Bat for Lashes: off the wall

There used to be something quirky and odd about pop bands,' says the 29-year-old Anglo-Pakistani singer Natasha Khan, better known as Bat for Lashes. 'When I was little, people like Talking Heads were on the radio. There was something geeky yet groundbreaking about them. If I was a kid now, I don't know if I would be boasting in 20 years time about pop music in 2009. It's all a bit samey.'

Bat for Lashes first appeared on the musical horizon in 2006. In a British music scene blighted by a quagmire of blokeish indie bands such as Razorlight and the Kooks, Khan offered an appealingly enigmatic alternative. Soon afterwards she was likened to pop-esotericists Kate Bush and Björk: the latter described her as 'brilliant' following an early performance in London. Khan's debut album, Fur and Gold, which had a haunting, celestial beauty, was an immediate success with the critics, with Radiohead's Thom Yorke likening it to Grimm's Fairy Tales. Glastonbury followed, with Khan performing in the Indian headdress that was to become her trademark. But it was her Mercury Prize nomination in 2007 (Khan was outside favourite to take the prize ahead of Amy Winehouse and the eventual winners, the Klaxons), in addition to her two Brit Award nominations for Best Breakthrough Artist and Best Female last year that brought her to the attention of a wider audience.

I meet her on a gorgeous mid-January day outside an old-fashioned cafe on the seafront near her home in Hove, East Sussex. Khan is wearing a green parka – it is colder than it looks – black leggings and moccasin boots. She is beautiful: part knowing Asian goddess, part wide-eyed girl-next-door, and has a multi-faceted personality, switching swiftly from giggly 1980s pop fanatic – confessing to an obsession with the soundtrack to the film Karate Kid – to aggrandising philosopher (she is a big fan of the psychiatrist Carl Jung).

Khan is also a self-confessed control freak. She writes all of her songs, designs the costumes that she wears on stage as well as the set (in 2007 she transformed the stage of Koko in Camden into an enchanted woodland) and album artwork, comes up with video ideas and co-produces all her material with Coldplay's producer, David Kosten. 'Maybe it is quite big-headed of me to think that I can rule over every area,' Khan says. 'But I just feel so specific about what I am trying to do.'

One of the most visible signs of Khan's increasing fame was a sudden preponderance of girls affecting her shaman-chic of gold headbands, feathers and totems. 'I'd walk past and look at them and think, is that anything to do with me, or just something you saw in a magazine?' She likes to display a certain aloofness – 'It's not really anything to do with me' – but it is clear that she is slightly excited by it. 'When Madonna first came out everybody started wearing fingerless gloves and lace in their hair,' she says, before swiftly checking herself. 'Not that I'm in that same league.'

Not yet, but Khan's soon-to-be released second album, Two Suns, brings her pop sensibility to the fore. While the first album was insular – a 'protected, quite vulnerable place' in Khan's view – Two Suns, recorded in California, New York and London, unleashes a polyrhythmic explosion of synthetic beats. The Bat for Lashes sound is intact, yet styles come thick and fast; the gothic-electro of the first single, Daniel; the gospel blues of Peace of Mind, backed by a choir made up of sassy gay singers from disco-era New York.

Perhaps the most affecting song on the album is Big Sleep, on which Khan duets with Scott Walker of the Walker Brothers, an artist more known for his increasingly impenetrable output and reclusiveness than his artistic cooperation. 'I emailed him the track with some notes, almost as a dare.' Walker replied, and soon Khan received his part via email. 'He wrote, "I really hope it works for you. I thought about it a great deal and tried to get into character." ' The result is one of the tenderest performances by Walker in decades.

The album documents Khan's two-year relationship with William Lemon, the lead vocalist in the New York avant-rock group Moon and Moon (also the title of a track on Two Suns). The couple met in early 2006, after Khan was introduced to him by a mutual friend, the anti-folk star Devendra Banhart. The arc of their affair inspired the album, from the longing Khan experienced when she was apart from him for long spells promoting Fur and Gold, to the couple's disintegration once she had moved to Brooklyn to start a new life with him.

