The Anchoress______
Catherine Anne Davies’ latest album tackles some tough subjects. She reveals why she was ready to deal with her past.
It’s been a long time coming but Catherine Anne Davies has finally released her second album as The Anchoress. The Art Of Losing takes listeners through some of the toughest periods of the musician’s life as she explores grief, trauma and loss with raw emotion. Davies tells Prog how it’s helped her to heal and why she now feels more confident than ever.
For Catherine Anne Davies, the writing and recording of her new album presented a distinct challenge: how much of herself to reveal. “I’ve always been an incredibly private person,” the singer and multiinstrumentalist tells Prog. “I never would’ve chosen to share any of these details publicly or even to write songs about them, so it’s strange to me that I’ve made a record about it all. But when things accumulate to such a level, it becomes impossible for it not to spill out.”
The Art Of Losing, her second album as The Anchoress, is a richly intense work, rooted in Davies’ personal experience of grief, trauma and loss. It’s also often extraordinarily beautiful. Her lyrical eloquence and raw emotive power are measured in vivid arrangements that shift between whispers and tempests, carrying with them gusts of prog, folk, experimental rock and semi-classical music. Like all the best albums, this one feels like it maps out its own unique world.
“It’s kind of bookended, at the beginning, by my dad’s death,” Davies explains of the album’s subject matter and chronology. “That would be the prologue. He was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour [her father died during the recording of her 2016 debut, Confessions Of A Romance
“I want to explode the myth that going through something awful makes you write great records. It’s bullshit, because when I was at my worst I couldn’t even get out of fucking bed.”
Novelist]. Not long after that I began my journey through baby loss, with the first of many miscarriages. And I guess the other bookend was very unexpectedly being told that I had cervical cancer a couple of days before Christmas. That really was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’d just lost another baby and had another operation – because it was a very complicated loss – and it was just too much. I was so angry, just railing against the unfairness of it all.”
Diagnosed with complex PTSD, Davies underwent trauma therapy. It’s been a long process, she says, but she committed herself to it fully. Creating songs was essential to her restoration.
“It’s this idea of crystallising your experiences so that you’re transforming them in some way,” she reasons. “And that you’re making sense of what happened by writing or thinking about it. I also want to explode the myth that going through something awful makes you write great records. It’s bullshit, because when
I was at my worst I couldn’t even get out of fucking bed. A lot of the work was done in the pockets between the worst parts of it, so it was done in spite of it, not because of it. I don’t want people to have this idea that I was really sad writing all these songs.”
The Art Of Losing was actually completed in the spring of 2019, but Davies deliberately held back for a while. “I needed some time to physically and mentally heal and also just be in a place where I could talk about it,” she says. Last year’s lockdowns, and the ensuing disruption of the live music scene, only delayed its release further. She’s happy, if a little trepidatious, for the album to finally see light of day.
Music has always been a central force in Davies’ life.
Born in Wales, she grew up listening to her parents’ record collection: Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Carole King, The Carpenters. She was an obsessive listener, especially when it came to the latter. “The Carpenters were a huge presence in my life, which I definitely think goes some way to explaining my vocal thing,” she says. “You can’t spend all those years listening to Karen Carpenter without picking up something of her timbre.”
Her mum loved Motown, while her dad was “much more of a progger. He was really into Rick Wakeman and Yes.” In fact, as a paramedic who also had a thing for amateur theatre, he once took charge of lighting for a local Wakeman gig.
At school, Davies discovered a natural aptitude for music. She ended up playing flute in the National Youth Orchestra, but packed it in at 15 to take up guitar instead. “I never sang at all really until I was probably about 16,” she recalls. “And I didn’t start playing piano until I was at university. I have quite obsessive tendencies as a person. I have Asperger’s, which makes me very good at focused and concentrated tasks. And I think music became a real conduit for that. It transported me from what was not a particularly happy existence, for lots of reasons, into an alternative space.”
While music continues to sustain her, Davies admits she’s always felt like she doesn’t belong anywhere. One of the songs on The Art Of Losing is The Heart Is A Lonesome Hunter, named in reference to Carson McCullers’ 1940 novel The
Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, which charts the plight of various misfits in smalltown Georgia.
“I think you can surmise a lot about a person’s background and personality from the title of their PhD,” posits Davies, who holds hers in English Literature. “Mine was
entitled Putting My Queer Shoulder To The Wheel: America’s Homosexual Epics. It was all about the disenfranchised seizing the voice of authority and speaking to the nation. I remember one of the professors saying to me, ‘Why did you pick this?’ And me thinking, ‘Because I feel like an outsider, I feel strange. I feel like I don’t fit.’ The difference now is that as you get older you don’t care anymore. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there’s a lot of women – Hannah Peel, Jane Weaver, Mary Epworth, Bishi; all of whom are my friends – who are making music on their own. And we all tend to be producing our own work too.”
