The Anchoress: “How do we make something fit for the future out of the past?”

‘I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy’ is the funniest thing Catherine Anne Davies, aka The Anchoress, has ever written. More or less literally a list, kept in the notes app on her phone over the first few years of her daughter’s life, of the daft, patronising, faintly medieval things people say to women who’ve just had a child. That she’d be giving up touring. That she’d mellow out now. Every one of them real, most of them said to her by people she likes, and spiteful in the most enjoyable possible way: a run of little earworms of spite. Read the lyric off the page and you’d expect it to be carried by something snotty and quick. That’s not what happens though.

Instead the music drifts. Vintage synth washes lapping against each ear, a hi-hat skittering across the middle while something beeps off to one side, the whole thing spacious and rather contemplative — pondering something else entirely, far less camp and knowing than the words having their pop above it.

As We Once Were lives in the space between two different methods of storytelling, the lyrical and the musical. They run at the same time and sometimes refuse point blank to agree with each other in some quite fascinating ways. Davies has always had this trick — write two songs simultaneously, let them contradict, and somehow still land on a single argument in the space between them — but she’s never deployed it with this much confidence, the lyric doing one job while the arrangement builds a subtext that subverts and enhances it. Which is, incidentally, why the box she’s been shoved in since 2016 was always the wrong one. A woman writing about her own life gets called confessional, and confessional is a polite word for artless. Davies is never that. Read this record off the lyric sheet alone and you get half the story. And possibly the less interesting half at that.

Davies’ career has been pointing this way for a decade now. Her 2016 debut, Confessions of a Romance Novelist, was a dressing-up box, half of it sung in character by a woman who’d invented a pseudonym so she wouldn’t have to be herself in public — and a good chunk of the press took the first word of the title at face value and sailed clean past the joke buried in the rest of the sentence. The Art of Losing, the astonishing, Elton-approved follow-up, looked grief in the eye and didn’t flinch, but even that was grief hung and lit and framed in different ways throughout. This one holds the thorniest parts of her backstory at arm’s length. Through gloves. On purpose.

And that raw material is rough. ‘What You Did‘ settles accounts, wearily, with a relationship that began when she was still a minor and set the pattern for everything after it — “what you did got me writing the same song again and again,” she sings, sounding thoroughly done with the whole business. Piano, bass and drums sit bare in the centre while the synths build something lusher and more numinous around them. The outro piles up in chaotic layers before resolving into a voice announcing that “you are not going to destroy me”. Mansun’s Dominic Chad plays it out — that signature guitar sound arriving on a song about a darkness that began in someone’s teenage years and haunted them into the present. A lovely, pointed bit of casting.

‘Stop the World’, meanwhile, is the hardest listen on the record, and possibly the best song on it. Davies wrote it on the floor of her house in the summer of 2024, after her daughter had gone to bed, while something unspeakable was happening to her family and she couldn’t say a word about it to anybody. Her daughter’s burbling turns up in the intro, mixed in with queasier synth warbles — a Ninth Wave-ish tone piece that slides into a piano ballad, drums stark and dry in a way that recalls Davies’ beloved Manics circa This Is My Truth… The same broken, lonely thing. “I just want to scream that I’m not okay,” she sings. Then, quieter: that if she sits down she might not get up again.

None of it is presented raw. All of it is built, and the building is what the record keeps drawing attention to — this is an essay on itself as much as it’s an album. We plunge into conversation with Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, in which the two bring each other to verbal, musical and quite possibly literal orgasm on ‘Throw Over Your Man’ as their panted names bounce across the speakers. There’s Louise Bourgeois chatting with Elizabeth Taylor. There’s public information films about the baby blues. There’s Kate Bush (side two is consciously referencing the shape of The Ninth Wave.) Mostly, though, it’s an artist in conversation with herself. A bass figure in ‘Throw Over Your Man’ quotes ‘Unravel’ from her last album. The interstitial that opens side two brings back the piano lick that did the same job on The Art of Losing, then argues with it. The whole record could be a PhD with a tracklisting, building worlds of references that are worth getting lost in.

