FEATURE: Spotlight: The Anchoress

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Talie Eigeland

 

The Anchoress

__________

I may have spotlighted her before…

but, as a new album has been announced, I did want to talk about the wonderful The Anchoress. The moniker of Catherine Anne Davies, I have written about her a lot and reviewed her work. However, it is a perfect time to reconnect with a phenomenal artist and producer. One of our very best producers and musical minds, I think I first connected with her over our shared love of Kate Bush, especially her gifts as a producer. I would urge everyone reading this to listen back to her previous work, as she is one of the most talented artists this country has produced for decades. Work that is so nuanced and layered. Important, urgent, beautiful, potent and fascinating, I can attest to her brilliance as a live performer, having seen a The Anchoress show a few years back. Featuring her fellow Welsh queen, Gwenno, The Anchoress’s new single, I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy, has a title that makes you smile but also makes you ask questions. Knowing that particular phrase holds power to The Anchoress. As a mother herself, what compelled her to write that song. I am going to come to a very recent NME interview where she discussed that single. I am going to pick a physical copy up over the weekend, though I felt it important to source it now to provoke and move others to do likewise. The Anchoress has also announced a date in London to promote her forthcoming album. Though I shall also come to that very soon! I am rushing this out, as a lot has dropped at once, and it is very exciting for fans of hers. Prior to getting to an interview from last year, prior to getting to that NME intervbiew, I feel it is worth highlighting. You can actually read details of the forthcoming album, As We Once Were. I will bring in another Substack feature from her, though The Anchoress talked about the vanishing music press and how valuable they are.

At a time when so many new artists need coverage and there is this jostle to be seen and heard, music journalism is as essential and required now more than any time in history. Social media, people sharing recommendations does not equate to the depth and passion, and knowledge, of music journalism! Especially independent sites like mine. Before that, some news on an album that will stand up beside the best of this year:

“If you just tuned in to my live interview with Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music then you will know that the cat is now out of the bag (or the first single at least…) and you can now preorder my new album, As We Once Were.

It will be released via Last Night From Glasgow this Summer and there’s lots of limited edition goodies on offer so don’t sleep on this. The first 100 copies of the double LP and first 100 CDs sold by LNFG will also be signed by me. There’s also lots of bundle discounts if you want multiple formats and even the option to include a rare test pressing: Preorder the album here.

We’ve also just announced a one-off special album launch show at London’s legendary 100 Club – the oldest independent venue in the world – on Saturday August 22nd with a parent-friendly early curfew of 10pm. Tickets are very limited and go on sale on Tuesday 14th April at 10am here.

BBC 6 MUSIC PREMIERE & NME FIRST INTERVIEW
Thanks to everyone who tuned in live tonight to BBC 6Music with Lamacq playing the first single from the album, ‘I Had A Baby Not A Lobotomy’ and chatting about all my exciting news! If you missed it, you can listen back to the show here.

ALBUM FORMATS

SO… what will you be getting? 14 tracks and around 58 minutes of brand new music. Formats wise, the album will be released on 2LP vinyl (in two colour options: coral and linen) with a leopard print etching on side 4 which I’m very excited about. Apparently this is the closest you can get to actual leopard print vinyl. Yes I did ask.

The standard gatefold CD will come with a lovely 24 page lyric booklet, while for the completists, the ltd edition deluxe 2CD hardback media book edition will include a 48 page hardback book with exclusive artwork, unseen photos, extended liner notes, scans from my studio notebooks + 1 additional CD featuring original demos, alternative mixes, and writing demos. All for just £25

A strictly limited edition cassette album will also be available to conceptually complete the beautiful back cover art, which has been lovingly created again by Simon Morse at Standard Designs in homage to the lost cassette tape of my grandmother’s voice that inspired much of the album. No spoilers on that just yet as it will give away some of the very special guests that appear on the record that I will be teasing you all with over the coming weeks…

SO WHY PREORDER?

So why part with your money now? Well, preordering makes a HUGE difference to me, the artist.

Not only does it give us the best chance of another UK Top 40 chart placement, it also signals to a wider network of shops and retailers that the demand is there. That The People (YOU) have spoken with enough notice. We don’t want to have a repeat of 2021 where we run out of stock in release week because it wasn’t clear that so many folk would want a CD!

Preordering also helps to finance the huge manufacturing costs involved and also makes sure that we can fulfil demand, as stock has to be made many months ahead of the release date, especially with vinyl.

