“I find it really hard to be inspired by grey soundbooth walls.” NATASHA KHAN of BAT FOR LASHES talks to JODY MACGREGOR about finding inspiration in unusual places.

Have you seen the clip for Bat For Lashes’ last single, What’s A Girl To Do? Go watch it on the Internet, I’ll be here waiting. I’d hate to spoil its awesomeness for you if you didn’t just go watch it, but I’m going to. It opens with Natasha Khan riding down a dark English country road alone, singing sweetly. At the chorus, from out of nowhere a gang of hoodie-wearing, animal-masked bike riders appear in formation, clapping their hands and jumping to the beat. Then Donnie Darko’s posse vanishes behind her again. It’s as gloriously lush and spooky as Edgar Allan Poe on an absinthe bender, or the song itself.

Khan explains that it took 22 hours of filming to get everything perfect. “We did actually do it for real,” she says, although she admits it’s not all one take like it looks – you can see a street sign appear behind her that wasn’t there before and there was a little computer trickery. “I think they did digitally get rid of a few elbows, but they are all cycling behind me.”

She goes a long way to create the right atmosphere in her videos, stage shows and recordings like the heartbreaking Sad Eyes. The demo was made as she wrote it, hungover after being dumped on her birthday (ouch). “My voice was really cracked and hardly coming through and I really wanted to recapture that, but it’s hard when you’re in a boring studio. So along with some other unusual recording techniques I was trying out, I thought, to get in that space again I need to get back to where I was. I actually got up at nine o’clock in the morning and downed half a bottle of Jack Daniels and smoked six cigarettes and then recorded it in a fog of blue, sad feelings.”

That’s commitment. Asked about those unusual recording techniques, she gives another example. “For Horse And I, if you isolate the vocal track you can actually hear that I took a 40-foot lead out into the forest and recorded my vocal track in the middle of the trees, in the dark with mist. It was raining and you can actually hear the rain on the leaves.”

There’s a lot of nature in her songs; animals such as horses, seals and bats recur throughout her album, Fur And Gold. She talks about them like Jungian symbols in the collective unconscious or Native American spirit animals come to deliver messages. “It was interesting for me to use those archetypal symbols in my storytelling to communicate to people things that you can’t spell out simply.” It’s all a part of the same aesthetic that has her wearing a feathered headpiece on stage, using a shaman stick as percussion or riding bikes with wolves and rabbits.

“I guess that what I’m trying to create is a universe of its own. A world with characters and visual symbols that are all connected.”

Fur And Gold is available through Spunk/EMI from July 28. Khan says she could be touring here, “Hopefully in December. That could just be me lying.”

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