Stage Fright

Eyeballkid talks to songwriter Cathy Davey about sleepness nights, Arabian kazoo instrumentals and her new album 'Something Ilk'.

A slight, bleached-blonde lady shuffles on stage and mumbles a meek greeting to the audience. She is Irish songwriter Cathy Davey and she’s playing songs from her debut album ‘Something Ilk’ to an enthusiastic crowd at London’s 100 Club. It’s an experience most musicians relish, but not Cathy.

“I’m usually frozen for the first half of a gig”, she explains. We’re talking a couple of hours before the show in a cramped narrow room in one of the 100 Club’s many corridors, while support band Cherry Falls blast out their sound check. Having previously toured with Graham Coxon and Supergrass she has been more at ease on these her first headline dates, but the nerves are creeping back at the thought of London’s notoriously difficult crowds. “London and Dublin are similar, they’re always toughies. Major cities have more bands coming to them anyway so I suppose they’re spoiled. Everywhere else is eager to like something. It’s not that London crowds don’t want to like it, but I’m just so scared of them. It might be just me projecting the way I feel which they pick up on”.

Her anxiety isn’t helped by the fact that she suffers from sleep paralysis –a sleeping disorder that combines vivid dreams with a temporary physical incapacitation. “It affects the way you walk through life. You get it in blocks and when I was recording the album I had two months of them every night so the whole album for me was just a daze of trying to concentrate when your mind is elsewhere. It’s a stress-related thing. Before I have a gig I’m nervous about I’ll get it so I had it last night. I suppose the more I get them the less I’m afraid of it, but I don’t know how to stop them. Valium probably”, she laughs.

Her dreams aren’t always a source of terror though. The kazoo introduction to ‘Trade Secrets’ was inspired by a dream. “It was really weird”, she recalls, “I was dreaming about these Arabs coming over a hill in the desert and they were playing this song on trumpets. All I had was a kazoo so I recorded it when I woke up and used the melody”. It is one of the many enjoyable quirks on ‘Something Ilk’. The album’s cohesive and catchy blend of sweet pop, occasional earthy blues and the off-beat lounge style of her hero Tom Waits, is supplemented by Cathy’s ear for sound, whatever the source. “There was a few experiments recording the album, just to keep it interesting. We had this amazing courtyard by the studios which we utilised by setting up a mic in the middle of it and recording from there. We also had echo chambers and we used Scaletrix and anything that would make a noise just to get a different percussive sound, like fans and helicopters.”

Aside from the general noises of everyday life and the gnarled arrangements of Tom Waits, Cathy’s other musical influences range from Burt Bacharach to The Muppets. But that doesn’t stop most journalists drawing lazy comparisons to her fellow female solo artists, PJ Harvey, Bjork and Kate Bush. It’s not something she dwells on, “I completely understand why they do it and I totally expected it so it doesn’t annoy me. They’re really good artists but I haven’t been influenced by these people so to write me off this way is really unfair because I’m influenced by a lot of male artists as well. It’s just not careful enough for me. There’s more to music than just names but it’s not something I dwell on except when someone says someone like Avril Lavigne or someone like that, then bile rises up inside me. But what can you do? Until I do my third album it’s only then can I be compared to myself.”

You sense Cathy doesn’t have much time for the music press in general and she’s particularly uninterested in the current rock revival, championed by certain music magazines. “The scene of the bands now is this rock lifestyle that’s more about the drinking and the drugs for the likes of NME and Q. I have no interest in the bands and I loathe the lifestyle. It’s just glamourising these little things that anyone can do, I mean any gobshite can party. These journalists want to be held responsible for creating a scene and that’s fine and dandy but a scene is something that’s very short-lived, especially a talentless scene that’s contingent upon getting as fucked as possible, playing loud music and being cool”.

She acknowledges that she was specifically looking for grounded musicians when it came to putting together her live backing band and didn’t want anyone too rock’n’roll. The group features two former members of The Verve and Blur’s keyboard player, who have helped her settle into playing live. “It took a long time for me to come around to the fact that I had to do gigs. I’ve never been to that many gigs so it’s a whole new thing for me to understand what people want from you, so I’m still really learning.”

As it turns out she has no reason to worry about the 100 Club show. The London crowd are supportive from the start and she finally appears at ease after an excellent lung-bursting rendition of ‘Clean and Neat’. For someone who is not entirely comfortable with performing live she puts on a good show, taking refuge from her shyness in her music. “Writing is the most enjoyable part of the whole thing for me”, she admits, “everything else is so I can keep doing that. The gigging and recording of the album doesn’t do it for me as much. To be honest it’s quite a frightening career”. Being a rock star is another fear she’s learning to cope with.

words & photos: Colm Larkin