Episode 189: Catherine Anne Davies aka The Anchoress

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1:39Hello, I'm Safiya DeSpexter, and welcome to Spinning Plates, the podcast where I speak to busy working women who also happen to be mothers about how they make it all work. I'm a singer, and I've released eight albums in between having my five sons, aged between seven years old and nearly 22 so I spin a few plates myself. Being a mother can be the most amazing thing but it can also be hard to find time for yourself and your own ambitions. I want to be a little bit nosy and see how other people balance everything. Welcome to Spinning Plates. Hello I'm speaking to you from it's a funny old day actually it's uh it's Saturday morning and it's going to be very very hot today but right now it feels really overcast and a bit breezy but still warm it's kind of confusing everybody's in their summery outfits but it's not really sunny you know what I mean it is quite warm so what does the day hold I don't know I'm taking my small people to the Guildfest festival today it should be really cute and And yeah, it should be a nice day.

2:51It's supposed to be a really lovely family festival. So I've got to the point where I'm taking my youngest to. So that's my seven and my ten-year-old. Because the teenagers have decided that they are kind of fine to stay at home. That's okay. No offence taken. And it's been a nice week. It's been quite as hectic as last week. Not as much of it moving around. But I've still found myself struggling to keep up with things. I had a couple of days where I had a couple of hours to myself. So I was trying to prep and unpack bags and sort things out. And it just seemed like I was finding it all a little bit overwhelming.

3:30I don't know if you have jobs where you're here, there and everywhere. But I sometimes get to the point where I've just got bags of stuff everywhere. And I'll start unpacking them. And I'm like, I don't even remember when this work was. And I'd be like, oh, there's some licorice in there. That must be from when I went to Denmark the other day. and I found yesterday the pack that I hadn't unpacked since last weekend so you know it's that kind of thing anyway I'm surviving life is good this is not a complaint it's more just an acknowledgement that I am yeah I don't know a little bit scrabbling around I think it's also that end of term thing two of my kids broke up this week the other two break up in a couple of weeks so lots of kind of last minute things to sort and organize so yeah just regular stuff you know how it goes my guest this week knows how it goes she is another singer uh catherine aka the anchoress catherine davies i should say also knows the anchoress who's just released her beautiful third album as we once were which is a gorgeous album and what a wonderful album to be part of our conversation for this podcast because so much of it is inspired by generations particularly of women she has some recordings of her grandmother's voice on there she's thinking about her little girl whose voice is also on the album and it's in part actually an album that works through Catherine's acknowledgement that she's been radicalized by motherhood which is such a fascinating way to term it and actually I love it makes it sound not just powerful but kind of purposeful too so yeah it's a great record and in fact the first single was called I had a baby not a lobotomy so hello she's part of our world isn't she um and just documents the ridiculous things people thought and surmised from the fact that she was gonna have a baby about how that would actually affect her working life Catherine's daughter is now six years old um and she'll she speaks about it all brilliantly but we spoke about uh how she found new motherhood how she had to keep things very quiet at the beginning because of an ongoing issue she had with a stalker and how it's inspired her work and also her relationship with her own neurodiversity and how that is woven into her working world and her role as mum so tons and tons of stuff it's a lovely conversation I'm really grateful to Catherine for coming over and speaking to me I'm going to go and get copies for the family while I listen back and I'll see you on the other side over to you Catherine

6:09lovely to see you Catherine lovely to see you too how are you today you good I am very happy that the sun is shining and I've been able to get out and about and be a human adult as well Yes, I know. That's basically why I started the podcast is so that I could have uninterrupted conversations with people because I was struggling to do that in my real life. Adult conversations are definitely in short supply in my life. Definitely. And I also find with doing the podcast, it's always a treat to speak to other singers. and even before we started recording we were in danger of having the podcast already with all the chat because it's we have such a sort of shared experience of trying to work out how to be a musician and raise your family but not necessarily getting that much insight into how other people are doing it yeah and I think I was saying to you that your podcast has been a real resource for me you know having my child in the circumstances I did which I was not really telling anybody that I had a child for two and a half years, but also not really having any of my peer group who have children.

7:13There's not been any kind of advice forthcoming from anyone. And my parents didn't do anything in the world that I operate in either. So it's been really lovely to just listen to conversations with other musicians and kind of go, yep, no. Oh, yep, I could do that. It's been amazing resource. So thank you for making it. Well, my pleasure. And I'm very excited to have you chatting to me today because I mean I feel like there's so many directions I would do my best to encapsulate as much as possible I think we will get on to talking about your own experience with motherhood but I think we should also start with your album because this album seems like it's been such a I mean you spoke about how motherhood has kind of radicalized you and I think a lot of those emotions have been poured into this project so why don't we talk about your album because I've loved getting to know it and thank you for sharing the music with me well thank you I think you're one of the first people to listen to it which is quite nerve-wracking and I had that kind of blissful sort of two weeks once I'd finished it approved the master where I just had this feeling of being really proud that it even existed because it has been such a struggle to even make the work to create the work because I work mostly alone you know it's all on my shoulders I'm not kind of you know dipping into a session for a couple of hours everything is made in my studio.

