Zen and the art of motor-psyche maintenance

It's a warm Friday afternoon in June and we're sitting with Cathy Davey in a Sandymount pub. There's a World Cup game on the television mounted over the bar, the crowd sound generating an ambient beeswarm hum. Ms Davey – elfin, white-blonde, not nearly as ethereal as you might expect – is stirring her coffee and tearing open the transparent plastic packaging on a shortcake biscuit. We've been here a while already, talking about the size of the giant Redwood trees in Inistiogue, near Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny, where she went to college; about the gig we saw her play with the Bare Bones in the Wexford Arts Centre a couple of months ago; mostly about how she's learned to live with The Nameless, the much-lauded third album that recently topped the Irish mainstream and indie charts on its first week of release. But if you're looking for self-aggrandising huzzahs, you've come to the wrong boozer.

"You love something and have great expectations for it, and then loathe it and want to kill it, so you abandon it," the singer laughs. "And then you go through a time of hating it and having to promote it. But now I'm coming full circle of not having listened to it in a while and not hearing all the things I hated about it. The last few months I presumed people were placating me or being two-faced by saying they really like it. But now I can say, 'Thank you!'"
It must, we suggest, be a bit like a painter looking at a self portrait. Subjectivity is impossible.
"Yeah, I wonder how much of a narcissist you'd have to be to actually work so hard on something and come out the other end going, 'Yes, it is a masterpiece!' I've been thinking about that a bit. But there are an awful lot of narcissists in music, so it makes sense. The trouble is when you think about how much lack of self-confidence (is behind) a huge ego, it's probably coming from incredible insecurity. It's really wonderfully messy."
And an archetypal syndrome. There must be something fundamentally askew in a person's wiring if they need the love and approbation of a crowd in order to feel squared away with themselves of an evening. Such neediness seems diametrically opposed to the hermit-artist paradigm, your Georgia O'Keefe or Flannery O'Connor or Francis Bacon, disappearing into their work, canceling the self.
"I think you have to be tagged onto something quite dark to ride with that," Davey says. "Francis Bacon was talking about why his art appeals to people, and it wasn't that he was creating things that were fantastical and unrealistic – they appealed to people because they are real life exaggerated and magnified and emphasised. He was far more eloquent than I've just put it, but he explained it so perfectly, and I don't understand how he was able to, because he's the artist, he's the last person who's supposed to know."

Pushing Out The X Factor
Well, it's only in popular music the artist is expected to play the idiot savant. Filmmakers, painters and writers generally acquire a fairly sophisticated sense of theory over the years, but such self-awareness is regarded as calculating in the average rock musician. Either ways, we digress – for the purposes of writing The Nameless, Davey's first album since she and EMI parted company, the singer decamped to Albi, near Toulouse in France, in order to work in a relatively cloistered environment. Get thee to a Zen nunnery, young lady.
"You definitely have to let yourself dwell in a place that's not very nice at all," she admits. "It felt so decadent, but it's not decadence. Nobody wants to sit in essentially the faeces of your life and try and make something beautiful out of it, but that's what you (have to) do, to put yourself at the mercy of your subconscious. And at the end of it, the reward is maybe touching on something real, as Francis Bacon would say. The downside is you have to talk like it's of some importance. That's the thing I find really embarrassing. But y'know, we won't kid ourselves, it is important to me, and why should I feel embarrassed? It's just residual humbleness, but I'm working on that."
Well she might. To paraphrase Alan Watts, the Zen philosopher Davey loves so much, refusing to admit you're God is committing the sin of false modesty. On that note, here's an unfair question – musical merits aside, and leaving our thumping 4 star review in Hot Press out of the equation – why does she think The Nameless made it to number one?
"Well, here's an honest reply: the amount of albums you have to sell for a number one is less than it used to be, so that's one reason. Also, I think people with blogs have been very behind me. I really, really like blogs and I like free music and I like giving demos away because I always prefer my demos anyway, and I'd rather people have those. And I think maybe the people who would be behind me understand how important it is to buy an album on that first week from a real shop, just to counteract the spots that are reserved for the X Factor/Glee shite. I'd say it's a combination of those things. Radio play as well. Thank goodness the single ('Little Red') was played a lot. During the week that it was number one I was doing press and in-stores and gigs like a headless chicken, so I don't know what it was. I don't dwell on it because it won't help me make nice music. It seems probably quite ignorant and non-sensible, but I don't live in that side of my brain."
Whatever the factors, the album's success can only augur well for other Irish acts.
"Yeah, and straight the next week, Conor (J O'Brien) was number one (with Villagers). I wonder if it's going to give people a bit of confidence to believe in their own music again. Obviously it's such a boring conversation, but there's a lot of non-music just presuming its position at the top of the charts, and surely in Ireland we're a small country and it's only right that we push out the X Factor and take control."
Here's a thing: how come so many commercial daytime radio stations ignore Irish gig-goers' tastes? Why do they cater to some notional audience comprised of either tweenies or superannuated soft rock oldies fans?
"I think it presumes it's supplying demand, but I believe it's fooling itself. It's being safe when it's not actually being safe, it's just... tiring. I don't want to badmouth anything because I was on the Late Late Show, but I would love to be able to turn on the Late Late Show of a Friday night and actually go, 'I wonder who they have on?' and not go, 'I can't believe they had Crystal Meth,' or whatever their name is..."
We believe Cathy's referring to Crystal Swing, although, having watched the video for 'He Drinks Tequila', we reckon Crystal Meth – or LSD-25, or Cow Tranquiliser – might be a more appropriate moniker.
"It's not funny," she declares. "If this is a joke it's not funny, and if it's serious it's not funny. It's not ironic: you're killing a wonderful thing that we have here."