So what’s it all about?

As We Once Were is my third studio album and the long-awaited follow-up to the UK Top 40 album The Art Of Losing, which scooped up a rack of Album of The Year nods from The Sunday Times, to Prog, to the Mail on Sunday. With Sir Elton John naming it “one of my favourite records of the year” and Caitlin Moran calling it “the inadvertent, beautiful and truthful soundtrack to this moment”, it went on to sell over 10,000 physical copies via the power of word of mouth.

I created this new album at my very own Black Lodge Studios, while being given access to Pete Townshend’s collection of vintage analogue synthesisers to produce an epic 14-track widescreen exploration of the nature of time and transformation.
Against the backdrop of the birth of my daughter (after the multiple losses documented on The Art Of Losing) and the discovery of my grandmother’s voice on a long lost cassette tape in her mother’s attic, I found myself asking the question: “What can we build out of the past? Are we destined to be held down by it? Can we ever return to these past versions of ourselves?”

This is As We Once Were.

I really think it’s my best work to date. And you know what a perfectionist I am…

Preorder it now and be part of this new chapter.

PREORDER HERE”.

I would suggest you subscribe to The Anchoress’s Substack, as the posts are really enlightening and thought-provoking. Also, a window into the creative process and experience of an exceptional talent. Her production alone should be discussed a lot more though, as many women in the industry can attest, they are not seen as producers. The statistics around opportunities for women and the number in professional studios is shocking! An industry that needs to embrace female producers and create an environment for them. Women often discriminated against for wanting maternity leave, for example. Perhaps relevant to The Anchoress’s new single. Though I need to focus. I want to draw from an interview The Quietus published, where The Anchoress discussed her favourite albums. I will bring in sections about The Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come, Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn…, and, naturally, Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. I am hoping to be part of an event for the album in June (before the forty-fifth anniversary of its lead single, Sat in Your Lap). I wonder if The Anchoress would speak or provide her take on one of the songs from the album (my favourite is Houdini, but she may have her own standout!):

“The idea that you can interweave – in a very different way to the Manic Street Preachers – your educational pursuits and your more intellectual interests into your music was a real revelation to me. As somebody who was a quintessentially camp person, Morrissey’s mode of speaking and approaching lyrics felt very like home to me. I feel really conflicted about Morrissey now with his right wing nonsense. There’s still a special place in my heart for a lot of The Smiths’ music, although I do find it impossible to separate the art from the artist and I don’t really put them on anymore.

The dynamic between Morrissey and Johnny Marr was certainly something that informed the way I worked with Bernard Butler on our collaborative album. As someone who tends to usually work alone, writing and producing without any interference, I definitely took on the Morrissey-Marr model. We found a very fruitful and quick way of working where he was creating these beautiful musical landscapes and I would write the music and lyrics on top.

This is a really important record to me because it’s Fiona Apple who basically taught me how to play piano. I never had piano lessons in my life, my parents couldn’t afford to send me and it wasn’t an option for us. When I finally got to university, I used some of my student loan to buy a small keyboard from Argos. It was probably way more than I should have spent on something that wasn’t food but I was harbouring this secret plan that I wanted to be a songwriter and a producer and knew that I needed to play more than guitar, something that I’d already taught myself to play.

There weren’t many piano equivalents of the guitar tab books that were around at the time, but Fiona Apple did have this music book for Tidal, her first record. I bought that and was just thinking ‘Fuck! I’m never going to be able to do this!’ She has quite complex jazz chords – and that’s not the kind of thing you want to be tackling when you first start playing. I remember the girls in my halls – many of whom had grade eight piano – were taking the piss out of me, trying to teach myself. Here I was, trying to play ‘Pale September’ by Fiona Apple as my first attempt on the piano!

But there was something about this record that opened everything up. It was a very kind of rhythmic way of writing, almost rapping – I know Kanye West has gone on to say it was a massive influence on him – in terms of his metrical rhythms. For me, it hugely influenced my approach to the instrument in that her music taught me how to play that instrument so I guess it finds itself seeping into my playing because the chords she used are the ones I taught myself. It’s the same way I taught myself to play guitar with Radiohead, you’ll find all those sounds in my music too.

