In complete confidence

Success came quick, but looking back, it was too much, too young, says Cathy Davey. She takes a stroll on the beach with JIM CARROLLand tells him how she found her confidence – and her performing chops

CATHY DAVEY is waxing lyrical about Eartha Kitt. It was the flamboyant Ms Kitt, she says, who coaxed her out of her shell when the time came to write a new album. “I didn’t start off wanting to write something dramatic, but I had a dramatic starting point for the new album, and I think Eartha Kitt had a lot to do with me pursuing that.

“I think there was a really good drama to her. She had a crazy life and anyone who is truly dramatic must come from somewhere real like that. I think the experiences I had before, and around the album, are why I’ve been able to do something which has more honesty to it.”

Sitting on a sand dune overlooking Dollymount beach in Dublin on a beautiful spring morning, Davey is talking about her third album, The Nameless. After the pop spills and thrills of Tales of Silversleevelast time out, the new album is cut from very different fabrics.

The Namelessstill has that off-kilter pop edge which is something of a Davey hallmark at this stage, but the sounds and scope are bigger and bolder. It's an intriguing display of show-and-tell; Davey finding a path which leads from bluesy pop to the music hall and back again. It's easily the most dramatic thing she's ever put her name to.

The starting point for Davey was death. "When I was writing The Nameless, I stayed in this woman's house in France. Death was very present there because her husband had died in the house and she had photos of him all around the house in these little bowls. I got the feeling that his absence was stronger than his presence ever had been and that had taken over the house.

“The photos were very Victorian, with shots of him in the morgue with black fingernails. She wanted to remember him dead as he was alive because death was part of his life. The two of them had plans to set up a school to teach Romanian death rituals in the house. I haven’t looked into what those rituals are – I have my own ideas.”

Before she could begin to write, Davey had to change her mindset. “There was no way to start writing these songs without biting the bullet and telling myself to stop being so embarrased about showing emotion,” she says. “The only emotion I’d show before would be a fake anger onstage, or what people would call sassiness, but I don’t find there’s much depth to that and so there’s no drama to it.”

Once she started, the songs flowed. “I could say things in the songs I’d never say before because it was a concept album and it didn’t have to autobiographical. Of course, it is autobiographical, and you can only pretend to be someone else, but I had the cover-up of the concept.

“Yeah, there are parallels between the album and my own life. I went through a break-up while I was doing the album, and there’s a parallel between that and death in how you deal with it and move on, and that messy period when nothing is settled before you meet someone else.”

Davey says The Namelessis a concept album in name only. "I did try to lay out the album so the story went from beginning to end, but then I thought that was bollocks and just didn't bother. I didn't want a concept album which suffered because I was trying to follow a concept."

She smiles when asked how her former label, EMI, would have reacted to a concept album. She was dropped by the label in 2008, though it didn’t come as a surprise to her.

“It was bound to happen. I hadn’t spoken to the man who signed me in about a year. It was a bad relationship. I felt no matter how well I did in Ireland that the label would always be disappointed with me. That’s such a horrible feeling. I felt like a cat bringing a dead bird into the kitchen. ‘Look at what I’ve killed for you!’ And the label yelling ‘go away!’”

Like many artists who’ve had a spin on the major-label rolleroaster, Davey realises, in hindsight, that she made a mistake. “If I got in a spaceship and went back to the day when the 23-year-old me was signing that deal, I’d say I was insane. ‘Do you really think you can make back all the money they’re giving you here? You’re going to fuck this up!’ But I wouldn’t have listened. I thought I’d be able to be creative in an interesting way, sell records and make the money back. But the creative things I had in mind were too left-of-centre for what EMI had in mind.”

The problems began with Something Ilk, her 2004 debut album. "I wasn't a fan of the first album," she admits. "I had all these nice interesting little demos which made me happy, and then I made this album which was far too big for those small songs. They were little songs so I should have signed a little deal and learned how to play live. But I only know that now; none of us knew. It was nobody's fault."

Another difficulty was that Davey wasn’t comfortable playing live. “When I started, I was shockingly bad. Not voice-wise; I was singing fine, but I had no stage presence. I was looking and sounding apologetic and didn’t have any command. I wasn’t interested in any of that stuff, I just wanted to survive and stop having panic attacks on stage.”

Learning how to perform took time. “The first time I felt I deserved to be on the stage as much as the next person was when I was playing to 20 people in a little downstairs room in a pub in 2008. That was the only time I got what performing was about and that was after all these big gigs. I had no idea that it could be such a personal thing and that you could say something that didn’t have to be a soundbite and that you could be yourself.”

Looking back, Davey now realises she just couldn’t do what was expected of her live. “Everyone thinks they can live up to what’s expected of them, when it’s not possible, except in a few cases. You can do it if you’re someone like Kasabian, who seem to me to have extraordinary ego and have the bombastic material to prove it. I’m not a fan, but they have this confidence which blows me away.”

The Nameless, though, suggests that she now has the material for a bigger show. Davey nods. "With the last album, I think I wrote some good pop songs, but when we played them live, I felt we were trying to dress up something that didn't deserve to be dressed up. With this one, I want to be moved onstage by the largeness of the songs. It has to be big. The thing about that is you need money to have the strings and backing singers and organ so it won't happen at every gig." All the same, Davey admits to a slight wariness about such huge productions.

“The people who can pull it off are people like Rufus Wainwright and they’re crazy for acknowledgement for doing that big thing. I’m not, I want to do the big show at home in private.

“I don’t have the drive to achieve this massive thing so I’m rewarded with praise. I don’t want fame. If I wanted fame, I would have drunk in Krystal nightclub, but who wants to be in the public eye so people can say nasty things about you?

“I think there has to be a corresponding low for any high, and I prefer to be stable. I’m too balanced to have that drive. I’m not going mad for the sake of music, which is why it’s not massive. I just want to make something beautiful without going mad.”

- The Namelessis out on May 7.

Davey will perform a series of solo and band gigs in April and May. For more, see myspace.com/cathydavey