Let's Stop Spreading A Harmful Idea
Davey's been one of the lucky ones. The Nameless forms the summit point of a trinity of Irish albums all released in the same month – the other two being Villagers' Becoming A Jackal and the Divine Comedy's Bang Goes The Knighthood – that eschew four-square rock music for avant-garde folk, doo-wop, torch song and film score flavours. All three albums commence with epic tunes that play like mini movies, and at the time of writing are dominating the Irish indie charts. The confluence makes sense: Conor J O'Brien has recorded and toured with Davey. Also, she's been stepping out with Neil Hannon for a good while now, although she doesn't wish to make too much of it in print.
"I can only speak for me and Conor," Davey says, choosing her words, "because we were so closely knit for the last few years from playing live, and we're so compatible musically that there are going to be joint loves. And then of course he played on my album, so his influence is there. I don't know for the other bloke you mentioned... You're a writer as well, so you would know that with anyone who is a writer friend, you're going to talk about the thing that you love and you share in common. You have to, because who else are you going to talk to about this really important elixir-of-life stuff? It's just that it may not be very interesting for anyone else to listen in on."
Well, they're your tribe, and you're lucky to have found them.
"You are, 'cos you go long enough without any of your tribe it seems, you're pretty much on your own."
Davey's father Shaun is a successful composer and her mother Agnes Conway a sculptor, so presumably growing up she felt a little less alienated than most arty kids?
"It depends on your background... and how much you want to give away about your background. Every family life has interesting stuff going on and it shapes what you are. I don't think I felt alienated, so you're right, I did have parents who lived in their heads, and that was absolutely the norm. That would probably lead to lack of good communication, but what family does have good communication anyway? I was lucky, I just liked being on my own. Friends would ask me if I was going somewhere and I'd lie and say I wasn't allowed 'cos it used to give me panic attacks."
In Michael Ondaatje's interview book The Conversations, legendary film editor Walter Murch says that if, as an adult, you can find an extension of the thing you were happiest doing for pleasure at the age of ten or eleven, you'll enjoy a prosperous and productive career.
"Have you ever looked at any of Alan Watts's speeches? The makers of South Park did an animation to one of his speeches. What Walter Murch said about finding that thing, Watts has this talk where you take a child and send him through pre-school and the child is told it has to work hard and get somewhere and graduate, and then it's primary school and then it's secondary school and it's work-work-work and it's coming, it's coming, and then you graduate from college or do a Master's, and then you go to work and suddenly... That thing you've been working for is not there. The thing was life! And the way he puts it is, the song has happened and you forgot to dance to it. I just love it when someone is able to articulate a thing that you know deep down and you've no way of putting it into words. What a present! I'm made happy by people like Alan Watts existing.
"But anything Zen (related) is beautifully based on now. I had a problem, I was getting a lot of panic attacks and I wasn't sleeping and all that stuff, and I talked to a man and he was trying to figure out what was putting me in a place where I'd panic. You know when you're in your teens and you realise the world around you is in constant flux and it's kind of a terrifying thought? I never dealt with that in my teens because it was too terrifying. I repressed it. And then in my mid-20s it wanted to be dealt with, and I had an extreme problem with it, I had back problems, and this back guy worked (on me) in conjunction with a kind of therapist.
"And one of the problems is we think the mind is a little thing that's held in the centre of the brain, and the body is a separate thing being controlled by the mind, and that's why we're balls of knots. We think we're able to stress about the future and have it not affect our body, whereas we are our body, there is no separation. I'm sorry to anyone who's incredibly religious and believes in the soul, but I don't – I'm sick of this being allowed to be taught in schools, tired of a damaging thing being respected. I'm kind of with Richard Dawkins: let's please stop spreading a harmful idea. How dare anyone constrict your sexuality or how you express your humanity? Life only gets better once you realise it's about letting yourself be gluttonous, deriving nearly too much pleasure from things. Really enjoy your food and really enjoy your wine, 'cos there's so much joy to get from that stuff. Really enjoy your boyfriend while you have him, don't get caught up in Evil Future Worries. Really enjoy your parents, don't be thinking about them dying every time you look at them."