As with all of Davies’ records, there are three versions of her at work, and they’re audibly different people. The songwriter is as barbed as ever but has lost her appetite for revenge — ‘All I Really Want Is Peace’ opens like the saddest Bond theme ever written (and I’m including ‘Nobody Does It Better’ in that) but finds itself in resolution rather than rage. The performer stacks her own voice into ghostly harmony with itself across ‘All Fall Down‘, then uses her own breathing as percussion by the end of ‘Hand to the Tide‘. The producer — the role Davies says is the easiest of the three to be — got the run of Pete Townshend’s vintage synthesiser collection and used it as an argument rather than a texture, which might be the smartest piece of thinking on an already smart record: feed seventies and eighties hardware into songs about being chased by your own past, and the method becomes the argument. Something coldly Kraftwerkian ticks away behind richer, warmer synths on the title track while the vocal stays entirely human. The four years Davies spent in the Simple Minds live band possibly did that. So, probably, did an unhealthy amount of time spent with New Gold Dream.

‘Hand to the Tide’, meanwhile, opens like Tom Waits, junkyard percussion clanging away, and turns into the most Kate Bush moment Davies has ever committed to tape before ending in angular metal guitar. A whole world in one song. That’s what makes Davies unique. She’s fascinating, always. She feels big feelings and sits them in musical puzzle boxes that come with a reading list and deserve the best set of headphones money can buy.

A wonderful record that deserves your curiosity, interest and attention.

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In conversation with The Anchoress

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SDE: Since your debut, you’ve been playing with ideas of arteface, wearing masks, constructing personas and playing with queer theory, which it feels like you’re doing here as well, often in quite a camp way. That was something people seemed to miss, especially about that first album…

The Anchoress: I think because there’s a tendency amongst critics, music journalists, or just people in general, music fans, to see a woman making music and put you in the box of confessional singer-songwriter. And given that the title [of the first album] said Confessions, people didn’t look beyond what that actually means in this context. They took it at face value and just thought, oh, these are all songs about your life, without maybe reading around it.

They focused on the confessions and not the second half of the title, “of a Romance Novellist”, which was the giveaway.

Yeah. I think there was a lot of hiding on that record. It was a very reactionary record to what I’d done before. I’d felt incredibly vulnerable and uncomfortable putting myself out there as Catherine A.D. — you know, my name — and people just aligning my life with the music. Hence why I created the moniker of The Anchoress, the idea of an alias, something I could operate through and do something much more interesting than what was confined to my life.

But I do see all three records as connected to one another, because I’m not ever just interested in writing about myself. There’s been a lot of misreading of The Art of Losing too, this idea that because it emanated out of a time where there was a lot of loss and grief in my life, that’s what the record is about. It’s just about me. It’s just me vomiting onto the page — hence the album cover, which was an ironic gesture. Tori Amos has talked about this, this idea that women’s craft is just erased. Whereas if a man is autobiographical in his work at all, then he’s a genius, you know, it takes great craft and great technique. So I have an interesting relationship to how the records are perceived. I think you have to let it go, though. I can’t control how people receive it. I’m a control freak, but I have to let it go at some point. It’s not possible to fashion how people understand a record.

There’s an element of all of your stuff — most true on The Art of Losing, but it’s there on the other two — where you’re very good at sitting in pain. Mining the trauma, sitting in it, expressing it so well that sometimes the wit elsewhere and the storytelling elsewhere get slightly obscured by it.

I think what’s missing from that equation is the sense that I always want to do something with it. I don’t just want to sit with it and reflect it back to the listener. There’s that sense of, what do we learn from The Art of Losing? How do we build something out of this? And obviously this whole new record is around that — this idea that it’s not enough to see the patterns in our past, it’s not enough to note the generational trauma. What can I do with that that isn’t just history repeating itself? How do we break the cycle? How do we put ourselves back together?