This album for me kind of goes hand in hand with Vespertine in that it’s the other record that made me think it’s possible for me to make music in the way that I wanted to, which was to write and play and produce everything myself. I remember when I was first doing demos for some major labels. They would invite me into the studio and I would just, every time, every day, come out crying because of how terrible the experiences were in terms of me having zero agency. I just wanted to go back and work in a shop like I did when I was a student. Nothing about the experience made me happy. It made me realise that the thing that did make me happy was the process of making a record and being a producer was inherent to that.

Kate Bush’s The Dreaming showed me that it was possible. It was the first record she did where she got to be the sole producer – she’d co-produced on the previous ones. This is the first record where she has full control and it’s brilliantly, batshit, bonkers. For me, it’s the first time you really get to experience the full breadth of her brilliance and her sonic eccentricity. In the same way that I constantly reference Vespertine, The Dreaming is another, with all its incredible sound collage, the spoken word voices, the theatricality, its multi-genre leanings – the jukebox style record that it is – if you listen to my first album, it’s very much influenced by that. It changed my way of thinking about music entirely – thinking that it’s okay to have a ballad alongside a kind of screamo metal song!

Once that clicked with me, I stopped making music for a year because I thought if I can’t do it on my terms, I wasn’t doing it at all. Those experiences in the studio certainly made me not want to go back to that in a hurry, as did how I was treated as a woman. Like many, I had terrible experiences with men in the industry and I ran away from it for a time: I didn’t want to be anywhere near an industry that made women feel like this. I was also constantly asked what school I went to, making me realise few people from backgrounds like mine were here. I was so naive about the industry: I had no idea what it was like and frequently legged it out of meetings.

I went to America and just accepted that I was giving up because trying to have that control in the music industry that I found myself in as a young woman, felt impossible: the labels wouldn’t let me play anything, let alone produce or develop anything. I was staying in far Northern California and after a good few months away from it, I slowly started to find the confidence to play again after those terrible experiences. Very gradually, I started writing music again, but on my own terms, with no label, learning how to play things myself, how to put a record together from scratch. Eventually, my debut album emerged on my terms and I’ll always credit this record with showing me that was possible, and for finding my way back to music”.

I am going to end with that NME interview. However, as The Anchoress wrote after speaking with Steve Lamacq on BBC Radio 6 Music, radio has always been an influential and powerful presence in her life. As an artist and a music lover. Out on the Last Night from Glasgow label on 7th August, go and pre-order As We Once Were:

“Growing up listening to the radio was an integral part of the daily thrum of my house.

We weren't really allowed to watch much TV but there was always music: my parents' vinyl collection and the constant hum of Radio 2 in the background. Terry Wogan in the morning, the chart countdowns of yesteryear at the weekends. A musical education by osmosis, as it were.

As I got older, listening Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley on the radio of an evening was a hugely formative part of shaping my music taste. And it was the first place that I ever heard my beloved Manic Street Preachers; a moment that truly changed everything for me.

I have no doubt that I would not have become the first in my family to go to university had I not tuned in at that precise moment, with open ears and an open mind, to hear that litany of literary names — Miller, Mailer, Plath, Pinter — that I would go on to make a reading list of so that I could take it to my local library and begin my path of self-education. A twelve-year-old girl from South Wales, scribbling names into a notebook she didn’t yet have the books to fill.

Fast forward a few decades and I remember meeting Steve Lamacq for the very first time when my debut album was released and I was a guest on his Roundtable show, breathlessly thanking him for playing ‘Faster’ and changing my life path.

He was characteristically gracious about the whole thing. I, characteristically, was not cool about it at all…

The importance of public service broadcasting has never been more vital, and never more under threat. A real human hand-picking the songs that they think will move you, change you, shape you, rather than a soulless algorithm making its best statistical guess at what you probably already like.

I can’t imagine a computer deciding that a 12-year-old girl, who was previously obsessed with Kylie Minogue and Karen Carpenter, would be so strangely moved and excited by the aggressive and angular tones of the Manics. And yet, it was just what my brain and ears craved.

That’s the whole point. You don’t know what you need until someone who cares points you towards it.

I’ve been prompted to think about this as I stand on the brink of sharing something new, live on the radio next week.

If you tune in to Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music from 4pm this Monday 13th April, I’ll be joining him to talk about my new single and unveiling other exciting news!

You can listen live on BBC Sounds and online here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002tr0l”.

