The Anchoress released her debut album under that name in 2016. Confessions Of A Romance Novelist remains an impressively complex, thought-provoking work. But when she introduced it she was keen for listeners to detect the dark humour beneath her "revenge pop,” as she told Prog at the time.
Confessions Of A Romance Novelist is the debut album from The Anchoress, the recording and performing alias of singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and all-round maverick Catherine Anne Davies.
It’s not the first thing she’s done – there were records released previously under the name Catherine AD, she’s been part of a supergroup called Dark Flowers alongside Jim Kerr of Simple Minds and Peter Murphy of Bauhaus – among others – and she’s been touring the world for a year or more with Simple Minds.
Ket’s not even get started on her part-time job giving Chrissie Hynde tips on social media and her post lecturing to undergrads about homosexual poetry.
Nevertheless, Confessions is her first major release. It’s quite a proggy affair, all dulcet vocals over jaggedly melodic rock – perhaps Karen Carpenter meets King Crimson. Or actually, front-loaded as it is with awkwardly accessible would-be hits and followed by a more meditative “side two” suite of music, the model is Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love, updated for the 21st century.
“That’s the biggest compliment I could get,” Davies says. “That’s what I wanted it to be. If I’ve got anywhere near achieving that, it would be amazing,” Confirming she based the structure of Confessions on Hounds, she explains.
“Side one ends with the song Popular, and then there’s a section where the tracks all bleed into one another, like Kate Bush’s modern classical abstract piece The Ninth Wave. Then Chip On Your Shoulder is like Jig Of Life, if you want to continue the analogy.”
Davies grew up in Wales, steeped in her parents’ Carpenters and 10cc, ELO and Yes albums. Her earliest prog memory, she says, was when her father – a paramedic involved in amateur theatre, who sadly died during the production of Confessions – operated the lighting for a Rick Wakeman show.
She calls herself a “musical autodidact,” learning to play multiple instruments as well as the rudiments of production. A brainy type, the PHD in queer theory describes the record’s overall concept as “deconstructing normative ideas of love and romance.” Each song is sung by a different character. “What you might call a musical ghost-writing of sorts.”
Davies has another term for the album’s contents: “revenge pop” – and as a supporting argument, one of the tracks is titled P.S. Fuck You. Who’s she taking revenge on? “All those people who didn’t think I could do it,” she replies. “Isn’t that what all musicians are doing: trying to prove people wrong?”
But she adds: “I hope people pick up on the fact that it’s meant to be a funny record. There’s lots of dark humour; occasions when I’m trying to make people laugh. I’m not po-faced and serious in ‘real life.’ I don’t have a secret stash of body parts and a shrine to Margaret Thatcher in my bedroom!”
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