INTERVIEW Singer/songwriter Cathy Davey

Far from Nameless


Edwin McGreal caught up with Cathy Davey ahead of her upcoming Westport Arts Festival concert

There’s a humility to Cathy Davey that is refreshing. One of Ireland’s best singer/songwriters is very much unaffected by fame. There is a distinct lack of ego when discussing her work, but a strong fire burns inside Davey too, which becomes obvious when you poke and prod her on her career.
Her single-minded nature and ability to strive to stay true to herself mark her out as that all-too-rare specimen in modern music: an original. She admits to still suffering from nerves when performing and being unsure of herself at the outset of her career. Such traits could easily have allowed Davey to be moulded into something she very much wasn’t, but a resilience and belief in herself allowed Davey to plot her own path, despite what direction she was being cajoled into by the industry and despite being dropped by her record company in 2008.
The result was an achievement well beyond what Davey herself expected. Her 2010 album ‘The Nameless’, where the rock/pop singer/songwriter gave the fullest voice to her talents yet, was a massive success.
Going back to the beginning and Davey’s debut album, ‘Something Ilk’ (2004), the contrasts are many. It was recorded under the Parlaphone label and mainly studio-based. She had been very critical of that work over the years, but has softened somewhat in her reflections now.
“Now that I’m older I really regret giving out about it, because if I hadn’t done it that way I wouldn’t have got to doing the music that I like now,” she told The Mayo News last Thursday.
She confesses  that the studio recording of that album and the amount of people that would be there didn’t suit her style. She doesn’t say this as a criticism of others but of herself, admitting she could be vulnerable to being too impressionable, too easily swayed by others’ opinions.
“I always knew that I loved working at home on my own. I wanted to learn that by trial and error though … I would get positive feedback [in the studio] for things that were less close to what I really wanted. If you’re young and vulnerable, you really want to please everyone,” she conceded.
To Davey, her wishing to please others meant that she would let their views of her work in progress shape the end product. “If you play it or show it to anyone before it is finished, you can’t help but hear it or see it through someone else’s eyes and try to feel what they feel …
“It [working at home] is the template that I use for everything now and it works because it is a private affair. If you are a solo artist and you are used to working on your own, then there’s no reason why you can’t just get on with it.”
The proof of the strategy’s success was evident in her second album, the humourously named ‘Tales of Silversleeve’, a reference to how Davey would wipe her nose when she was younger.
“Here’s a bright, bold and breezy rush of imagination, creativity and sheer glorious sounds, an album of sequins, sparkles and swagger,” said Jim Carroll in The Irish Times of the 2007 album.
‘Tales of Silversleeve’, the vast majority of which was recorded at home, was an effort by Davey to get her ‘head around’ death, “to try to reason with it and maybe personify it so that maybe it could be a character as opposed to a big, daunting thing.”
In ‘The Nameless’ there is, she admits, a greater effort still at weaving a single story through the album. Is the confidence that comes through in the album a sign of how much she has developed?
“I don’t know if anyone is a good judge of that themselves,” she deflects modestly. “I think I enjoyed the craft of it more, as in taking one idea and trying to stretch it so that there was some storyline through the whole thing … And that album did have a storyline … [it] was about a woman’s experience of losing someone and turning her anger into something tangible and then that anger wreaking havoc on the world.”
But surely the widespread praise heaped on ‘The Nameless’ is a vindication of the direction she took? Davey is somewhat circumspect; she would probably agree with the Kipling line about the twin impostors of triumph and disaster.
“It [criticism and praise] is a complicated thing … I’m scared that it will shape how I work because if it is all good, positive stuff then I’m afraid that the standards that I set for myself will drop. If it is all negative then there’s the trouble that you may feel too self-conscious and try too hard and make a laboured thing.”
The axing of Davey by Parlaphone in 2008 could indeed have been viewed as a disaster, but instead the Dubliner saw it, ultimately, as liberating.
“I’d say it was a real mix of things. It was relief, it was also hurt pride that I wasn’t wanted. It was fairly expected because I didn’t reach any of the goals that they wanted me to reach … You need to be very driven and visually orientated as how you present yourself and I wasn’t. I wanted to wear wooly jumpers and not perform – and that’s absolutely fine, you just don’t sign to a major label if you want to behave like that. It’s nobody’s fault. It works for some and it doesn’t work for others, and I should have signed onto a tiny indie label who were happy for me to wear my wooly jumpers,” she laughs.
Cathy Davey does betray a certain apprehension of live shows, but those intending to see her at T Bourke’s pub in Westport on Friday, October 7,  will be glad to hear that she is most at home in small, intimate venues. And, refreshingly, she doesn’t try to make any empty promises about performing live.
“I certainly can’t bring myself to connect with a bigger crowd. I think that’s why I love the smaller venues. I do like performing, it is always different and I haven’t found my equilibrium, the place I get to and [know] ‘now I can perform’. I never saw myself as a performer but sometimes it works and we’re all happy, and sometimes I just make a mess of it,” she says, with a childish giggle through her softly spoken voice. “I know that usually if there’s candles and people sitting down and I’m feeling confident, which varies from day to day as it does with everyone, then it can go right sometimes.”
Bearing in mind her humility, it’s not irrational to think Cathy Davey can and will do justice to her captivating work of recent years – and, sure, T Bourke’s might light a few candles to make her feel at home.

Cathy Davey will play in T Bourke’s pub, Castlebar Street, Westport, on October 7. To book tickets (€15 each), visit westportartsfestival.com or the festival box-office on James’s Street, Westport.