“No, woah, oh, woah, no, no, no,” howls Natasha Khan into a microphone, dark hair flailing, long arms wafting, musically transported somewhere a lot further east than this basement venue’s east London postcode. And then, without contradiction: “Ah, yeah, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!”
This is Sexwitch, a side project fronted by Khan, known more often as Bat for Lashes. It’s an outfit that pretty much does what it says on the tin, all in capitals and with a smile, but with enough voodoo to convince. Sexwitch have played just one previous gig, as unannounced special guests at the Green Man festival in August. No more shows are scheduled, so there is more than a little of the hoodoo of restricted supply in the cramped, excited room.
There has always been a tension in Khan’s work as Bat for Lashes between her desire to make accessible pop music and her penchant for tribal rhythms and taking the hallucinogenic drink ayahuasca. Witness the contrast between Khan’s early, first-album incarnation as a feather headdress-sporting enchantress, and 2012’s Laura, the rather more catholic single that is Khan’s most well-known song. Sexwitch is giving her inner wiggy pagan free rein while she prepares a new B4L record, with an accompanying film.
Behind Khan on the tiny stage, producer and Speedy Wunderground label owner Dan Carey pounds vintage keyboards and some modern drum pads. Various members of Toy, the psychedelically inclined indie-rock outfit, kick Sexwitch’s first song, Ghoroobaa Ghashangan, up another gear. Khan smiles a little too often, perhaps, to maintain the illusion of a sybaritic sorceress, but the track’s heady funk is convincing.
Ghoroobaa Ghashangan was originally popularised by Ramesh, a Persian singer active in the 70s. A version of it was collected on Zendooni, a 2012 compilation on Pharaway Sounds, focusing on pre-revolutionary pop in what is now Iran.
Around the same time, Carey – who worked on Bat for Lashes’ last album, 2012’s The Haunted Man, and has produced Toy – united Toy and Khan for a limited-edition one-off single on Speedy Wunderground. It was a cover of another Persian pop song (also on Zendooni) called The Bride, where Khan’s effects-laden vocals plugged into a rich vein of eastern-tinged exotica on the 60s-70s cusp, spurred on by the driving grooves of Toy.
Carey, Toy and Khan enjoyed making it so much they reconvened for a whole album of psychedelic world-pop covers – the self-titled Sexwitch, released two weeks ago to enthusiastic reviews. The six tracks on the album take in songs from Iran, Thailand, Morocco and one – War in Peace – from Oar, the cult solo album by the late Skip Spence, formerly of Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape. The common denominator – sometimes innate, sometimes imposed – is the songs’ hypnotic quality, whipped up by Sexwitch into a cogent ritualistic groove not a million miles from Goat, the last band to work similar material out of the specialist racks and into wider circulation.
Sexwitch play all six tonight, in a different order, plus The Bride – a necessarily short set because, as Khan puts it apologetically, “we don’t have any more”. It’s a pity, because Sexwitch are just hitting their stride when the set list runs out.
As the oldest, The Bride is their best-known track, met with whoops and swaying. Wordier than many of Sexwitch’s offerings, it sees Khan’s soaring vocal combine both authority and abandon – this is a bride not keen on her marital status – amped up by Toy’s raw psych-rock remix, a hairier take on the more mellifluous original. Ha Howa Ha Howa and Helelyos lean more towards dance music. Lam Plearn Kiew Bao stands out, with a calmer and more considered treatment from Carey and Toy, Khan’s soprano whispering out a love song.
Throughout, there is the ever-present risk that Sexwitch might tip over into parody – too sexy or too witchy. But Khan proves adept at combining a certain measure of slink with just enough primeval clout. It all gets a little orgasmic on Kassidat El Hakka, the night’s fiercest song, saved for the end. But the context is significant. The words are bleakly existential, Khan singing English translations of the Arabic. “When I die, I’ll go back to where I was,” chants Khan. “Nothing!” Driven by Toy’s nagging mosquito guitar lines, circling relentlessly, urged on by double percussion, Khan works herself into a persuasively transcendent state.
