Natasha Khan — better known as the musician Bat for Lashes — has just picked up her daughter, Delphi’s school photos. She proudly shows me snaps of a grinning three-year-old in a blue frilly dress.
Khan, 44, hasn’t heard Lily Allen’s comments about how having children derailed her pop career, but she nods when I ask her about it. “I can understand that,” she says. “In pop, you are a slave to the game, it’s difficult. And there’s always someone new coming along. There’s a moment where you are big stuff and then you are not.”
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Khan was very much “big stuff”. She was nominated for the Mercury prize three times, opened for Radiohead on tour (Thom Yorke says he admires her “sexual ghost voices”), supported Blur and Depeche Mode and was hailed as the next Kate Bush by Rolling Stone magazine. Her biggest songs were Laura — influenced by Lou Reed’s Berlin — and the more upbeat, Fleetwood Mac-style Daniel. Then in 2016 she left her label, Parlophone, and a year later she moved to Los Angeles. She released an album in 2019 but there’s been nothing since.
“I think I could have pursued something bigger but I’m too sensitive and shy,” she says, as she breaks off a hunk of chocolate marble cake. “I’d have been really burnt out and f***ed up if I’d gone down a pop route. I’m not as successful or famous as Lily Allen but in a way I’m glad because it’s allowed me to explore what I’ve wanted to explore.”
Having Delphi, whose father is an Australian actor and model, meant she felt compelled to start writing music again. Her new album, The Dream of Delphi, is all about the transformative experience of motherhood. She describes becoming a mother as “a breaking open of my heart that softened me”.
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She was 40 when she had Delphi and feels glad she waited. “My mum had me at 21 and if I’d had a kid at 21 I’d have been a mess. I always wanted children, but I’ve been able to enjoy it a bit more and I don’t resent her or feel like she trapped me because I had a career. I got the best of both worlds. Childcare means you don’t have time to swan around thinking about muses, but I like the polarity between domestic mundane repetitive things and freeform thinking.”
Would she like more children? “I wanted a tribe of them — because as a sensitive, creative child I wasn’t like other people. But they call it geriatric pregnancy at 35 so God knows what they would call it at 44.” She laughs.
Delphi’s father and Khan are no longer together, although he lives nearby and they co-parent. She speaks about “how hard the parenting dynamic can be on a relationship, because you are just tag teaming, you don’t have that quality time together. The early stages are so mum-centric, the hormones are so heightened that it’s hard for the man to be as engrossed as the woman. You are both grappling with a lack of resources and a lot of relationships suffer. I wanted to be in my cocoon, but for him to see me as a partner still and not just a milk machine.”
Before her home birth, she read about natural ways of preparing — doing squats and relaxing, and a Japanese tradition of lying down for a month after having a baby and drinking warm broths, avoiding draughts and rubbing sesame oil into your body. “I would love to be a matriarchal adviser because women have been fearmongered a lot around birth,” she says. “You aren’t meant to talk about it, there’s a lot of shame. I was lucky that I had a home birth that went well but I don’t think it would have if I hadn’t given myself support.”
On stage Khan is known for her elaborate headdresses and floaty dresses, but today she looks more cosy, in burnt orange cord dungarees with a black fleecy sweatshirt underneath. She is a naturally intense person, quick to share, but has mixed feelings about doing this on stage. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve opened up my insides and laid myself bare. I feel quite depleted. I wonder about it as the years go by. After every album I say I’m thinking about leaving.”
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Since she came into the music industry, she thinks two separate worlds have emerged, with different rules — and money. There’s Taylor Swift, “who is breathing oxygen on a different planet. There’s a chasm between big pop stars and everyone else, whereas in the Eighties it felt like everyone had a platform.” But she is positive about finding new music — at the moment, she likes Nilüfer Yanya, the Glass Beams and Mary Lattimore, who plays in her band and is also a solo harpist.
She moved back to London from California in January 2024. “There had been shootings in preschools,” she says. “There’s Trump … politically I find it hard to justify raising a daughter somewhere I can’t vote, I don’t have rights or healthcare. It’s hard to establish a sense of safety.”
Delphi adjusted quickly to London — although she has recently taken to speaking in an Australian accent after a trip to see her father’s family in Australia. “She came back calling everyone ‘mate’,” Khan says, laughing. “She tells me, ‘Put your phone away, mate.’”
Her forthcoming tour has been organised around Delphi’s school holidays. “It’s really hard — I have fantasies of the record company having a crèche so women could carry on doing what they love and also feel supported by the infrastructure of their industry. The mum guilt is awful and I see so many mums struggling with that. I always think about Kate Bush and how she disappeared and had her kid and didn’t play for years, but she had made so much money in the Eighties it was a real possibility.” She pauses. “But it’s not about the money, I still want to make music, I’ll never stop.”
The Dream of Delphi is out now (Mercury KX)