8:30I might go off and do some kind of drum recording elsewhere, but it's all on me. And obviously everyone knows that when you are parenting, the hours in which you can create and produce something are drastically reduced. So it was really nice to have a short period of time where I just felt this overwhelming sense of, wow, I did it. I accomplished that impossible feat of making something out of nothing at all because you have nothing when you start a record so and I now have 14 tracks which is amazing it's like where did that come from between all the sleeplessness and all of the hours and you know the interruptions um and it's ended up sort of being an unexpected record for me because I wasn't really sure what kind of what I wanted to write about I definitely didn't think that I wanted to be a songwriter that probed the question of motherhood in a very stereotypical way you know I didn't feel musically that I was going to start writing lullabies or kind of gentle um you know um interrogations of all this new love that I felt um and as ever I kind of went the long way around and it sort of ended up being a work about intergenerational relationships really um a lot of the record kind of came together through coming across a cassette tape and my grandmother talking about her childhood and it's strange because hers was a presence I felt really strongly from the moment that I found out I was pregnant with my daughter um and I'm not a particularly spiritual person at all but I had been through quite a lot of losses to get there this was my seventh pregnancy and I just kind of had this really strong sense one day and I thought I wouldn't get emotional talking about this but I probably will cry many times today just of her presence and she's no longer with us but I'd reached I think about the ninth or tenth week which was always a kind of danger zone for me and I just had this really strong sense of this sort of like like a tie between myself my mother and her mother pulling through like this kind of cord so when this tape this cassette tape plopped into my lap pretty much a few years later while I was contemplating starting a new original record it kind of felt like a gift in some way that she was coming back again into this chain of events and so it ended up being an exploration I think slightly of generational trauma about some of the things that she kind of weathered as a parent who lost several of her children in very traumatic circumstances about the generational trauma that was passed on to my mother because of that therefore the way that she parented me and some of the ways I think I've tried to avoid doing that with my own child I'm not sure that's a very succinct explanation of what the record's about but it's called as we once were and I guess it what it looks at is these events and these things that happen in our lives that fundamentally change us forever maybe for the better or for the worse so be that becoming a mother be that traumatic losses terrible things that happen to us and I think it's what I wanted to I mean I didn't know I wanted to do this when I was starting but I wanted to eventually create a work that explored the nature of time and change and how we evolve as kind of people across the years as I trundled towards my own middle age well I think you put it brilliantly and I'm I feel like for everybody listening I want to reiterate you did this yourself and that is an enormous thing to achieve something I am not capable of doing I go into a studio I don't know what many majority of the buttons do um so the fact that this project as you said is something from nothing is really on your shoulders but what I could hear when I listened to it um I could really get the scope of the ambition and the intensity of the feelings and exactly what you've spoken about and I mean right from the beginning you're ensconced in this world of synth and audio from your grandma, from your daughter in there.

12:36And you sort of embark on this journey where you're aware you're about to unpick things. And there's a glorious mix of drama and an occasion within it, but also real intimacy and intention. It feels like a very intentional record. thank you I mean I think retrospectively it is but you know you'll know as you when you create an album worth of music sometimes at the beginning you're not quite sure what it's going to be yeah like chipping away at something yeah it's a bit like a phd really you're sort of you've got an idea of sort of what the remit of the project is obviously you're not certain about the detail and it's exploratory and and the you know the best records for me or the most interesting records are um and obviously you know there's still lots of banging pop songs on there as well yeah probably the way I'm kind of selling it it sounds a little bit kind of esoteric but you know it is about also writing great memorable hooks as well but to do that also within this sort of more ambitious scope of creating a piece of art you know yes that's what I was going to say it's like an art pop sort of genre really yeah I'm so lucky in that I don't have you know I don't have an A &R man breathing down my neck you are lucky the expectations I have of my work from my previous albums as the anchor s that I will do something alone that I will do something that is you know art rock art pop and that it will be conceptually kind of bound together you know my last record was about loss exactly trauma and I think I've been very lucky to find an audience that really appreciates the difficulty that's entwined with you know I think I called it last time the death disco and this time I think it's you know an exploration of the nature of time really um yeah terribly serious but it's it's not in the way that i hope well it's also it's time also just in the the preciousness of it the way that seasons come and go but also as you said you know when you started talking about the way that you suddenly access this idea of lineage and uh the what you know the generations before went through and their private stories that you suddenly realize have been put into your being as well and and I think that as as creatives it's a wonderful thing to be able to exercise some of that and bring it into the light and really examine it in a way that a lot of people would have to keep those things quite shut away there might be conversations and thoughts and whole chapters of people's lives that they would just never have really spoken of again whereas if you're someone that is going into your studio and allowing yourself time to play and to access it all, then you're able to get those things out into the light and really examine them and think, well, what if I stretch it this way and that way?

15:13And what does this mean to me now? And now that I have a small person, what am I hoping to give to her? And it's lovely as well, you spoke about the relationship between your last record and this one. Because I was thinking about that a lot when I was listening to it. And I think sometimes albums come as a call and response to each other a little bit. So if you go from, you know, loss and the art of losing, and then you come into this new things you can find and so there might be parts of yourself that a version of yourself that's gone but then something new emerges from it and even I'm so sorry to hear about the six pregnancies you went through to get your you know your successful seventh but even those losses who you have now who you are now raising she wouldn't have been here and saying you know that wouldn't be that person without all that loss too yeah I mean I think that became the sort of accidental theme of the record was kind of you know making something new out of the past or you know all of those losses even in in sort of the mechanics of the record so a lot of it was made at um the townsend studios which houses all of pete townsend from the who's vintage synthesizers so i had the the physical presence of the past as well literally playing the past had hands on the keys of the past and it was kind of thinking how can i make something new out of this rather than just doing like a kind of slavish sort of 80s retro kind of sound which didn't interest me because I'd kind of done that on the last record to some extent you know I discovered analog synths when I was making The Art of Losing so I didn't want to repeat myself and so it conceptually has sort of become about you know what can we make out of what we have lost but also what can we make out of these objects from the past you know the cassette tape of my grandmother's voice taking that and threading it through all of the segues of the record and making it a kind of narrative spine as well as obviously kind of plummeting the depths of my own sort of family history to some extent that is because I had to do that quite sensitively as well yeah but I'm sure I mean you know you're obviously a sensitive artist I think sensitivity is probably second nature to how you approach things anyway but I think it's um without that's sounding too twee there's a nice metaphor in using the synths because I was looking up a little bit of footage online of Pete Townsend's studio and all these synths that you would have been having access to and how for him as someone who primarily would write I suppose guitar he said that for him what he loved about synth is it put into his hands orchestration he wouldn't usually have access to but also when you record you have to record it then that you are never going to recreate that sound again that only exists for that time that you're recording it so you get these extraordinary oscillations and and shapes in the sound and in a way that's quite a nice metaphor for how you can feel a little bit when you become a parent because you have some of the themes that have existed for time eternal but in your moment you're the only person that's been you know it's the first time you've been a parent and that child's first time you know they've existed too so there's the very bespoke incredibly of the moment mixed in with these bigger themes that will continue going around and around and around yeah and also the impossibility of like you know to extend the metaphor you know grasping that sound in your hands you know it will run through your hands and will you you try to hold on to it and that was my experience recording these synths as well you know some of them the modular synths especially you're creating a sound that no one else has made before and if you don't hit record there and then And you are never going to be able to recreate that.