It’s always this idea of productivity in the face of loss. Not a kind of toxic optimism, but when you’ve been faced with so much difficulty — as, relatively speaking, I think it’s okay for me to say that I have — I never wanted it to define my personality to the extent where I’m just sitting in that victim mentality. Something I’ve been obsessed with ever since I did my PhD is this theorist called Wendy Brown, who wrote a book called States of Injury, where she looks quite critically at what the patriarchy has to gain from us sitting in states of victimhood. And actually power structures have a lot to gain from that. That was a really big turnaround for me — in my late teens, coming to that at university and realising, hang on a minute, if you’re not sitting in your power in terms of your trauma, they’re keeping you in a state of vulnerability. A state of injury, as Wendy Brown calls it. And therefore, who does this benefit? It certainly doesn’t benefit you as the injured party.

So in my art, in my life and in my work, I’ve always tried to push against that. I don’t just want to sit there and be victim of sexual assault, victim of baby loss. That’s not very interesting to me. And I recognise the unhealthy power dynamics. Once we begin to interrogate what it means to sit in that state of victimhood, we are not empowered at all. I think that’s why I have this compulsion in the art to do something with it, to move beyond it, to turn it into something new — which is obviously the theme of the whole new record.

It’s five years since The Art of Losing, but you recorded that a few years before it came out, so the gap between albums is quite large. Does that gap mean a greater evolution in how you view the world across the three records?

You say a long gap, but to me it feels like the blink of an eye, because I haven’t stopped. That interim period was filled with the collaborative album with Bernard [Butler, 2020’s In Memory of My Feelings], the Versions record, touring, and having a child. It’s almost as if this has been the quickest record I’ve made and released — such a short gap from me finishing it to it coming out. I haven’t even had a chance to make sense of what it’s about yet.

Which is an interesting position to be talking about it from.

I’m finding it really hard, actually. With The Art of Losing there was about eighteen months from when it was finished to when it came out, and obviously Confessions… took me so long to put together as a debut — four years, in the end. By the time they came out I had a really clear sense of what they were about. This has been finished and three months later it’s in people’s laps.

Did you have a manifesto going in? Because your albums all have a thesis.

There is, but that only emerged in the middle of it. I approached it very much as I did my PhD — you might have a broad area of interest, something you feel you want to explore, but none of the records has that ever crystallised until about halfway through. I’d written quite a few songs and I was really struggling to see what the thread was. And I was very adamant that I didn’t want to do a motherhood record. I was like, God, I’m not interested in that. I wanted to continue what I’d done with The Art of Losing, not break the thread and start anew.

It was only when I managed to get hold of this tape of my grandmother’s voice that I was suddenly like: it all makes sense. It’s a bit like therapy. You do all that talking and then you realise you’ve been piecing it together all this time without knowing. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle you’re not aware you’re doing while you’re doing it. So for me it’s always the midpoint of a record where suddenly it’s, okay, this is about the threads between the generations. This is a conversation between my grandmother and my daughter. And then it completely knitted together when I got the phone call asking if I wanted to come and play with Pete Townshend, and I was like, right, the past just keeps calling here.

But no, you never start with it. Any musician who tells you they start with a really clear idea is lying to you. Or they’re just — I don’t think that’s very interesting creatively either. If you already know where you’re going when you set out, it’s a bit like going to the supermarket to buy something on your shopping list.

It’s going to the supermarket with a shopping list and then refusing to look at anything else on the shelves. It’s saying, I want to paint something using these colours, and then refusing any impulse to use another colour.

It’s like the Frank O’Hara poem, ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’, where he talks about this painting that starts out being about oranges and by the end of it it’s called Sardines. I’ve probably completely fudged that précis and it might be the wrong way round. But this idea that the creative process is fundamentally one of transformation and exploration — that what you start with is oranges and you end up with sardines. It’s supposed to be a funny little poem, but I think it says something quite serious, which is that the route we’re on is not a straight line from A to B. And I also like to make things hard for myself.

Tell me about the tape. Did working with your grandmother’s voice change your relationship with your memories of her?

