Fresh from announcing her forthcoming album As We Once Were, The Anchoress (aka Catherine Anne Davies) returns with new single ‘Throw Over Your Man’, featuring James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers. The track is the second preview of a powerful and deeply personal record that cements Davies' reputation as one of the UK's most distinctive musical voices.
Inspired by the love letters between the two literary giants Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West, the new single is a celebratory queer rock anthem that conjures that intoxicating feeling of being drawn into someone’s orbit for the first time. A raucous and pulsating guitar-laden track – think Anna Calvi meets Fleetwood Mac – the single features both guest vocals and guitars from James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers, whom Davies has frequently collaborated and toured with since appearing on their 2018 album Resistance Is Futile.
The new single appears on June 30th alongside a stunning new video directed by JJ Eringa, during the creation of which Davies broke her arm, halting filming for a month while she had surgery and a metal plate inserted into her wrist: “incredibly scary for a musician”, she adds, completing the rest of the video while still in plaster with some “clever camera angles and ingenuity.” Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/0AWHzSzH3Gc
Davies – who also has a PhD in literature and queer theory – describes the track as “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. These letters were signposts from the past for an imagined future for myself. ”
On James Dean Bradfield’s involvement, she adds:
“The Manics first taught me how to incorporate the literary world into rock n roll, so I knew that James would instinctively “get” what I was trying to do here. It’s never not a huge privilege to listen back to his incredible talent and I spent many happy hours editing the takes and wondering what my 12 year old self as a huge Manics fan would think to see what “just another day in the studio” looked like for the adult me. The song also features a “queer choir” of voices, including my dear friends Bishi and Rookes, who are brilliantly talented producers and artists in their own right”.