18:45I remember having this moment on my first day on the ARP 2500. Probably a synth nerd will tell me I'm getting my numbers wrong there. Not me. I am not a synth nerd, so I cannot correct you. I'm just thinking, holy shit, like I've got to press record right now because I'm never going to get this sequence back again. And that sense of like just grasping onto air. And that felt like a real metaphor for, I think, how we experience those early years of parenting as well. Because for me, those five years have just, I lived it. I was there for certain, but I cannot hold on to any of those moments. And that bittersweetness, I think, of that.

19:27I love how all of the concept of the record, the way it's made, and I love the neatness that all ties in together. but that's retrospective because I definitely can't say it was intentional I didn't have this big master plan it just accidentally all ends up making sense after you finish I think yeah well I suppose with intention maybe I mean more like an energy tour of something that you were um needing to actually create in front of you you know that space it just it's just I found it really cohesive and I loved all the themes in it and I really enjoyed the scope and ambition of the lyrics and I really got all the you know the conversation around what's passed on generationally and and and I suppose some things you know you got especially if you're having a little girl I imagine you know you're the question of what it is to be you know a woman in your in your in your lifetime doing the things you do and how that's affected affected you oh god from the moment i found out i was having a girl and this was quite early on i it plunged me into some kind of crisis really and i think to some extent sort of foreshadowed what i ended up doing on the record which was to sort of say to myself you know you've really got to address the past you've got to look headlong at some of this trauma that has been embedded into your dna from your mother and her mother and you've kind of got to sort yourself out before she arrives because I had this real strong sense that I didn't want to mess her up in the way that I felt perhaps some of that generational trauma had impacted me and it became a mission for me I was a woman on a mission and I don't know if you know anyone listening has kind of tried to access certain kinds of therapy while they're pregnant it is contraindicated quote unquote and I really fought for this kind of saying this is madness you know I'm trying to do the best thing for my child here and put myself in the best possible space mental health wise and was being told oh that's not good for the baby really for the baby I'm surprised to really fight for it um was sort of told you know oh we don't we don't let anyone pregnant do that what's the thinking behind that I suppose I guess it's the idea is probably that it could kind of re-traumatize you or be bad for the baby because obviously as there's a lyric in one of my songs as it's all said you know you're just an incubator on legs this idea that you actually you don't have autonomy anymore that the health of the baby comes before your needs even though I think that those two things are deeply entwined I suppose also it's slightly hmm it's maybe part of as well when you're pregnant the way you can get spoken to you can sometimes feel a bit like you're not addressed as much of an adult as you are in other environments.

22:21Oh, and I really fought for this. I mean, my particular experience of sort of being pregnant whilst deeply traumatised and having complex PTSD was I did a lot of research with anything to try and work out how was I going to navigate this safely. I wasn't going to have internal exams. There were certain things I was not prepared to do in terms of medicalisation of the process. And I found this really incredible programme called My Body Back, which is a very, very small, not very funded programme that runs out of one particular London hospital. And they can accept hardly any women every year. And it's a programme for women who've experienced sexual assault and trauma who are pregnant and want to access healthcare in a way that's safe to them and I had to again really fight to get health care access in this way but eventually was able to be transferred to it was a great and they call it the safeguarding team at UCLH and I had a very particular kind of tailored pregnancy care that meant that I could keep myself safe keep the baby safe but do that in a way that wasn't going to further re-traumatize me because there is so much about the way or things that you're expected to put up with or have done to your body when you're pregnant that I just absolutely knew for certain was not going to be happening on my watch and it amazes me in this conversation that I had subsequently with the health authority after I gave birth or saying why isn't this just something you do for everyone when you're pregnant?

23:55Absolutely. Given that one in three women has experienced sexual assault, why is this just not embedded into pregnancy or the conversation you can have really early on is there you know how do you feel about these things to what degree are you happy to be a participant in these if we explain really clearly what the objective is or maybe if that healthcare professional is given a little bit of a steer on why this might be difficult for you I mean I'm actually sat here completely blown away by the obviousness of that conversation and very very aware of the absolute lack of it I mean it's quite shocking actually it is isn't it that you should have to access access a specialized kind of pathway in order to just be treated in a humane way god it's not actually mind-blowing because it's making me think about how much of health care female health care doesn't really take into account that you might be dealing with quite a lot every time you go for something quite routine that could also be something that reminds you of something that was very much not something you're okay with and I'd never even really I don't know why I've never really put those two things together before in such a simple but really I mean it's so obvious now you've said it yeah even down to not wanting to give birth at the hospital where I'd had multiple miscarriages and operations and and having to fight for that again because it was out of area so to just say do you know what I can't step foot in that building it's really traumatizing for me can I please just access my maternity care here and and the fact that that wasn't just considered to be a normal request you know we shouldn't be wanting to keep the mother healthy and sane surely yes surely but again none of this is is enmeshed in the way that we kind of treat pregnant women and it can be pretty exhausting to advocate for yourself because also you are also in the big unknown the pregnancy is progressing you've got you know a timeline within that so to to feel that you've got safety in your choices is something that could actually give you a quite a lot of anxiety yeah and I think I was so aware of my privilege and being able to advocate for myself in terms of my educational privilege and then being able to write it all down and have it on a little card that I would hand to whoever was seeing me um and and how there were so many women that I encountered who had similar backgrounds to me who had never even mentioned it to the person that was providing their care and was feeling deeply traumatised by the endless internal exams, for instance, and that no one could explain to me why it was necessary at all when I managed to not have any at all because it wasn't necessary.