'When I finished touring Fur and Gold I was just like, "What am I doing? What do I have? Where is my home?" I didn't really know where it was, so I went to New York to try and make it there.' In February 2008, Khan, partly inspired by the Hubert Selby Jr novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, moved into Lemon's apartment in the Puerto Rican quarter of Brooklyn's hipster epicentre, Williamsburg. Yet the reality proved tougher than the dream, and Khan and Lemon's relationship began to deteriorate, the party ethos of Brooklyn a deciding factor. 'They have a particularly hedonistic Peter Pan lifestyle over there,' she says. 'I thought it was going to be really fun but I found it even lonelier than before.' Three months later she moved back to Brighton: the couple split up at the end of the year.

But while living in Brooklyn, Khan invented an alter-ego, Pearl, a hedonistic blonde who inhabits the album alongside Khan. 'I bought a blonde wig and started dressing up as her. William and I would go out on the streets of Brooklyn at night and he'd take pictures of me.' Khan has created the artwork for Two Suns, depicting herself on the album's front cover in the desert and an image of Pearl on the back. Both characters wear a lace hoodie that Khan designed with Alexander McQueen and his label McQ. 'Somebody I know knew him and asked his designers to make them for me,' she says. 'It is like getting a suit made or something. If you can get it made by Savile Row then you would, wouldn't you?' Khan was chuffed with the results, but there are no plans to collaborate in the future.

The concept of Pearl is quite a conceit, but Khan does not entertain accusations of affectation. 'Perhaps people might think I'm really pretentious but it was just a spontaneous idea that felt right. It sat in my chest properly, and felt like something I can believe in.'

Belief is important to Khan, whether it be her pantheistic inclinations, or the moments of whimsy, such as Pearl. 'My dad was a Muslim and would pray five times a day. I would pray with him as much as I could, in the morning before school. Sometimes he would tell us moralistic tales about genies, magic carpets and wondrous lands. My mother is not religious – she's just English.'

Khan was born in Wembley in 1979. Her father is Rahmat Khan, a member of the Khan squash-playing dynasty. Born and brought up in Pakistan, Rahmat moved to England in 1970 when he was 20. A few years later he met Natasha's mother, Josie, then 17, who was working as a receptionist at Wembley Squash Centre, where Rahmat used to coach. They soon married and started a family in Wembley where they lived until Natasha was five. 'We lived in a high-rise flat there,' Khan says. 'My dad was always away working so it was just me and my mum a lot of the time. We would go to Brent Cross shopping, or go to Wimpy.'

Rahmat was a leading squash player during the 1970s, but he sacrificed his own career when he saw the promise in his nephew Jahangir Khan – Natasha's cousin – and became his coach. In 1981, when he was 17, Jahangir became the youngest player ever to win the World Open, the highest accolade in squash, and is still today recognised as the greatest player of all time. As Jahangir's career progressed, so did Rahmat's, and he moved the entire family to the leafy commuter town of Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire. It is a period that Khan remembers fondly. 'They would start at 5.30 every morning, drink raw egg shakes and train for hours,' she says. Rahmat and Jahangir became sporting celebrities, with Jahangir appearing on A Question of Sport, and Ian Botham a regular visitor to the Khan family home.

Khan, along with her mother and younger siblings, sister Surriya and brother Tariq, would travel the world to follow the matches. 'The roar of the crowd is intense; it is ceremonial, ritualistic,' she says. 'I feel like the banner got passed to me but I carried it on in a creative way. It is a similar thing, the need to thrive on heightened communal experience.' Visits to relatives in Pakistan each summer had a great effect on Khan. 'They were very tactile; they grab you and squeeze you and push you into their bosoms. They are openly emotional, crying, and praying.' It proved quite a contrast to her reserved English relatives: 'Don't spoil the coiffure,' Khan's grandfather would say, if she got too close.

