Gig review: Bat For Lashes at Belgrave Music Hall, Leeds

Bat For Lashes – aka Natasha Khan – is standing in front of a floor length mirror. Her white, embroidered body stocking and wafting arm movements make her resemble Kate Bush auditioning for a part in Suspiria. The electronic rumbles, which are triggered by an anonymous stagehand, and the blinding vertical light strips meanwhile have the unexpected experimentation of Björk.

This, then, is the Motherwitch era that was promised for this up close and personal show. One of only two dates in the run up to the band’s performance as part of the Christine & The Queens-curated Meltdown Festival, it’s a chance for Khan to test out new material and re-work her back catalogue.

She opens with three new and as yet unnamed tracks, taken from upcoming sixth album The Dream of Delphi. They continue the filmic, narrative bent of her recent releases but largely dispense with the 80s synth-pop of 2019’s The Lost Girls. In the place of iron-clad choruses and ear-worm melodies there are neo-classical piano lines, reverb-washed vocals, and basslines that are so low the bar staff are handing out free earplugs.

The outfit and choreography, which continue a longstanding interest in image, initially suggest a conceptual hauteur. It’s not long, however, before she’s joking about being a diva for demanding no air-con, getting the audience to howl in appreciation to the harpsichord-driven ‘Horse and I’, and ad-libbing a line of The Human League’s ‘Human’ when a cough forces her to abort ‘Close Encounters’.

There’s something about Florence Welch in the way she connects with the audience, combining a theatrical mysticism with a caring nature. In a parallel universe it’s even plausible that Welch covered ‘The Hunger’, which is the closest the set comes to conventional pop. The track makes it clear she could have pursued a commercial career but instead she’s favoured restless creative reinvention.

This means that despite only being backed by programmed beats and a live violinist, who also provides occasional backing vocals, she covers a lot of musical terrain. The delicate piano ballad ‘Deep Sea Diver’ sees her trying on Tori Amos for size, ‘What’s a Girl to Do?’ combines electronics with 60s girl group pop in a way that Unloved would envy, and the acapella, handclap driven ‘Sleep Alone’ has one foot in traditional folk.

The reinterpretation of old tracks isn’t always successful, the dance beat that crashes into the delicate ‘Mountains’ being so pounding you wonder if it’s simply the consequence of a bad sound mix. But when it does work it either contemporises material or casts it in a new light, as when she segues a section of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘True Colors’ into ‘Kids in the Dark’, or when a violin replaces piano on ‘Laura’, possibly her best-known track.

It’s a set that raises high expectations for her return as Motherwitch. The coinage may be a play on her motherhood and side project, Sexwitch, but it’s also a concept that’s driven by forward-thinking creativity. She’s already played the mystic, the femme-fatale, and the vampire girl but, as she promises an audience member, “Don’t worry darling, there’s going to be so much more!”