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Finding a voice amidst the loss
Singer The Anchoress on coping with tragedy, the inescapable reality of women’s lives and an eye-opening Simple Minds connection
WHEN you have made an album that is full of death, loss and grief maybe it is serendipitous, Catherine Anne Davies suggests, to release it in the middle of a global pandemic.
“In the past people have shied away from talking about all these things,” the singer-songwriter and multiinstrumentalist tells me down the line from Buckinghamshire where she’s currently shielding. “I think now we are forced to confront it every single day. Everybody knows somebody who’s been touched by covid and we’re all being forced to think about making a will, talking about what we would like to happen if we die, in a way that I think, pre-pandemic, we just weren’t very good at.”
If so, then The Art of Losing, Davies’ second album, released under her alter ego The Anchoress, might make for the perfect soundtrack for the moment we are living through. Both thrilling and tough to listen to. Dark and painful, yet full of beauty.
Davies in conversation is chatty, entertaining company, whether she is talking about her love of Depeche Mode (“Martin Gore is probably one of my favourite songwriters”), the years she spent touring with Simple Minds or Julian of Norwich (“the original anchoress,” Davies points out when talking about the 14th-century English mystic).
But it’s difficult to avoid the pain that envelops the new album. Produced by Davies herself, mixed by regular David Bowie collaborator Mario McNulty and featuring a guest appearance from James Dean Bradfield, The Art of Losing takes on themes such as the death of loved ones, sexual assault and baby loss, while sonically conjuring up the ghosts of Talk Talk, Depeche Mode and even PJ Harvey. The Art of Losing is a lush yet scouring follow-up to Davies’ 2016 debut Confessions of a Romance Novelist.
Finished in the summer of 2019, the album was meant to see the light of day a year ago, “but obviously 2020 had other ideas,” its creator points out.
“So, I’ve been sitting on it for a while. But that’s actually had its upsides. Some of the subjects I tackle on it are difficult and the upside of having had that extended delay is I’ve got some distance from the events. So, it’s a lot easier for me to talk about than it would have been 18 months ago.”
The album began from a place of anger as Davies responded to the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the Harvey Weinstein revelations and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings (all of which can be heard swirling around the single Show Your Face).
But as the recording process went on, Davies was hit by wave after wave of personal tragedy.
As a result, work and life were inextricably linked during the recording, most notably when she was working on the track My Confessor.
“At the precise moment I was recording the guitar, my dad died. My mum called me in the middle of a take to say he had died. He was 59. It’s no age at all. I wasn’t able to come back to that song for a very long time.
“And then to have subsequently visited upon me multiple baby losses, and then to be told I had cervical cancer … It was just …. I feel like it’s quite logical to look for a reason because, otherwise, what does it mean? It’s cruel. It’s unbelievably cruel. And so, the music for me was a means both to process what was happening to me and to try and find some meaning in it too.”
She pauses for a moment. “I don’t think I achieved either of those things.”
The weight of all that must have been appalling. Trauma therapy and counselling helped, she says. As did making a podcast, also called The Art of Losing. Speaking to the songwriter Sophie Daniels who had also gone through baby loss for the podcast was hugely beneficial, Davies says.
“Talking to her about the wisdom she had come to, which was, ‘You cannot beat grief. You cannot beat this. You cannot win this. You cannot succeed at this.’ That was really the best thing anyone said to me.”
This all might make the album sound impossibly difficult to listen to, but it is anything but. From its Debussyesque opener Moon Rise (Prelude), it is an immersive, gorgeous
Jim Kerr is such a showman. And I studied hard and absorbed everything
record. Yes, it is angry, and, yes, at time the words are tough. But the music – rich and strange, propulsive, at times synthy – is always a consolation.
“When I say to people what the new album is about, they’re expecting something sombre and downtempo,” Davies admits. “But I really wanted to challenge myself to not write an album of ballads or funereal marches. That was really important to me.”
AT times, though, the album, no question, makes for discomfiting listening. Should we find a song like 5am, which takes in domestic abuse, sexual assault and baby loss, beautiful? Because it is.
“I think what I wanted to do with that song was present it as a triptych; three different scenes that are very common to female experience. It would be more unusual for me to talk to a female friend who has not experienced one of those things and perhaps that’s not readily acknowledged.”
And acknowledgement is key here. she thinks. We need to talk about baby loss because in the past as a culture we haven’t.
“Absolutely. I think we’re making huge strides in the last few years. It’s a subject people are uncomfortable talking about. But, you know, the common thread through all of this – talking about death, talking about baby loss – is that people are often scared to say anything because they don’t want to say the wrong thing.
“And I remember one of my friends saying, ‘You know, the worst thing has already happened. There is nothing that you can say that will make it worse.’ People should be less afraid of saying the wrong thing.
We need to talk about the physical experience of baby loss, too, she says. “Because it’s not just about the emotional fallout. It’s about the surgery, the blood. Let’s not dress it up in a package and call it a stillbirth or a miscarriage because the language doesn’t do justice to the experience.
“And that was why I wanted to write 5am on the album because I wanted to put the blood at the centre of it because every person who I was encountering in hospital post-surgery was not acknowledging that reality for me – that I had bled for nine weeks.
It’s a huge amount to lose and it makes you feel very physically frail and weak.
“I can hear myself saying this and thinking this is an uncomfortable conversation to have, but it shouldn’t be. It’s just a physical reality and I find it enormously helpful to just be very, very honest at the time because there are not many things that help.”
Music is one of them, presumably? “Absolutely. I’m a workaholic, so work was exactly like that, the thing I was grasping for in the dark. It kept me going on a daily basis; something to cling to, something to do, something to take up the huge, gaping, painful hours.”
Some back story. Catherine Anne Davies had a peripatetic childhood which started in south Wales, took her to Australia and then brought her back to the UK. As a kid she learned to play the flute and became good at it very quickly, which led to a place in the local youth orchestra and eventually the National Youth Orchestra.
“And then I discovered the Manic Street Preachers and started to teach myself guitar.”
Even then, though, she didn’t pursue the limelight, instead opting for a life in academia.
“I made the first album while I was doing my PHD, all the while being really super-quiet. Even my boyfriend at the time never heard me sing.”
It was working with Simple Minds that brought out the rock goddess in her. She’d met Jim Kerr writing songs for the supergroup they were both involved with, The Dark Flowers. Next thing she knew, he invited her to tour with the Scottish band in 2014.
“I went from playing shows in front of 500 to 600 people to playing shows in front of 30,000 people, which is a bit of a culture shock. But I’m a quick learner.
“I had faith because Jim saw something in me. I learnt from the best. They’re incredible. Jim is such a showman. And I studied hard and absorbed everything.
“I went from being quite meek and shy for the first few months, to, by the end of the first tour, being right up the front of the stage throwing some moves around, clad in PVC and high heels. I found my confidence.”