Bat for Lashes

Khan was born in London on 25 October 1979. Until the age of five she was raised in Wembley where her parents had met and married several years before. She was born to a Pakistani father, Rehmat Khan (a former professional squash player from Peshawar) and to an English mother. Her father decided to relocate the family to the commuter town of Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire to help with his coaching of future squash world open winner Jahangir Khan, Natasha's cousin. As a child Khan, along with her sister Suraya and brother Tariq, attended her uncle's squash matches. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Khan reflected that seeing her uncle helped inspire her. "The roar of the crowd is intense; it is ceremonial, ritualistic, 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." With her father's abandonment of the family Khan turned to the piano. Deciding to play improvised pieces instead of attending lessons, Khan felt the piano became an outlet for her emotions. "You need to find a channel to express things, to get them out", she said. During her teens Khan was also a victim of racism. Speaking about her time in after-school clubs she claimed "the kids there totally ripped me to shreds." This rejection led Khan to rebel, making the decision to "bunk off" school and stay at home listening to music. "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". With the completion of her GCSEs and A-Levels she decided to embark on a road trip through America with her boyfriend at the time, using the money earned from her part time job at a local card-making factory. After spending three months touring through the US and Mexico, Khan returned to the UK and settled in Brighton to study a degree in music and visual arts at the University of Brighton. While at university her experimental work was influenced by artists such as Steve Reich and Susan Hiller, and she produced multi-media work centred on sound installations, animations and performance.