The Most Wonderful Way To Go
And there we have the crux of the new record. In this murky area between grief and guilt, Davey says, the songs on The Nameless took form.
"The main thing that happened, the only relevant thing, is I lived with my grandmother all my life, and she lived 'til 101, and I was imagining her dying every night for all those years. My parents split up when I was small and my grandmother was my, and my sister's, constant. And finally she died when I finished Tales Of Silversleeve. And I'd spent 28 years imagining her dying, and hanging onto this morbid thought – sometimes because it was so familiar it was comforting in a way. But she died, and I was out of the country and couldn't get home. I was on some fucking stupid island in the Bahamas. My boyfriend at the time, his parents had a place there, and I was there. And what happened after that was – it's very hard to talk about, but I may as well – I had such guilt. I'd be waking up and my first thoughts were that I was feeling guilty that I wasn't around when she was really, really, really in need of people who loved her.
"So the album is dealing with really horrible guilt-voices, waking up at half-five or six in the morning, and the first thought would be pretty much self-hatred. And there's that weird thing, I'm sure you've had it, a weird sense when someone dies that there's a small possibility, if you just figure it out and think about it long enough, that you can bend this linear thing to loop back on itself. But it's not real, you know it's not real, and it's wrecking your head. So I started going out at about six to the gym and I'd work and I'd work – I'd never been a gym-goer in my life, but it was something to do. And then my back went. I slipped a disc."
Hardly surprising, given the amount of stress and tension her body must have been suffering.
"It was very much a physical weakness caused by that. And then when you're on your back, you've nothing to do but deal with your guilt. And while I was touring Tales of Silversleeve I was dealing with that... I was in an apartment that belonged to a lady who lost her husband to cancer, and before he died they were setting up this Romanian school of death rituals, and they were looking at death in a very unique way. She was a very philosophical, beautiful woman, very much about living now, and loving as hard as you can now, and being there for people, now. She had photographs of her husband around, and some of them were photographs of him after he had passed away.
"But his absence was really there, solidly, filling the house entirely, and that's why the album is about what it's about. It's about a woman who has lost her identity, through losing someone that she loved, because that's what I was going through. And it was far easier projecting it onto this other woman, I didn't feel like I was vomiting my own emotion onto people, that would not sit well with me. It was a nice way of dealing with my own loss, and I think I've learned an awful lot about compassion for anyone else who's lost someone they love. Inevitably you feel guilt because you just can't turn time back.
"My other grandmother died in the sea, of a heart attack, and I think that was just the most wonderful way to go. No one could feel guilty about her being happy, (she had) all her faculities, her body had not given up on her, she was in a place she loved with the people she loved. It's just unfortunate that fucking medicine keeps us going far too long and so we have this slow, humiliating demise. And that's why I feel so guilty as well. You're watching someone go through a humiliating demise and you can't change it for them and you're not enjoying being with them. Medicine has forced us into making pacts with our family: 'Please put a pillow over my head'. We're not even allowed save our loved ones from their loss of dignity. My dog will have a better end than I will, I know that's a fact. I'll never let him go to where he's shitting himself and can't walk anymore.
"There's still a tribal tradition where old people are given one biscuit and are brought somewhere, usually in a wheelbarrow, and left. That is considered the dignified way of going. They're far more advanced than we are."