Davies is nevertheless partial to collaboration. While completing her PhD, she became the ‘Emerging Artist in Residence’ at London’s Southbank Centre, where she worked with Nitin Sawhney and the London Philharmonic. She was once a member of supergroup The Dark Flowers, whose ranks included Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy and Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr. Indeed, the Simple Minds connection was so strong that Davies recorded and toured as part of the band for five years. There have also been recordings with Steven Wilson, The Pineapple Thief, Paul Draper, Manic Street Preachers and Bernard Butler. Her and Butler’s studio album, In Memory Of My Feelings, came out last year.
Davies’ solo career began amid all this, in 2011, billed as Catherine AD. Today, she’s pretty dismissive of that phase in her creative life. “I don’t think Catherine AD ever really existed for me in a public sense,” she says. “I was just pissing around in my bedroom, doing these demos. When I was making Confessions… I needed something between me and other people, as a buffer. And that was The Anchoress. I felt more of an affinity with people like St Vincent, who’d taken on this moniker and had a kind of persona around them that enabled them, creatively, to be more experimental.”
Confessions… was evidence of a very singular talent. A conceptual piece about “deconstructing normative ideas of love and romance”, as narrated by a bunch of different fictional characters, its highly literate premise was shot through with pathos, black humour and vengeful intent. The Cure’s Robert Smith was so impressed that he invited her to play at the Meltdown festival. She also ended up touring with one of her formative heroes, Manic Street Preachers, going on to appear on 2018’s
Resistance Is Futile. Around the same time, while attending a King Crimson gig, Davies bumped into Robert Fripp and Toyah, who declared themselves fans: “I was like, ‘What!’ It was so weird that they even knew who I was, never mind saying to me: ‘We love your record.’” She also won the Limelight Award at the Prog Awards in 2016. All of this means that expectation has been unusually high for The Art Of Losing. Fortunately, Davies has delivered. And more. Its complex and infinitely varied musical language is a reflection of her lyrical themes. Recurring
behavioural patterns are signified by cyclical motifs; pockets of calm are conveyed by serene piano; anguish finds expression in jolting avant-rock; emotional release comes in rapturous clouds of synths and strings.
“I wanted it to be quite cinematic,” she says. “A lot of it was about manipulating sound in space, so something I used an awful lot was the Leslie cabinet. The rotating speaker is quite disorientating in terms of what it does, physically, to sound particles. I don’t know if I consciously thought of it at the time, but looking back I realise that a lot of the techniques I was using in post-production were about distorting and creating chaos and a sense of fragmentation, which is the language of trauma.”
The most traumatic moment arrives in the form of 5am. The song addresses a number of harrowing episodes in Davies’ life, not least sexual assault, which she suffered as a teenager. “I want to reframe this idea of what we’re shocked by and why,” she says. “And I wanted to bring a sense of how it feels when these things keep happening in your life. I wanted to talk about bodily fluids and the viscerality and physicality of it. And I guess to challenge the listener a little, rather than tie it all up in this neat little package that we tend to talk about: ‘How tragic, how sad, how shocking.’ Fuck that. Let’s talk about why this is happening.
“The numbers are shocking,” Davies expands. “And sadly, it would be more shocking for me to discover that one of my friends hasn’t experienced this. It was definitely a song that I wasn’t sure I would release or play to anyone. I did a version in Studio Two at Abbey Road last year with two good friends, who are string players. And we all had to have a moment and stop recording, because it was too much. And I think it’s about embracing that, rather than shying away from it. Maybe that’s what the whole record is about – that it’s okay to be upset by these things.”
Davies hasn’t been alone in the realisation of The Art Of Losing. James Dean Bradfield adds distinctive guitar to Show Your Face and joins Davies for a duet on The Exchange. Given that the Manics’ Holy Bible is a key influence on the album, it’s entirely fitting. The same goes for drummer Sterling Campbell and mixer Mario McNulty, both of whom were regular David Bowie contributors during his last few decades. Certainly, the Bowie of The Next Day and Blackstar is keenly felt in The Art Of Losing, as is the work of Kate Bush, Björk and Scott Walker.
Rightly, Davies considers the album a major leap. “I’m such a perfectionist that I look back at my debut and cringe,” she says. “And I think that’s healthy, because you have to feel like you’re progressing: sonically, lyrically and technically. I’m just so much more confident now. I’m not looking to someone else to underwrite the choices I’m making. And that’s a big shift in the way I think about things. This record feels like a springboard to the next thing.”
“I’m such a perfectionist that I look back at my debut and cringe. And I think that’s healthy, because you have to feel like you’re progressing.”
The Art Of Losing is out now via Kscope.
See www.theanchoress.co.uk for more information.