I am going to source that NME interview. Apart from committing the cardinal sin that all press and radio do when an artist does not release music every week, The Anchoress has not ‘returned’. She is, and always will be, an active producer and artist. This idea she retired or spent years away. In fact, she has been steadily releasing music for so many years. However, NME are not the only ones culpable of using that horrible word. Andrew Trendell asked the questions and spent time with the amazing The Anchoress. It is a fantastic interview. Go and pick up a copy of NME:

“So much of this record was born out of the early years of my daughter’s life, and I really wanted to collect together and call out all of the clichés, stereotypes and dumb shit that people say to women who’ve had babies that I had encountered myself,” Davies told NME. “I started a note in my iPhone, just writing down each thing I heard pop out of people’s mouths: from the assumption that I would no longer be touring, to the assertion that I would no doubt ‘mellow out’ and have some kind of personality transplant.

“Quite the contrary: motherhood radicalised me. And I know I’m not alone in this.”

Davies continued: “So many friends have spoken about labouring under the false assumption that we had somehow reached a place of gender equality, until they became mothers and discovered how regressive so many of the systems still are around parental leave, maternity pay, and the practicalities of rearing children when it now takes two full-time wages just to exist.

“When I put it all together, it really felt like a litany of misogyny and lazy bias but it also revealed the utter inanity of most of what we are told or assumed about as a result of choosing to procreate. I’ve spent a lot of time following brilliant campaigners online who are working towards equal flexibility in the workplace and shared parental leave for freelance workers – and no, we are not entitled to it, unlike those who are employed, which still shocks people when they find out.”

PHOTO CREDIT: JJ Eringa

What can you tell us about your relationship with Gwenno and what she brings to the track?

“Gwenno is just extraordinary, as an artist, as a person, as someone who has quietly and determinedly shown that there is absolutely no reason why any of this has to stop when you become a parent. She gave me so much good, practical advice when I was first trying to navigate touring post-pregnancy. I took my daughter on tour with the Manics two summers ago (including taking her to Glastonbury) and was genuinely nervous about how to manage it all, and Gwenno really set me straight.

“She was an absolute lifesaver. I’ve looked up to her enormously, just watching her get on with it and do an incredible job of proving that it can be done. So when I was making this record, she felt like the only person I wanted on this song. The authenticity of her voice adds something I couldn’t have anticipated and was just perfect for what the track needed.”

How representative is this of the album to come?

“It captures the energy and the refusal to be quiet but I’d also say it’s one of the more overtly combative moments on the record. Think of it as kicking the door open rather than the whole room. But the album as a whole has a much broader emotional range than this first single might suggest. There are a few songs that go to some genuinely dark and tender places. There’s a song I wrote crumpled on the floor that I’m still not sure I’ll ever be able to play live. There’s a queer anthem inspired by the love letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (which features a special guest on vocals and guitar).

Can we expect any other guests on the album?

“Ssshhh! Apart from Gwenno, I can’t tell you about all that quite yet, but there is quite a star-studded cast of collaborators on there. Some familiar faces and voices, and also a couple of people who might genuinely surprise. I’m very proud of who came to the table and what they brought. To paraphrase Tori Amos, I had a big loan from the ‘girl zone’ and the conversations I got to have in the making of this record were as nourishing as anything that ended up on tape -and quite a lot of it did end up on tape.”

When can we see you on tour?

“I’ll be playing a one-off album launch show at London’s legendary 100 Club – the oldest independent venue in the world – on Saturday August 22, with a parent-friendly early curfew of 10pm to make it more accessible to all. No more worrying about getting the last train home or arranging childcare until midnight.

“I wanted to make it something people could actually come to, whatever their situation – which is why I’m also working with The Ticket Bank to make some tickets available for those on benefits. Beyond that, more dates are coming – and I promise they’ll be planned with the same thinking. Watch this space”.

I am going to end things there. I hope to interview The Anchoress soon and go to that gig at the 100 Club in London. I love everything she does; whether that is solo work, collaborating with the Manic Street Preachers or anything else. This phenomenal voice, not just musically, but in a wider social context. In terms of raising issues around gender inequality, misogyny in music and how women like her (as a new mother) are seen and how the situation for pregnant women and new mothers is worse than other women in the industry. We are at a point when there needs to be this seismic shift and massive overhaul. How realistic that is remains to be seen. Follow The Anchoress, pre-order As We Once Were, and go see her live. As of publishing this feature (15th April), there are tickets available, so get in there quickly! I wanted to show some new love for…

AN amazing queen who I respect hugely.

___________

Follow The Anchoress

Sam Liddicott