26:36And that was thanks for part to this Her Body Back collective. That's right, yes, because they recognised that, unless it was absolutely necessary, medically speaking, that this actually was something that we could work around and that is something that you should be entitled to request. Oh, shout out to them. I'm glad you've gotten to my attention, actually. They're amazing. And they also provide women access to smear tests and things like that as well. You know, any situation where it might exacerbate past trauma. And they're just such a brilliant organisation. But they had so few appointments because they're so underfunded.

27:08Yeah. And that just broke my heart completely. And it was the fact that I'd had to do so much research to even find out this place existed because I was so panicked at the prospect of what I might have to go through otherwise. So it was quite, when I say that motherhood has radicalised me, it has in many ways, including just realising how broken the system is and the way that we treat women given what, you know, a third of us has experienced that we really need to look at the way that we kind of access maternity care in that context. So many of us have trauma that we've got to navigate and that we can't just put this aside.

27:45That's not healthy for the child either. That's so true. I suppose it's going almost back to a sort of old fashioned idea of, again, back to the behind closed doors kind of way of dealing with a lot of these things that are quite uncomfortable and quite difficult to, you know, to remove that feeling, to let people have that space where they can feel safe and well looked after. But they're not also going to feel that they're being brought into contact with things and make them feel deeply uncomfortable. yeah and i think i think i've just got that personality where i will you know when when my own kind of well-being is is at stake to that extent i will fight for it and i think um yeah i'm really you know five years on the fact that nothing has really changed with the way that we approach maternity care is it's not flabbergasting to me but it's not a priority is it we're talking about maternal death rates that's great but what about just general trauma at the same time

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30:50And so you mentioned that you kept your new motherhood secret for, did you say, two and a half years? Yeah, so first of all, it kind of, I didn't, because of the multiple losses that I'd had, and some of those had been had partially in the public eye, not through my own choice. I didn't really want to tell people I was pregnant this time, also because I presumed that it would end the same way that the others had. And I just couldn't really go through that again. And then not to go into any details, I had a situation with stalking that was happening. And the police advice was basically do not let anybody know that you are pregnant.

31:26and this continued to be the advice for the very long period of time that it took to go to court um so by the time I sort of felt in a position and they changed their advice to me once we had a protection order in place um she was two and a half which was just a completely surreal experience to have gone through pregnancy without being able to draw on any kind of wider support um But then to navigate those early years as well in lockdown. Yes, I was going to say you had lockdown. Trying to pretend as if nothing's happening here. You know, everything's normal. It was wild. But then I had nothing to compare it to also.

32:07I guess that's true. But I also, I don't have very much to compare that to either. I mean, like, did you find anyone else that had done something similar? Or did you feel like you were just navigating that very much in your own level? No, I mean, I didn't even have the capacity to sort of even reach out to try and find out if there were other people that had done this. I mean, I think it was made easier by the fact that, so I had my daughter, I think it was about a week before we went into lockdown. So it was probably... So the world was helping you out a tiny bit with that, some ways. It definitely was, obviously, because it's not like we had to go out and see people or do anything.

32:43And I think it was also helped by the fact that I carried very small, as they say. you know I was shooting music videos when I was six seven months pregnant nobody had a clue wow no one there's um the video of me for show your face where I've got a red suit on I've got a telecaster guitar which is hiding a very tiny bump and I think I was nearly seven months pregnant and and you would not have been able to tell at all so I was quite there were a few things kind of playing in my favor and I think it just got to the point where it became so ridiculous that it was quite hard to say anything either.

33:17It sort of had gone on for so long that I didn't really know how to tell people. Obviously, there was an inner circle of people who knew. Yes. Those who really had to know. But for instance, I didn't tell my grandmother I was pregnant until after I had my daughter because there was some concern about the fact that she might sort of be so excited that she might mention it to someone and might put something on social media and things like that. So I guess you've just got to be led by instinct at that point. and given that you were dealing with a really difficult situation. Yeah, and I think I have had to sort of put it in the box of actually it was for the best because we've got to have this really lovely time.

33:53Well, I was going to say, well, there's some unexpected positives that came out of that, just having that moment, just the family unit. Yeah, and I also got to conduct this strange social experiment, which was if people don't know that you've had a baby, what impact does that have upon the work that you get offered? and I was I saw a marked difference between the amount I was working before I let the world wider world know that she was here and then that point afterwards where people started trotting out the oh well we thought you might be too busy to do that so we didn't ask you to do that or well I guess you're not touring anymore too and it was really interesting because for those whole two and a half years I'd just been carrying on nobody had suggested not asking me to do anything or offering me work so I guess a lot of this became the fodder for I had a baby not a lobotomy which is the lead single that's right so I'd been in this really strange position where I'd actually been able to test that theory and practice amazing um obviously not on purpose but um yeah I started making a list of all these daft things that people said to me it's quite a list but I feel like I've had a lot of those things said to me as well so many women have said that to me they've just sort of said yep can tick pretty much all of those off each verse is sort of like kind of looking at a different arena so like the first verse is all about the daft things in the music industry that people said to me I guess you'll be retiring now we presumed you'd be too busy so we didn't ask you to do that amazing thing that we asked someone else to do and made me very cross afterwards to oh I guess Europe's out of the equation now in terms of touring and these are things that men with children were saying to me which just made me even more cross yeah well um I mean before we got together today you and I were sort of having a little email exchange about uh you know the the quiet misogyny that goes on and and it's really difficult because I think when people say those casual statements I feel for me it's it's given me like a double-edged ouch because on the one hand it's a terrible thing to say to someone who's perfectly capable of doing the work but on the other hand it kind of gives you this extra burden of feeling really guilty if you then do the work because you feel like you're going against maybe the expectation of what it should look like to be a new mum so I think it's probably taken me well I think it's something I still think about now actually I mean I definitely had it where I'd be going away for work and I'd go on online to sort of find these forums of people saying well I'm sure it's fine if you do leave your baby for three nights but I mean it's not something I would do but you know you go for it and you feel absolutely terrible but um I mean how how surprising has it been to you that people have taken that on as a way to speak when you're doing the same job as you were before I mean honestly just ridiculous and again exposed my real privilege I think in I guess presuming that we'd reach some kind of space of equality and then obviously I think for every woman that is shattered when you have a baby and you realise actually in this particular domain we're quite broken.

