anchoressaway

Catherine Anne Davies, who records as The Anchoress, wonders whether it's good to look back

- Catherine Anne Davies

I've been thinking a lot lately about the urge to look back, artistically speaking. I've had the good fortune to be involved in my first “reissue”, which has seen my very early work, a mini-album titled Communion (under my previous guise of Catherine AD), getting a “proper” release (via Last Night From Glasgow) a mere 14 years after I first recorded it back in 2011.

It's a strange thing to look back at the work you made when you weren't quite fully formed. In literary circles it’s called “juvenalia”. I like this term for its etymological emphasis on the child inside the work and Communion was the first thing I ever recorded properly, captured live in a single afternoon at the legendary Church Studios in London: just me, a Steinway piano, and an all-female string trio.

I'm probably the exception to the rule in willingly airing my early work, rather than engaging in some attempt to pretend that I emerged fully formed with my debut as The Anchoress in 2016. There’s a long list of my favourite artists, from Alanis Morissette to Lana Del Rey (as Lizzy Grant) and Tori Amos (Y Kan’t Tori Read?), whose albums under previous guises have been successfully all-but-wiped from the face of the earth.

Despite huge commercial success (and garnering a Juno award) both of Morissette’s pre-Jagged Little Pill releases are unavailable to buy or stream. After being similarly out of circulation for 30 years, Tori Amos’ 1988 debut enjoyed a low-key remaster and digital release in 2017, but she has always expressed a mixture of amusement and horrified embarrassment towards the album, before suggesting in 2017 that she had finally “come to peace” with this early work.