159. The Anchoress
Kings Hall Place
17 December 2016
Kings Place Hall, if you’ve never had the pleasure, is a venue that looks less like a temple of music and more like the sort of place where you would go for a TED talk. Imagine a utilitarian lecture theatre, add a grand piano, two hundred very polite people, and the faint sense that you should have brought a notepad and worn better shoes.
I was there with one of my best pals and his then girlfriend, now wife, all of us slightly disoriented by the lack of sticky floors, beer taps, or anyone in a Slayer T-shirt. This was not your standard Saturday night noise bath. This was The Anchoress, aka Catherine Anne Davies, who deals not in riffs, but in tightly wound art-pop with a PhD. And she was, it must be said, utterly brilliant.
She walked onstage dressed like the first act on a very glamorous gothic TEDx, took her seat at the piano, and from the first note we were under her spell. This wasn’t just a performance. It was a recital, delivered with such precision and poise that even the venue’s air-conditioning unit seemed afraid to make a noise.
Tracks from her then-recent album Confessions of a Romance Novelist dominated the set, each one a barbed little gem of literary angst, bitter beauty, and big ideas disguised as pop hooks. “You and Only You,” “Popular,” “Doesn’t Kill You”, all performed with a level of vocal control and emotional range that would make Kate Bush nervously rearrange her scarf.
Every song was introduced with the wry charm of someone who’s read a lot of theory but still knows how to tell a good story. There were jokes about heartbreak. There were jokes about patriarchy. At one point I think she casually referenced Sylvia Plath and Tori Amos in the same breath and I swear I heard someone in Row C faint from joy.
After the show, we wandered over to the merch table, expecting the usual awkward nod-and-run transaction, but instead found Catherine herself, warm, funny, and disarmingly normal for someone who just filleted us alive with a minor chord. We chatted. We bought vinyl. We may have gushed. She smiled graciously through all of it, the sort of artist who somehow manages to be both intimidatingly intelligent and genuinely lovely. We left Kings Place feeling like we’d just witnessed something much too beautiful for a Saturday in December. This wasn’t just a gig. It was a masterclass. A salon. A séance conducted via Fender Rhodes.