37:04So it made me kind of reflect on myself and perhaps how I hadn't noticed it before it applied to me which obviously we all do in our own kind of blinkered way don't we with the world. But I think what was more galling was the fact that in those two and a half years you know I'd had to kind of get on with it you know I'd had to promote a record which had done the best of any record that I'd released before you know I'd had to carry on working in my studio to you know I was inundated with work during lockdown because obviously people on furlough they had more money I had remixes coming in left right and centre mixing for other people remote recording and of course no one knew that I had a newborn so I was just getting on doing it but like you say there's that real tension between the guilt that you feel because now I look back and I think but does that mean that I was kind of neglecting my child in some way you know she was often lying asleep in on top of me while I was doing some of this work but I don't know should I have been 100 % focused on her and I think we always judge ourselves against other examples of what we see and obviously what I didn't have was those conversations with privately with other women who are musicians saying oh yeah I'm doing that too or yeah I find that difficult too yeah I was kind of starved of any barometer of whether what I was feeling was normal or whether what I was doing was within the realms of what a good mother would do you know quote unquote it's like that's a lot isn't it but now that you're the other side of that that chapter can you see now that actually like now you know you've been able to have the conversations you can probably see that actually there's a whole world out there of women navigating things completely their own way and actually sometimes the hardest things to work out are the ones where there isn't a right or a wrong it's just what works for you well I think that's that's the thing and I've been having conversations most recently we're about to launch my podcast the milk and the music um I think at some point I'm not sure exactly when I've been having conversations with other women in the music industry all different roles you know some of them are behind the scenes some of them are performers and what's really struck me is how there is no right way as you say you know what's right for you is not going to be right for someone else you know I've spoken to women who have felt quite happy at shutting the door and going off on tour and enjoyed their time and then there's someone like me who will sit sobbing on the driveway in the tour bus and neither means anything other than you just have to do I think what you feel is right for you at that particular moment and that can change I think as my daughter's got older I found it much more difficult to leave her when I go away touring and I will take her with me.

39:53Was it last summer or the summer before she came on tour with me and the Malick Street Preachers for pretty much the whole summer and I wouldn't have done that had I not had a conversation with the amazing Gwenno who said to me oh yeah you can do that you know I take mine with me take my mum with me and we book a twin room and this is how we do it and I was terrified I thought oh my goodness you know she'll have a terrible time I won't sleep it'll be awful and it was only another woman kind of just saying yes you can yes it's okay um we had a brilliant if slightly exhausting summer and I'm so glad that she's had that experience of seeing me do my job you know she's been to Glastonbury side of stage on the main stage and latitude and she's had all of these very non-normal experiences but equally she's seeing her mother do what she loves and that's hopefully I think got to balance out the fact that sometimes she's a bit sad if I have to go and do something and not bring her with me yeah definitely but how do you find it for you with giving yourself what you need to perform when you've also got your little one with you because that's something I struggle with sometimes it's giving myself a bit of headspace that's really hard i mean that's the impossible part and that's sort of almost what i'd say is the bit i haven't figured out yet across the board it's the psychological space either the psychological space to create or the psychological space to step into you know the anchoress rather than catherine or me um that i don't have the answer to that because it's you can have the time you can have the resources you can have all of these things that we think will make it better but what we kind of don't have is that identity switch that just goes ping and now you're in this other mode and you're not thinking about the fact you've been touched all day and you're overstimulated or that your brain is still thinking about her first and foremost and I think unfortunately the way that I figured out how to navigate that is to not take her on tour with me as things kind of go forwards because it is just too difficult to occupy those two roles and do either of them well because you're not really well for me I wasn't really doing either of those things to my best ability and it was fine when I was touring with the Mannix because I didn't have too many songs to do and I could have that little runway time as I call it to get into the zone and I was still able to deliver you know what I was doing as a performer but to do that when you're the headline artist is quite quite tricky I don't know how you found that is it yeah tricky I've definitely sailed a bit close to the wind sometimes as well with like if I'm honest sometimes knowing that I can bring the kids away with me when I work makes it harder for me to feel good about the fact that I've chosen not to bring them because sometimes I know that I will I really need some space and I've definitely had it where I mean what pops into my head was a gig where yeah I was it was my show so um I'm the headline act and I was I had the kids in the dressing room with me until about 10 minutes before I went on and my older ones it's it's slightly different when they're little and and you know they're all kind of a bit more like happy to be out and you can pass them around to people but I think then my he must have been sort of early teens 13 or 14 and uh this was my second born and he was just really angry he didn't want to be there I'd slightly tricked him into coming to my gig if I'm honest I said come and meet me for sound check and then he just hung around and he was like I don't I want to go home he's not that bothered about gigs and so he was so angry in my dressing room the little one put some glitter straight into my eyeball I was like I think I need to have some space I had about 10 minutes I just thought I don't think I've given myself what I need here to really feel prepped and ready I felt a bit a bit shambolic a bit a bit messy in myself and I was also thinking what you mentioned with your autism and how that can be affected as well because you mentioned when you feel overstimulated and touched a lot I'd imagine that's an extra layer of needing to find what makes you feel calibrated absolutely I mean in a way sometimes being autistic for me can be an advantage with performing because I'm so used to and good at masking I can flip the switch because I've been doing it my whole life the cost of that is obviously quite high the next day or that next evening um so it both gives us and take us from me because sometimes you can't navigate that and if I have been overstimulated all day as parenting is incredibly overstimulating for me in terms of noise and touch especially just sometimes drives my brain to the edge of ability to cope with that or to override it and soldier on um so I'm still figuring that out I think because obviously performing and touring also places a huge demand on your kind of sensory overload as well but routine really helps I think this is the thing every time everything I look at I try to look at the good and the bad and I think you know parenting can be great because it demands a schedule I love a schedule it's like I thrive with routine um but obviously parenting also comes with the chaos as well and that's the bit I can't really cope with so I try to see everything is kind of imbalanced nothing is ever fully unmanageable and nothing is ever fully wonderfully a great fit with your life um but I don't have the answer yet to the touring and I still sort of feel that's like a kind of something that's looming in the near future as to you can work it out as you go along though try try things and see see what works and that's what I need to hear it's just I think it's it's seeing visible examples of other women doing it and managing it but also being honest about as you have been about that you know it won't be perfect yeah it won't be perfect but you might do some things and think you know what this was actually a festival that i could have brought her to and she would have really liked another one where you go this has been really stressful and i definitely won't do this again you can figure it out as you go i remember one particular gig i think it was man manchester castle bowl arena whatever it's called and um the night before she had just suddenly woken up in the middle of the night and decided and said pronounced everything was wrong the hotel room was wrong this is wrong the bed is wrong the room is wrong i hate everything about it i want to go home and she screamed from about midnight through to 5 a.m in the morning oh she's dedicated it was unreal and i i don't know how i did it wow managed to have a nap during the day and then go on stage and just get through the show and then reset and have like a very long sleep the next night but it was that kind of feeling of this is as bad as it gets yeah you're really being tested there was nothing that I could have done to have made it better for her you know we couldn't get up and go home no you're just in it it's just happening but it's sort of knowing that I got through that it's kind of like I don't want to test it by karma kind of saying could it get worse than that you know we managed it we did it we got through it um and you know bless her she did actually enjoy herself that evening which is because I was kind of opening my eyes with matchsticks you know kind of like oh my god please put these sunglasses on the stage thank goodness it was an outdoor show because I look like I haven't slept um I think and that's always the thing is like someone's going to be sort of slightly their knees aren't going to be completely met and that's what I'm learning to accept slowly five years later well it is an ongoing thing it's an ongoing thing for sure this might be a bit clumsy me but I'm sort of just joining some dots up in my head a little bit because I was listening to you talk about how you'd been invited to do a, I think it was a six music talk about the Beatles' White Album.

