Natasha Khan, AKA Bat For Lashes walks onto the stage dressed all in white. She’s positively beaming, and well she might. Her sixth album (well-reviewed and rightly so on this site) The Dream Of Delphi might just be the best album she’s ever made. An ethereal thing of wonder, it’s certainly a contender for album of the year (are you listening, fellow scribes? Because we’ll be having to make these choices in a matter of weeks), and anticipation for tonight’s gig is high, and not just from me.
Delphi in this case is not the oracle of Ancient Greece but Khan’s daughter, which has inspired the new album, conceived and born during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some might sneer at this – after all, this is still a world in which a male office worker’s pictures of his children on his desk is admired, while a woman’s is sneered at as evidence that she’s not properly focused on her job. Khan is someone who comes across as at ease in her own skin, and during the course of the evening she reads not one but two poems about her daughter. In the hands of someone less skilled, this could come across as cloying, but she carries it off with aplomb.
Accompanied by a keyboardist and a guitarist cum bassist (actually Charlotte Hatherley, once of Ash), they engage in a bit of interpretative dance, but mostly set about performing a fantastic set, mostly focused on the new album. So we open with ‘At Your Feet‘ and the album’s title track, both of which are an excellent introduction to that angelic voice and the hauntingly ethereal music that accompanies it. She’s incredibly polite, too: ‘umm, you’ve all got beautiful faces, but is it possible to make it a bit darker, please?‘ Asked like that, how could the staff possibly refuse?
She seems as surprised as we are that it’s now eighteen years since her first album Fur and Gold, and we get excellent versions of ‘Tahiti‘ and ‘Sarah‘ from that record. The latter is about someone slightly crazy that she knew at university. She’s always used names as titles – and it’s a thrill to get ‘Daniel‘ as well. There’s also an airing for ‘Let’s Get Lost‘ the song she collaborated with Beck for the soundtrack of Twilight: The Eclipse.
Yet she quite possibly saves the best for the encore. As well as ‘All Your Gold,’ there’s the airing of a b-side that she tells us should have been on an album, ‘Wilderness‘ (seemingly record company issues were to do with it). It’s a shame, because this song about when she lived in Brighton and would go wild swimming is absolutely beautiful. Best of all, is the final song ‘Laura’ still my favourite song of hers. A simple voice and piano ballad, like the best of her songs it’s heartbreakingly beautiful and pretty much impossible not to love.
The Edinburgh International Festival have set the bar pretty high with their contemporary music artists this year, and Natasha Khan and co. are a shining example of just how good it’s been.
Photo courtesy of Bat For Lashes Facebook Page
