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Catherine Anne Davies and Bernard Butler announce joint album with lead single "The Breakdown"

22 July 2020, 11:07 | Written by Cerys Kenneally

Catherine Anne Davies and Bernard Butler have announced their collaborative album In Memory Of My Feelings, and have shared the opening track "The Breakdown".

"The Breakdown" is the first taster of the one-off collaborative LP from Catherine Anne Davies and Bernard Butler.

In Memory Of My Feelings will also be the first new project to ever be released on reissue label Needle Mythology.

Their forthcoming album was written and recorded by Davies and Butler over a period of just 15 days, although four years passed between the time of the album's conception and completion. Davies says of the first session, "We were booked in for five days or something, and by the end of the final day, we knew that if the brief was to write hit singles, we’d sort of wandered off in a different direction." In the four years it took to start and finish In Memory Of My Feelings, Davies emerged as The Anchoress, and released her debut LP Confessions Of A Romance Novelist.

The duo revisited their collaborative LP in 2014 at Butler's North London studio. He says, "When we came back to it in 2014, no-one asked us to do it. No one cared and no-one was interested. It was a pure suicidal artistic pursuit. And that is the only useful place to make art, write songs about making art, and then laugh at ourselves."

Speaking about the album, Davies explains, "I see the record as being something akin to a painting you might find in an antique shop – not an expensive painting, but perhaps an heirloom just waiting for the right person to come and claim it." Butler adds, "I’d got used to the idea that the record might never emerge. Occasionally, I’d listen to it on my headphones if I was on the bus or something, I always had the same thought, "I wish I could go to a record shop and buy this"."

The vinyl edition of In Memory Of My Feelings will also include a 7" single with a rearranged version of "The Patron Saint Of The Lost Cause", and a cover of Madonna's "Live To Tell". Butler says, "When I was 16, "Live To Tell" allowed me to join the dots in songwriting between True Blue and The Queen Is Dead." Davies continues, "I don’t know what Madonna wrote it about, but the resonances in a post-#metoo world are impossible to miss."

Tracklist:

  1. The Breakdown
  2. Ten Good Reasons
  3. Sabotage (Looks So Easy)
  4. In Memory Of My Feelings
  5. I Know
  6. Judas
  7. No More Tears To Cry
  8. The Waiting Game
  9. The Patron Saint Of The Lost Cause
  10. FOH
  11. Live To Tell
  12. The Patron Saint Of The Lost Cause (Harmonium Version)
"The Breakdown" is out now. Catherine Anne Davies and Bernard Butler's In Memory Of My Feelings album arrives via Needle Mythology on 18 September, and is available to pre-order now.
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