She died when I was at university, so I had a long time with her, and we were very close — my mum brought her to live near us for the final ten years of her life. I thought I knew her really well, and it was so strange revisiting her voice and those conversations from an adult perspective, because it really struck me how political she was. How radical she was as a person, how atypical she was for a woman of her time. The conversation on the tape is between my sister, who was doing her middle-school history homework, and my grandmother. So she’s talking to quite a young child, but everything she says is threaded through with this sense of working-class radicalism, which you only hear as an adult. I was saying to my mum, I don’t remember her being this political. But you don’t, obviously — when you’re a child she’s just your grandmother. All the choices she made in her life, which were quite out there for the time. And how much of a feminist she was without ever using the word.

What it made me realise is that some things are just embedded genetically, because she’s forceful, forthright, and didn’t really care that the way she lived her life wasn’t very typical. I can’t imagine how that’s threaded down to me. There’s one bit, I think it’s at the front of “I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy”, where she’s saying, women, we give so much, we don’t ask much in return. And there’s an extended part of that conversation where she talks about how unfair that is, how society is structured to just take from women, and we’re not expected to achieve anything. I found it so moving to hear a lot of my own thoughts and feelings about the unequal structures of society echoed in her words all that time ago. It’s depressing that we haven’t quite resolved it. But it also made me aware of how much personality and temperament are ingrained in our genes.

And your mum’s on the record too.

It was just really fucking lovely to be able to get my mum to hear her mum’s voice again. She obviously hadn’t heard it since her mum died. I spent about a week retrieving this audio, and it was really hard because the tape was mangled, you couldn’t hear anything. I thought, I’m not going to be able to get this back. And then I thought, you know me, I like a challenge. So I worked on it for about a week, and as soon as I had it I sent a snippet to my mum on WhatsApp. I’ve still got a screenshot of the message she sent me. Imagine hearing your mum’s voice again after she’s died.

So then I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely — I’d obviously been recording my daughter’s voice, the laughing and the little things, as you do — to get my mum involved and have that four-generational conversation. You hear my mum right at the beginning of the record saying, “when I was young, I used to say to people, my daddy was a shoplifter.” It’s really lovely that we can’t all be in the same space-time continuum in reality, and this is the great thing about art: we can create something where we’re all simultaneously present.

It was such a privilege, because it was a really hard record to make. There were so many times where, as always but for different reasons this time, I thought I can’t finish this. It’s been so hard, practically, with a small child. But it’s like she’s been with me the whole time in my ears. Whenever I felt like I was going to give up, whichever bit I was sifting through would be like a little motivational speech. I’ve really felt her presence with me, and I’m not a spiritual person at all.

Which songs came before that revelation?

‘Damsels’ was one of the first. I’d had the idea for a while that I wanted to write a sort of Manics-style “Faster” manifesto, but for feminism. And then some of them arose out of circumstance — ‘Stop the World’ was very much a reaction to something that was going on in my life. ‘What You Did’ was one of the earlier ones. I think ‘All Fall Down’ was too. Songs that just wanted to come out, that needed to be spoken.

The last one I finished was ‘All I Really Want Is Peace’. I had orchestrated the whole thing, all the instruments were arranged and put down, and I had no vocal, no top line, no lyric, nothing. I really resisted finishing that one, and it only made sense to me once I’d made sense of the whole piece of work. I went through this period of writer’s block, as I think everybody does when they’re making a record, and I couldn’t work out why. I remember saying to my manager, I think it’s because I’m not wanting to write about this stuff. I don’t want to give it space, I don’t want to give it the time of day. But it’s the Michael Rosen thing, isn’t it — can’t go over it, can’t go under it, got to go through it.

What I realised was that I needed to write about this thing that had happened before I could let the other stuff come through. It was like a blockage. And when I finally addressed it, what came out wasn’t the song I thought I was going to write, which is exactly why I’d been avoiding it. I thought it would be an angry one, a “you deserve to die” revenge thing. Instead it was this very philosophical, quite mature — for me — idea that all I really want is peace. I’m not interested in the Pyrrhic victory. I’m not interested in wasting time and energy on this any more. That was really healing, and it sewed up the end of the record. It made me realise what was different about this to The Art of Losing: that it wasn’t just about sitting in pain, it was about doing something with it, but not thinking I could go back to the person I was before. There’s no reversion to the prelapsarian Catherine, or the prelapsarian Anchoress.

