Cathy gets the cream

Three years after she first exploded onto the public consciousness, Cathy Davey has followed up with Tales Of Silversleeve, a beguiling, dreamy collection of mostly downbeat songs which occupy some strange other world vaguely redolent of a pop-conscious Tom Waits or PJ Harvey, replete with melancholic jazz inflections and driving, insistent rhythms. En route, she’s discovered a way to enjoy it, but it’s clear that this wasn’t always the case.

“When I was first touring,” professes Cathy, “I felt this pressure to replicate the album, and I really didn’t enjoy myself playing live at all. I used to get nervous. It isn’t a problem now – something’s changed, I don’t know what it is. I’m not embarrassed about the songs, and when I look back, I think I was a bit embarrassed about a lot of the stuff on the first one. A lot of it comes across as silly teenage-angst poetry, quite horrific. I was very young when I wrote some of them. I’m a different person now. I wasn’t ashamed of all the songs, but I wasn’t thrilled about playing them to a room full of people, and very self-conscious. I thought people were judging me more harshly than they actually were. I still do some songs from the first album, but they’re jigged about to make them a bit more bearable for me, and I can enjoy them now.”
Even the dreaded term ‘singer-songwriter’ sits more comfortably than it once did: “I used to hate the term because of all the connotations it implied, and I thought the two should be separated. I don’t mind the term now cause I accept it’s technically accurate, if you sing and you write songs, and I don’t really care what I’m described as.”
Accompanied almost everywhere she goes by a magnificent friendly canine named Rex, who sits in on the interview, Davey adores animals and is especially besotted with parrots: “I’d love to have a parrot. I wanted one, but I’m away too much of the time and they get so upset when they’re left on their own. They’re all really damaged mentally, cause they’re like five-year-old children dealing with separation anxiety and real sadness. They’re prone to taking chunks out of their own feathers. It’s a bit distressing.”
Cathy is no stranger to the frustration of writer’s block: “I write in short quick spurts of manic creativity, which are followed by spells of borderline writer’s block where the writing comes really painfully and laboriously. I’m sure it’s a universal experience for anyone who writes, but it’s difficult to get out of, you can’t just wish it away – it just disappears when it’s had enough. It’s completely independent of whether I’m happy or blue, up or down. It tends to lift as soon as I stop fixating on it – I remember thinking my house was the problem, and I’d need to go to France in order to write, and I would have been scared without Rex. I got through it. You can’t chase the muse, or you’ll scare it away.”
In a recent interview, Cathy made one observation that jumped off the page – “I had a head full of skeletons, and when I wrote songs for them they’d dance.” Was she being flippant or…
“No, not at all, it was quite weighted. I meant it. I think that for much of the past two or three years I’ve been very preoccupied with death. Nobody in particular, just the fact that it’s going to happen to us all and I don’t like the idea, it’s not all that easy to come to terms with. I was very conscious of the shadow of death. I had what I’d describe as my skeletons with me, and I wanted them to be as happy as possible, so that was part of the thinking behind making the music as carefree and sweet and child-like as possible, because the subject matter is quite sinister. If I was to enjoy it, the music had to counter that.”

Tales of Silversleeve is out now on EMI Parlophone