The Anchoress has spoken to NME about her literary-inspired single ‘Throw Over Your Man’, which sees her rejoin forces with Manic Street Preachers‘ James Dean Bradfield.
The song is the latest to be released from Catherine Anne Davies’ forthcoming album ‘As We Once Were’, which is set for release on August 7 and available for pre-order here.
Inspired by the letters between the two literary giants Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West, the single is a queer rock anthem that captures that dizzying feeling of becoming infatuated with someone for the first time. It sees Davies continue her long-running series of collaborations with Bradfield, following them touring together often and working together on the 2018 Manics album ‘Resistance Is Futile’.
“[The single is] born out of my life-long passion for Woolf’s written work but also because of the profound awakening it provided for me as a queer teenager still figuring out how to be in the world,” said Davies, who has a PhD in literature and queer theory.
“These letters were signposts from the past for an imagined future for myself.”
She also shared that Manic Street Preachers were the band who “first taught me how to incorporate the literary world into rock n roll”, and therefore knew Bradfield would “instinctively ‘get’ what I was trying to do here”.
The song also comes with a music video directed by JJ Eringa, however during filming The Anchoress broke her arm, bringing progress on the video to a halt while she had surgery and a metal plate inserted into her wrist.
Speaking to NME about the new single, Davies told us that she saw it as her “celebratory queer anthem of sorts” and instantly knew that she wanted it to be “raucous and pulsating, to conjure that intoxicating feeling of being drawn into someone’s orbit for the first time”.
“The title is a direct quote from a Woolf letter to Vita from 1927. She says: ‘Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads.’ It’s a dinner invitation. But a rather debauched one…,” The Anchoress added.
The artist’s love of Woolf was born in her adolescence, as it provided a “profound awakening it provided for me as a queer teenager still figuring out how to be in the world”.
“Reading those letters as a teenager, I felt a thread of kinship across the century. Here were people who had lived and felt the things I was feeling. They had given voice to the unspoken. These letters were signposts from the past for an imagined future for myself,” Davies told NME.
“For years I’ve wanted to write a song inspired by the letters between Woolf and Vita and I’ve never leaned quite so heavily into source material before. I think that a lot of people think that as a songwriter you just vomit your heart out onto the page but when you’re working with source material and you want to render the emotional core of that original text authentically, it’s quite a different process in terms of the songwriting.”
As for the collaboration with Bradfield, The Anchoress explained that she also loved the Manics since her teenage years and explained that their music “shaped how I thought about what a song could do” and gave her “a template” to use in her own songwriting.
“I originally asked James if he might just add some guitar to the track,” she said, adding that the band let her use their Door To The River studio for the recording process too. “Then James also did a little bit of surprise singing on the chorus… ‘just in case you might want it,’ he said, as if you might not want that incredible voice on your record! So it became an accidental duet.”
“It wasn’t my original intention. To be honest I would have felt a bit cheeky asking him to duet again after the last album [where he sang on ‘The Exchange’]. But it was serendipitous, and I think it adds that grit and edge the track needs alongside all that female energy. James balances it out.
“It’s never not a huge privilege to listen back to his incredible talent on the guitar too. I spent many happy hours diving into all the solo takes and wondering what my 12-year-old self, an enormous Manics fan, would think to see what ‘just another day in the studio’ looked like for the adult me producing my own record.”
Continuing to share her long-running love of Manic Street Preachers, Davies went on to say that they “genuinely changed the course of my life”, and without them, she is “not sure I’d have done my A Levels, let alone ended up at university”.
“Their music functioned as a kind of self-directed education for me,” the singer added, referencing their 1994 third album ‘The Holy Bible’ as a major source of inspiration.
“There was also something deeply personal about the band for me. They were Welsh, as my family is, and the Manics gave me a sense of belonging that my immediate world wasn’t providing. So when they got in touch after my debut came out, it was fairly surreal.”
“They’re genuinely warm, generous people. During some very dark periods in my life they’ve shown up in ways I’ll always be grateful for,” The Anchoress added. “Nicky [Wire] and James in particular seem to have an uncanny instinct for exactly when to pick up the phone. The fact that I’ve now toured with them, sung on their records, and have James on mine — none of that would have seemed remotely possible to the kid I was.
“And for it to happen on a song soaked in literary and queer history of all things — it really does feel like it’s come full circle in the best possible way.”
As well as Bradfield, the song also features a “queer choir”, as The Anchoress wanted to have “other queer women’s voices on the track, to capture the authentic emotion of the song’s lyrics”.
The choir features composer and producer Bishi, producer and mixer Rookes, and musical director Vicky Falconer Pritchard and “all came together in this very conceptually authentic way”.
“The song ends in this orgiastic call and response between “Vita” and “Virginia” that I hard panned dynamically bouncing back and forth between your ears to the song’s climax,” Davies shared. “You can listen to it just as a rock track and enjoy it for what it is, but all of those layers are there if you want to dig into them too.”
As for the incident where she broke her arm during filming, Davies explained that she “fell backwards in a really awkward way” and “completely snapped” her arm about an hour into the first shoot, and had to put things on hold for a month.
“We had to halt filming for a month while I had surgery and a metal plate inserted into my wrist, which as you can imagine, is incredibly scary for a musician,” she told NME. “We just completed the rest of the video (while I am still in plaster) with the help of some clever camera angles, lots of draped fabric, and buckets of ingenuity.”
As well as working together on 2021’s song ‘The Exchange’ from The Anchoress’s second album ‘The Art of Losing’, Bradfield also recorded guitars for song ‘Show Your Face’ which featured on that same album.
In 2023 The Anchoress covered the band’s classic 1994 song ‘This Is Yesterday; too, and she has played live with them many times over the years, coming out as a supporting act, as a special guest, and also being a part of their touring group as a multi-instrumentalist and backing vocalist.
The Anchoress first announced her first album since 2021’s acclaimed ‘The Art Of Losing‘ earlier this spring, when she dropped the synth-led new single ‘I Had a Baby Not A Lobotomy’.
Speaking to NME about the inspiration behind the new material, Davies said: “So much of this record was born out of the early years of my daughter’s life, and I really wanted to collect together and call out all of the clichés, stereotypes and dumb shit that people say to women who’ve had babies that I had encountered myself.”
“I started a note in my iPhone, just writing down each thing I heard pop out of people’s mouths: from the assumption that I would no longer be touring, to the assertion that I would no doubt ‘mellow out’ and have some kind of personality transplant,” she added. “Quite the contrary: motherhood radicalised me. And I know I’m not alone in this.”
New album ‘As We Once Were’ arrives on Friday August 7, and the artist will be playing an album launch show at London’s 100 Club on Saturday August 22. Tickets are on sale now and you can find any remaining ones here.