47:54And you knew that you were brought in to a space that was largely going to be white blokes talking about the Beatles. So you'd done really extensive research. And it made me think about the amount of times that probably as a solo artist who is clearly so, so competent in a studio environment. And yet you ask of yourself this to sort of over, over prepare, to absolutely armor yourself. And then I was thinking about that almost as if you're someone that is used to masking in an environment, there must be so much of time where you have done so, you are working so much harder than everybody else in that space in a way that in a lot of ways actually if you dropped a lot of these things you would still be so capable but you've given yourself so many sort of levels to hit and I was thinking that is a that's something that in the studio setting are you able to completely just drop all of that worry about it and just completely be yourself oh yeah that's why it's my happy place you know I if I could just be a studio artist and make records and and do a Kate Bush and never have to go anywhere or tour out of one venue that would be ideal for me the studio is my happy place where I can be myself because one I can hyper focus on the task I love comping drums more than anything in the world which is so boring why do you love comping drums i just i really love intricate hyper-focused tasks and is it very pleasing to you that there's an equation that will work with it i love logic i love maths i love patterns because there's so much maths in what you just described and for people who don't know what comping drums would entail it's basically where you've got your drum recordings and you're picking maybe like okay it's that hit of the snare it's that tom it's that hi-hat and getting it all to quantize and be absolutely in the pocket of the beat that you're creating and you can literally go it's not that snare hit I liked it where it sounded right in the middle of the drum not on the edge or you know absolutely getting it and then tightening everything to the grid exactly and it will take days and you but you really I love it it's my I get that I mean my thing is Tetris which I think is not that's as similar in terms of the tessellation the neatness of absolutely it can have its place I mean what you do is a lot more complicated and actually lives on beyond the new world of Nintendo but I do I can relate to the pleasing nature of when it all slots and you're just absolutely it makes you fire something I think it's that illusion of control as well it really struck me when you were describing sort of you know all of that extra preparation yeah and for me I think I was quite sort of well prepared for that in that I studied classical ballet for a long time when I was younger, the idea of all of that work and effort and discipline to end up with a result that looks effortless.

50:57What a great analogy that is in my life. It's furiously paddling under the water like a swan and gliding across the top. Look how effortless this all is to me. Whereas underneath it all, you know, there is the two days of preparation to do a three-hour live program on the White Album next to the person who's literally written the book about it yes and was able to even come up with things that he said oh catherine i didn't know that that's quite surprising given that i wrote the book and i was like yes i have achieved i have achieved and it is i think you know there's something about how i've approached my music career that is analogous to my previous career as an academic in that i love to immerse myself in a subject and become an expert at it and obviously the album format allows you to do that you know You can pick a sort of demarcated area and decide, I'm just going to spend a couple of years exploring this and create work out of this and become the expert in it.

51:56It's no accident that all of my albums come with a reading list, not just because I love the Manic Street Preachers and it's a nod to them, but also because for me, the people that enjoy my music, I'm lucky enough that they also want to dive into the world building around it. They want to maybe go and read the poems that have inspired the lyrics or they want to go and read some of the theorists that I'm mentioning in some of the work that I've looked at. And I can't believe in a way that I've got my dream job because I'm able to combine all of these things that I love and all of these hyper-focused tasks and sit in a room on my own all day.