I came to this concept of — is it kintsugi? I never know how to say it and I will be slaughtered for saying it incorrectly. The idea of putting the pieces back together again. Obviously I hadn’t also planned on shattering my arm in the process. You couldn’t write some of the shit that happens to me every album campaign. It’s so on brand, right, snapping my arm in half and having metal plates put in it, and now it’s stronger than it was before. But I feel like that’s in the metaphor I was getting at as well.

There’s a circularity there, because it was a wrist injury that originally pushed you in a different musical direction years ago.

Do you know what, it’s the same hand. Well remembered. I had ganglion surgery on it when I was making Confessions, which is why I ended up shifting over to guitar on that record. And in my very good recycling way, I actually dug out the splint I had from that surgery to reuse for this one.

How did all of this feed into the production? There are always three versions of you on a record — the one dealing with the thoughts and feelings, the one playing the music, and the producer. And your records always have a very specific sonic identity.

The producer role is the easiest one for me to inhabit, in a way. It’s the one I go to when I’m having a day where I don’t want to work on something, because it’s my most natural role. It’s logical, it’s methodical, it’s processual. It’s my logical brain.

In terms of the techniques, there was a lot of thinking about how I could conceptually echo this idea of rewinding time. So there are lots of reversals of sounds, lots of tape echo loops for the delays rather than digital delays. And then the production decisions in terms of the synthesizers. Most of the synths in Townshend Studios are the originals from the seventies and eighties — there are a few reissues in his collection, but we can broadly lump it into the past, right? So it’s not only choosing hardware, literal objects from the past, to create the sounds, but also thinking about techniques that reproduce that sense of going backwards and making the connection with the present. And then the found sound and field recording element, which is the collaging together of the voices of my grandmother and my daughter.

There are specific techniques that are conceptually congruent with what the record is trying to say. But I didn’t want to do what I did last time with The Art of Losing, where it was, oh, grief sounds like this, let’s get dizzy with the Leslie. It’s not as obvious as that, because it’s more present and tangible in the instrumentation and the found sounds themselves.

The broader stylistic decisions are anchored in the past too. ‘All I Really Want Is Peace’ is my parents’ record collection. I wanted it to sound very consciously like Carpenters Gold, because I grew up with that tape jammed in the car — it was permanently on loop because I don’t think we could get it out. ‘I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy’ and ‘As We Once Were’ sit firmly within that synthetic palette of the late eighties. But as ever, I didn’t want to do something that was purely a slavish reproduction. I wanted to bring it up to date at the same time, and that was hard. It was easier to just copy what’s been done before. So that was the disagreement the producer would sometimes have with the songwriter: hang on a minute, are you genuinely making something new here? Because it’s easy, especially with access to those instruments, to just record them and have everything sound like it was made in the eighties. I don’t think that’s very challenging.

It doesn’t sound like an eighties record.

Thank you. Well then I achieved my goal, right? Which was to blend those things together to make something that’s fit for the future out of the past. I always find interviews really helpful, because they make me work out what the record’s about. That’s it. How to make something fit for the future out of the past. That’s exactly it.

It’s the Manics thing of going into a session with “Guns N’ Roses play the White Album” or “ABBA play The Clash” as a manifesto.

I don’t think I could ever do something like that, because you’re hemming yourself in too much. The analogous thing in my life is that when I found out I was having a girl, it sent me into a complete spiral of, oh my God, I don’t want to fuck up my daughter, right, I’m going to do tons of therapy and make sure I’m as fit for purpose as possible by the time she arrives. So I set out with this purpose to fix myself before she was born, but obviously the end result of that is always so much more than you expect. And that’s the same with how a record should be. You might say it’s Guns N’ Roses meets the White Album. The success is when it becomes so much more than that by the end.

You can always set a goal in mind, you can set a destination point, but as ever in life the most interesting things happen when you go off path, or take a few diversions, or arrive at a completely different destination that’s way more interesting than the one you expected. And that’s absolutely what this record was, because I wasn’t intending to make a record about becoming a mother. And that’s what I’ve done — but not the record I thought I didn’t want to make. There are no lullabies. Zero lullabies. It’s about modern motherhood and how it means we don’t fundamentally change as people. It’s about the ways we stay the same. How do we hold on to ourselves in the midst of this cultural pressure to be soft, to be malleable, to be the primary caregiver and nothing more, to sacrifice your ambition? None of those things have happened to me. Apart from the crying.