She credits her parents, too, for her imaginative streak. On family occasions they would jump at the chance to dress up. 'I had Hallowe'en parties every year as it was my birthday five days before. My parents would actually put prosthetic noses on and my dad would wear a top-hat and tails, put on a fake curly moustache and hold a pipe.'

Khan's father left the family when she was 11, leaving Natasha's mother with the task of bringing up three children alone. She won't talk about the ins and outs of why he left – 'I don't think I should go into it, it is quite personal' – but she suggests that the clash in cultures between her parents might have been a contributing factor. So, too, may have been the deterioration in her father and Jahangir's winning partnership: the pair split in 1990 after Rahmat voiced concerns that Jahangir was forsaking training to spend time with his girlfriend, who was, somewhat prophetically for Khan, a Pakistani pop singer.

Her father's departure had a great affect on Khan. At first she retreated to the piano, shunning lessons in favour ofimprovisation. 'I suppose it was the time when things become a little bit more real,' she says. 'I think it strengthened my desire to play and write and become a bit more serious about it: in that situation, you need to find a channel to express things, to get them out.'

Coping with the sudden loss was made all the more difficult by the racism that she encountered in her teens. 'I remember once my mum made me go to this after-school club. I was really geeky. I blow-dried my fringe to the side and put gel in it, trying so hard desperately to be cool. The kids there totally ripped me to shreds. They called me a "f***ing Paki". I didn't tell my mum that much because I was embarrassed but I remember being mortified. I just wanted to disappear.'

Khan's response to the upheaval in her life was to rebel. She bought herself a guitar, pulled on Dr Marten boots, and applied plenty of red lipstick and hairspray. 'I used to bunk off school. My mum would take me to the train station and I pretended to get the train; she'd drive to work and I would go home and play a tape of Nirvana all day, going round my house screaming and singing it.' At 15 she was suspended for throwing a chair and swearing at a teacher. 'I was an outsider at school. When I came back from being suspended they had told the small group of friends that I did have there that they weren't allowed to talk to me because I was a really bad influence. Then it got quite lonely.'

She got through her GCSEs and A-levels, but had no plans to find a job or go to university. Instead, inspired by Jack Kerouac and the Beats, she dreamt of an American road trip with her then boyfriend. To save money she worked in a Christmas-card-packing factory. 'My internal imaginary life was really fruitful at that time. I remember packing cards and just listening to songs that I had made the night before on my mini-disc player. All day long just listening and dreaming, while counting the cards to be packed; 'One-two-three… four-five-six-seven-eight-nine… 10-11-12.'

Taking in New York, San Francisco and Mexico in three months, Khan, then 19, decided that the freewheeling lifestyle was for her. 'We stayed with this musician couple and their daughter in New York. It rained all the time but we didn't care. We just immersed ourselves with the romanticism of it all, listening to Leonard Cohen over and over, running through the streets eating muffins and pizza.'

Returning from the States she moved to Britain's very own bohemian enclave, Brighton, and in 2000 studied for a degree in music and visual arts at the University of Brighton.

Khan wrote songs while at university, but it was not until 2004 that she started Bat for Lashes, so named simply because she liked the way the random words sounded together. After building up a following in Brighton, in early 2006 she was picked up by the small record label Echo. 'It was very small. Me and my manager set up our own team and did everything ourselves on a grassroots level.' By 2007 a number of labels were vying for Khan's signature. In the end Echo made a deal with the EMI subsidiary Parlophone. 'It is a much more well-oiled machine. It is a bit like being at school again; the weird kid who doesn't quite fit. But I feel like my ambition is large, so the label I am on needs to be too.'

After all the moving around, Khan has finally admitted that Brighton is her home. 'I bought my own flat here recently, which felt like a massive, grown-up thing to do'. After she finished university, she worked as a nursery-school teacher for three years and confesses a desire to have children, but not yet. 'I have got those mothering tendencies, but I know they aren't going to go anywhere. I'm in a process at the moment which I am enjoying, discovering a lot of other things. I feel quite childlike still, quite silly.'

• 'Two Suns' (Parlophone) is out on April 6, the single, 'Daniel', on Monday