52:36It's brilliant. And I was thinking how glorious that you have the world of music. And actually, you mentioned the reading list I mean you'd sent me before we met today sort of track by track I suppose it'd be intended mainly for the press but send it to me with a little synopsis or you know um the meaning behind each song on the album but also some quotes from from writers and I was really impressed by it because uh there's not even there's no hint of pretension to it it feels completely sincere that the writing absolutely has been part of the creative process and the music. That's always been me.

53:13You know, when I lived in London, I'd be, you know, obviously getting the tube to the studio wherever I was working because I don't drive. And I'd have, you know, a book with me. I used to actually come to a studio quite close to here and there was a secondhand bookshop near the tube station. Every morning I would grab a Penguin Classic from there and read it on the commute to and from there. So very naturally, that would embed itself into what I was making. There is what I think I kind of hit upon quite early on with the Anchoress was this sense that after having spent a lifetime trying to be someone else, I had a terrible time at school and was bullied really awfully.

53:50That if I just stopped pretending that I was anything other than I was, what I noticed was that people actually who did like that would find me. and that was just a moment of revelation for me after trying to fit in for so long not tell people I had a PhD which I was told by my first label you know it's going to put people off you know nobody likes a boffin kind of thing um to you know you know don't tell people your age or don't tell anyone about your you know your sexual identity or private life at all that I the moment I just stopped listening to all this nonsense advice and just was like I'm autistic I have a PhD in queer theory by the way that suddenly this small tribe of people suddenly kind of started coming to me and it was almost like just being yourself was the answer all along rather than as the industry kind of tells you you must kind of fit into what's just been successful and I remember when I had my first development deal with I think what would have been Polydor at the time and Duffy had been really huge and they were trying to kind of put me in the studio with Bernard Butler and they were like trying to kind of replicate this formula it was nuts but that's how the industry operates right it sees success and it says oh let's just do a little variation you know different pot noodle flavor of this and that was never really going to work for me um and so I slowly kind of just walked away from all of that and put together my own records on my own when I'd been told no you can't self-produce your own record that's not laughed out of the room by people for that and yet here I am a decade later having built a career up the very things that they said would mean that I would fail that's pretty wild isn't it especially when you had if you add into the mix can you please not say you're pregnant or you've had a baby yeah and then when you finally say I have and actually I'm going to pour into my work as well like it's all there now yeah I mean sort of in in the past before I'd had my daughter with previous pregnancies obviously I've been over quite a long period of time you know there was work that I lost when I told people that I was pregnant um and I couldn't believe that still happened really flabbergasted and then I started talking to other women who'd had the same experiences and obviously you know the music industry is rife with NDAs you know non-disclosure agreements so of course this kind of behavior goes unchallenged um and I it still happens now is all I'll say it still is happening right now yeah And it's crazy that we're in 2026 and you can still lose your job or lose work because you are pregnant.

56:31Mad. I know. And it's interesting as well that we've, you know, threaded through so much of our conversation has been, you know, through the prism of being a woman in this industry when you actually did queer theory as part of your PhD. So if anyone's going to pick up on those things, it's going to be you. and I think there's a whole you know we could have had the cold conversation itself just about the heteronormative expectations that are still so much part of our world that's so unhelpful well I think that's why I found it quite natural to push back against these things because queer theory obviously without giving a lecture here is about kind of recognizing the constructed nature of identity and what we accept to be essentialized norms so obviously apart from the fact that for the most part the woman has to carry the child actually everything else around it is a cultural construction so I found it a little bit easier to push back against these things because I guess academically I've already been deconstructing what we accept as the norm and that's kind of in my DNA too I think to kind of just say hang on a minute why do we do it like this?

57:41And what led you to studying that in the first place was it something that in your family would be a conversation or did you sort of question it by yourself no I mean my parents don't even have a levels I'm the first in my family to go to university at all there's absolutely there's no musical background in my family there is no academic background in ballet um that was just something I became really obsessed wow so everything you've been up to really yes I think I'm just a little aberration a happy one sometimes I think you sort of my mum really appreciates art to look at and my mum enjoys watching dancing etc you know she loves Strictly she's a big fan um but no I think I've always been a bit different um and my parents are very good at accepting that and sort of allowing that to flourish but but I think you know being drawn to the queer theory side of things kind of came from my experiences as a teenager recognizing that I was not straight as they would have called it then and that being a big part of my experience of being bullied at school you know having horrible slurs shouted at me daily from about the age of eight oh my word because kids do pick up on these things even if you have not the vocabulary to articulate it yourself um and then going to an all-girls grammar school where to be not interested just in the boys was was quite a difficult thing to navigate and And I think me not necessarily having the social awareness to moderate my behaviour in front of other people, I just want to be quite defiant with it.

59:19I didn't probably make it easy for myself. So when I went to university, I think... But then why did you hide it? But I think at the time, you know, growing up in the 90s and in the early 2000s, there was still, I mean, there still is a lot of difficulty around groups of children in schools. I think people aren't quite as accepting as perhaps we would like to think. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. I think the conversations are happening. And I think the sort of generation of late teens, early 20s, kids onwards is pretty great. But I think still for kids growing up, there's still quite a lot of, what's the word?

59:55It's just still quite old fashioned. It's surprisingly straight in a lot of thinking, I think. Yeah, and I think that's something that happens when you have children too, is that kind of assumption, that heteronormative assumption that because you are a woman who's had a child, therefore everything about your kind of sexual identity that doesn't fit in with that is kind of erased or there's presumptions made. And I know that chatting to my queer friends who've got children too, they've found that really challenging. The idea that part of who they are kind of gets erased in other people's eyes because they just see you as a mother.