It’s right there in the single. When somebody makes a motherhood record, ‘I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy’ is not the song you expect to come out of it.

This was the thing. I tackled it head on. Right, if you expect me to write a song about being a mother, here it is, fuck you all. I wanted to write down every shit thing that everyone has ever said to me. I know where the bodies are buried, I know who said each one of these things, and they were all real things that people said to me — people who I love and like — that really just fucked me off. Can’t go over it, can’t go around it. I’ll write the song about motherhood, but I’m not going to give you the lullaby. And it’s slightly tongue in cheek, because it isn’t supposed to be an attack on men.

There’s a lot of camp on that single.

I mean, you know me. I’m permanently camp. Camp as a row of tents at Glastonbury.

Which is the thing I think people don’t get about you sometimes?

I think they’re getting it a bit more now, although I think that’s because I’m allowing it to come through. But even in the way people have been surprised about ‘Throw Over Your Man’ and said, oh, I didn’t know you were queer — hang on a minute, I did my PhD in queer theory over a decade ago. How did you miss this information? I guess because I don’t tend to express my identity clearly and transparently, as we’ve now seen on the record. But camp is a massive part of my vocabulary. It amazes me that people will filter out what doesn’t register with them or what doesn’t interest them. I’m glad it landed with you as a very camp single.

It’s incredibly quotable. I get earworms of different lines from it all the time.

The strangest thing is when my daughter sings them back at me. That’s a bit jarring.

The whole record is in conversation with things, which is different from nostalgia — you’re not idolising the past, you’re reaching for references. ‘Damsels’ doesn’t just have the Manics manifesto thing, it seems to have a direct reference to ‘Little Baby Nothing’ in it. Is “equality offends your ego” nodding to the Manics writing “your lack of ego offends male mentality”?

Possibly. It’s an unconscious one if it is. I’m trying to think. It’s that thing of what’s embedded in our unconscious — the way we speak, our turns of phrase. That age when you’re eleven or twelve is when your mind is most malleable, and mine just happened to have all of that stuff poured into it. It’s literally like, cut me and I bleed leopard print. There are so many things we do as writers where we borrow without realising, because that song, ‘Little Baby Nothing’, is in my DNA.

As you go into the second half and things get more esoteric and dreamlike, there’s a piano figure that deliberately echoes The Art of Losing…

There is, yes. There are several musical motifs, and I guess this borrows from my classical background, but they hark back to The Art of Losing. There’s a bass motif in ‘Throw Over Your Man’ that is literally an echo of ‘Unrave’. And there’s a piano motif in one of the segues.

It’s not lifted directly, it’s a nod. I think it’s what they call a leitmotif, isn’t it, in classical? All of that knowledge fell out of my ear many years ago.

But it’s conscious. What’s the intention?

Well, it’s because I see this as the final part of a trilogy of records. Especially with the little segue piece — happiness don’t show up like it should. It’s an answer to the question of what you’ve got to learn from The Art of Losing. Me thinking that what I had to learn was, oh, your happiness will be at the end of this rainbow of difficulty. And obviously what I’ve learned is that life doesn’t quite work like that, and happiness doesn’t always get delivered in the form or the manner you expect it to.

That was something I learned through lived experience, but it was also embedded in my grandmother’s life, listening back to her telling her story. She had a lot of loss and a lot of pain, but she was a very happy person. Her life was the lesson that I couldn’t hear as a child, because I wasn’t ready to perceive it yet. So it needed to have that musical motif embedded, almost in conversation with the previous record, to refer back and say: I was wrong about this. Let’s revise it now and let it take us where it should be — which is that happiness isn’t going to show up in its own spotted bow tie.

Thanks to The Anchoress who was talking to Marc Burrows for SDE. The new album, As We Once Were, is out today.

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