Bat
This is Bat from Bat for Lashes.
Who I love. Apparently she comes from Brighton, which I’d take with a pinch of salt, because I’m from Brighton and I’ve never seen her… but as far as I can gather, a lot more people have seen her than seen me, so maybe I should start taking myself with a pinch of salt… maybe… even more of a pinch of salt than I’m already taking myself… and that’s already quite a lot of salt.
Anyway, she’s almost exactly like my 3rd girlfriend - Nat… which rhymes with Bat, so there’s another similarity. Nat was a bit less peacocky perhaps. Just a bit mind. Nat was unbelievably beautiful. Why the fuck did I split up with her? I must have been off my fucking rocker.
Back to Bat. This is a song she does:
Which is excellent.
She’s a perfect incarnation/manifestation of Batty English Female Genius… a join-the-dots thread from Mary Shelley (who ran away with a radical poet and wrote the original Frankenstein when she was 18) to Kate Bush to… Bjork maybe - although she isn’t strictly speaking English, but then again neither is Bat entirely, though she sounds English, and does (so she claims, but I’ve never seen her) come from Brighton, which is in England, albeit only just, on account of it being on the edge.
Here’s a gratuitous Kate Bush track… which has been stuck over the top of a montage of about 3 photos, which makes it the least irritating one:
I mean have you ever tried writing a song? I have. It’s easy. It’s easy to write songs that sound like everyone else - but listen to the melody of this… where the fuck did that come from? How do you do that? It’s as random as Frankenstein - and Bat is even better because she isn’t as squeaky, which can grate on your nerves after a while.
I was never that into Kate Bush though to be honest - though various guys in my band were - and we took Magic Mushrooms and listened to The Hounds of Love once, and the other guitar guy sat there clutching a chocolate brazil nut, pissing himself with laughter for about four hours… so he was left with a chocolatey hand and a brazil nut, not really remembering how it got there… and it sounded good then.
And then there was this other time when we came into the studio during the day and the guy who wrote everything was sitting upside down in an armchair, in total darkness having smoked a hell of a lot of something, listening (and singing along to) this 2 hour loop of the same 10 seconds of a Kate Bush song. That was cool. Of such thing are legends born.
–
I couldn’t carry on. It had become untenable, several times over. And now I can’t go back… but I miss my life.
