Bat for Lashes

“I live in a Moomin house in East London which I fill with blankets and nice crockery and get people round for dinner. When you travel a lot, you feel rootless and adrift - this is my sanctua...”

“I quite like androgyny.”

“When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano...”

“I have been listening a lot to The Carpenters and Neil Diamond, Elton John, and thinking, like, 'God, it'd be great to write a sort of subversive, alternative ballad,' like Lou Reed does so...”

“I don't like to be too submissive in the way I dress. I like quite boyish things, so I hardly ever wear high heels.”

“I always think that the exceptional people are those who remain outsiders but still communicate on a grand scale. I think I want everyone to feel more free, and so I feel really claustrophob...”

“'The Haunted Man' is about communication barriers between men and women, and in that song it's a woman's wait for her husband to come back from war. The vision for me was of a group of men a...”

“I want to communicate to the everyday person. I don't want to just roll around in my own avant-garde pool of coolness.”

“When I'm doing just music all the time, it can get really overwhelming. It's always challenging to switch it up a bit. And just because you're a musician, it doesn't mean that music is your...”

“All of the art that I love is about peeling back layers and delving into something that's in a subconscious or dream realm. People like Jan Svankmajer, or the artist Yoshimoto Nara, or David...”

“When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's...”

“I have lots of clothes that I don't wear because I'm bad for impulse buying. They sit in my cupboard looking forlorn, but if I haven't worn something for a couple of months, I usually realis...”

“In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is...”

“I'm not really frightened by experimenting - that's the main thing. I really like mixing very old beautiful pieces that are from thrift shops or that have some historical value with quite ne...”

“When I was little, people like Talking Heads were on the radio. There was something geeky yet groundbreaking about them.”

“My dad was a Muslim and would pray five times a day. I would pray with him as much as I could, in the morning before school. Sometimes he would tell us moralistic tales about genies, magic c...”

“I get people being frightened of me. One time I did this photo shoot where I had hairy armpits - I was really digging it, but they were like, 'We'll airbrush that out.'”

“Dad was an amazing storyteller and illustrator, which he did in his spare time - very inspiring and dramatic.”

“To be a great artist, you need to know yourself as best as you possibly can. I live my life and delve into my own psyche. It's more about exploring how I feel rather than making pale imitati...”

“I think there's a karmic purpose that souls make before they decide to come into people's bodies and become someone's parent, or become someone's child. Maybe my dad disappearing was his way...”