1:00:27So therefore you must have a husband or a partner who is male because you you have a child um and that they're that that's quite tricky i think to navigate along with everything else because you're just exhausted it's like actually i don't really want to explain the ins and outs of my history and my life to everybody that i meet yeah and so it's part of that slow erosion of yourself that you experience anyway when you're a mother i was gonna say because i think there's a little feeling you can have actually quite a big feeling where you can feel like you've gone into some processes that homogenized you a bit and that your edges have all been sort of smoothed out and you're therefore just out the other side just there to be someone raising someone else and it's it can be quite hard to go back and find your identity and feel good about it and feel in your body and in yourself yeah and I think when you're already fighting battles on so many fronts as I have been as well you know I don't have endless energy and sometimes I have now learned to pick my battles around where I will push back I think it was it's just been such a difficult period being pregnant and then giving birth under the circumstances I did that to push back on that as well has just felt you know I'm slowly getting my energies now to begin to talk about it but I think the first five years I just thought you know what pick your battles Catherine it's not yeah I actually think that's kind of what can happen anyway as we get older because you can't be all things to all people but the things you've got time for and fire for it's like the power of it can be even more magnificent yeah and I think that's quite hard when you're obviously a musical artist somewhat in the public eye because obviously everything that you say and do in your songs kind of gets condensed into this sort of pithy one line in the press release about what it's about and obviously there's no even nuance there so everything gets condensed down to something digestible that's either can be digested into a verse or a chorus but also you know what's the opening paragraph of the press release you can't get across everything about the experience that you've had over the last five years you just have to kind of stick to the bullet points I think I find that quite challenging because you know none of it nothing is that simple is it no one's experience is that it's not but I think that's what's brilliant about music is that you can create this world and an atmosphere and a landscape that has got layers and it continues as dialogue so whatever comes next whatever project it follows it's like all like I don't know I always think of it like um steps in a stream or something like you're crossing through these waters and each time you put a new record out it's like the next little stone you jump to well I think for me as well it's been my kind of therapy and retribution for my earlier years and all of that bullying and horrible kind of experiences that I had is that now I can be in dialogue with this group of people who love my music and come to the shows and buy the records and that they are accepting of me and I can put all of this nuance into this is why you know the productions and arrangements are so dense and there's so many layers and footnotes in the lyrics because that is my way of being able to set the record straight and to be able to be all of the layers of things that I am and it's it's a real privilege to be able to have that space because obviously most people don't have that in their life yeah and I get to be fully myself in my records because there is no one else media you know there's no literally no one else's hands yeah obviously apart from my amazing session players which I should obviously acknowledge um Keir Adamson who plays the drums Charlie Kaywood who plays the bass on the records as well and there's lots of lovely guests on there as well it's been quite a after having as I say mostly worked on my own for a really long time for like the last eight years what I found myself doing was softening on this record and being much more open to collaboration and I don't think it was any surprise that all of those collaborations came with women apart from one and it was um gueno who had been such a huge support to me um as another artist who has children um and just the practical advice from her was so amazing just even just her just existing for me was just like yes you can do it and then hannah peele who's been a really good friend of mine for a few years now um and also eve swalder as well he's a young artist coming up now and it it's really nice to look back on the record and say after the art of losing which was really about isolating myself I couldn't have let anyone else into that darkness that I am kind of opening up now and making those connections again as someone who'd resolutely said you know I'll never work with anyone else again and you know it's just me and myself and the anchoress encapsulates that whole concept you know maybe I will invite more people to the party in the future and it's been really nice to rebuild that trust with with the women especially on the record yeah you're part of like this community but at the heart of it is what you've been you know it is your ship so I do I do think it's um well it's glorious and it's lovely to hear you speak about it with the darkness of the last one and that that isolation to this what a nice answer that is to have this communication and also community and the boldness that's come with it so I think it's I think it's exciting.

1:05:51I feel like, I think you should be, well, I'm sure you are, but really proud of your record. It's beautiful. Thank you. And I feel, you know, really happy that you got to listen to it because no one else has heard it yet. Oh, I know. Well, this is just the beginning. Thank you so much for coming and talking to me today.

1:06:13Yay. Thank you so much, Catherine. What a glorious conversation. and so joyful to talk to somebody else who has a similar job to me. But Catherine is so impressive because she also is a one-woman band with regards to recording and production. And I absolutely take my hat off to her with that. That is super impressive. It's just not a skill set that I've ever managed to master. And so, yeah, I just want to tip my invisible hat to her on that front as well. but yeah how glorious and how enterprising and motivated Catherine's had to be with her work but how inspired she has found herself in part thanks to her new baby daughter well young daughter I should say um so thank you so much to her thank you to you for lending me ears thank you to Ella for the artwork thank you to Richard for editing it especially over the weekend sorry darling and yeah what happens next we got how many weeks have I got left oh I think I've only maybe got is it one left after this wow that is sped by i've already started writing a little bit of a a list for the next series some lovely names oh good ones please keep your suggestions coming um sometimes people dm me sometimes they write it on the uh wherever you get your podcast bits so like on apple whatever but it really really helps me out so please keep it coming you've introduced me to some wonderful wonderful working women who happen to be mothers i'll keep casting my net far and wide have um a great week and i will see you next week for i'm pretty sure you know what my bloody brain i'm actually going to check because it'd be so embarrassing if i'm saying to you it's the last one and then it isn't yes it is right i'm correct one more next week another lovely conversation i'll see you then and uh yeah until then have a great week thank you

1:08:13Thank you.

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1:09:42at wayfair.com.

1:09:48ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. I'm Monica Reinagle, nutritionist, author, and host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. We dig into the questions that you're actually asking. If it's okay to drink coffee on an empty stomach, whether it's possible to retrain your sweet tooth, which ultra-processed foods you might actually want to include in your diet. We take a closer look at diet trends, fact-check, sketchy claims, and track down the science so that you can feel more confident about what's on your plate. New episodes are released every Wednesday. Find Nutrition Diva on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening, and be sure to follow or subscribe so you don't miss a single episode.

1:10:42Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.