeps the loveliest garden, with flowers everywhere. I have to live near nature now; I lived in Brooklyn on and off for three years, and I couldn’t deal with the endless concrete situation. There are so many vibrations here that you can’t sit still and let anything bubble up.”

She goes on: “My mystical side came from growing up in England, and reading a lot of fairy tales. You know, swimming in lakes, collecting miniature butterflies and putting them in boxes and writing letters to nymphs. I spent hours watching David Attenborough nature documentaries on the BBC, and being brought up so religious, I loved those archetypal characters, the myths, the duality of Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary.”