At the start of 1997 David Gray was just another singer-songwriter struggling to survive in a world dominated by Brit-pop and dance music. His third album, Sell, Sell, Sell had failed to do just that in sufficient quantities and he was dropped by his record company. He then began to spend more time in Ireland, where he had built up a small but enthusiastic following, and spent the rest of that year writing the songs that would eventually appear on White Ladder – to this day the biggest selling album in Ireland. Here he reminisces about the days just before stardom beckoned:
“Ireland had been more receptive to my music than anywhere else. I had done No Disco with Donal [Dineen] way back when my first album came out. They played the video for ‘Late Night Radio’ a lot and I became quite popular in a small way. But overall 1997 was a fallow year for me. I was out of my contract and I took a break to get my head back together. All through that period I was popping over to Ireland to do various gigs in places like the Temple Bar Music Centre. Then the Liss Ard Festival happened in Cork so that was a chance to hang out with Patti Smith and Nick Cave. I began writing the songs for White Ladder around then
“Around that time Mary Black came to my rescue. She was being recorded by a guy called Larry Klein who was a fan of my stuff. So they got in touch and they eventually did a few of my songs including ‘Late Night Radio’ and ‘Shine’ which became the title track to her album. They even did some new songs that I hadn’t quite finished. The royalties from that kept me afloat. Suddenly I had this PRS cheque for a few thousand pounds. Soon after that White Ladder came out and everything changed for me.
“It didn’t happen very quickly but there was an inevitability about it in the end. I knew we’d done something we could be proud of, but little did we know that the seeds of magic that were obviously sown in the record were going to unlock all kinds of doors. We’d made this record and it had something special about it. We became this quirky little unit of misfits and things just gelled together.
“That first White Ladder Irish tour was great. The vibes were there in the audience straight away. It was a big tour of little places – we started in Sligo and we played all kinds of funny little places – Listowel is one I remember, and gigs like Dolan’s Warehouse in Limerick when they got 700 extra people in without us knowing – the place was rammed! That was the beginning, and it basically started to roll from then on. Records started to be sold and we got some airplay and it all became much more mainstream. We just kept going – we knew we had to stick at it.
"By a year later we were given something like a six times platinum disc which led up to the gig at the Point Depot, which was a seismic event for us. It was symbolic that you can make it on your own without anyone’s help. Apart from a little help from my friends of course. That was a special night. Every time I check into the Morrison Hotel I think of that evening. We had fantastic time; lots of friends and family turned up. My dad was there, my sister was there. It was a brilliant, brilliant night. We got a sense that things were going to work out after that, because for years we’d been conditioned to think they wouldn’t work out.
"Then it just began to sell and went something like 20 times platinum. It became such a big thing I started thinking, ‘How are you supposed to deal with that?’ I struggled for a while. Now I’m quite relaxed about it. In hindsight we were too busy doing the White Ladder tour that we didn’t have time to think about what might happen when it all stopped and you have to think about doing something else. It was a complete mind-fuck, honestly.
“I remember well doing that hotpress cover dressed in a gold lamé suit like Elvis, with the headline ‘50,000 Fans Can’t Be Wrong’. It should have been 50,000 units of alcohol instead. I was absolutely arseholed. I was still up from the night before and I could barely see what I was doing. It was like ‘Dave, the camera's over there.’
“But then things got even crazier – everyone starts to smell money and books you into the biggest places possible. I’m trying to get away from that now, but I remember headlining Witnness festival in 2000 and it just blew my mind. It was like, ‘Fucking hell’. It was like a scene from Lord Of The Rings meets Apocalypse Now – they weren’t just holding up lighters; they were setting fire to rubbish bins. It was like a medieval gathering. The sheer weight of numbers and the roar of the crowd just took my breath away.
“There was a big pressure on us to follow it up. You want to feel happy about your work, but life isn’t like that. All I had were these raw emotions and concerns that you’ve suddenly become almost like wallpaper – there’s this ubiquitous quality to the whole thing. Perhaps wrongly, you feel you need to react against that. This is very common these days where you see band after band who have big success and then try to become more credible or something. You get caught up in it. It’s a new experience to have people talking about you and pointing fingers, so you become much more self-conscious than is helpful. My dad died and I was struggling to come to terms with the whole thing. It was a tumultuous period. In the aftermath of that I’m sure I had some misgivings about the follow-up record [A New Day At Midnight]. Although it was not without merit, I didn’t feel it had an identity to it. I knew that the music had suffered while everything else prospered. But I came out of all that. You have to go with it and come out the other side. But no-one gives you a map.
“But it was Ireland that was the springboard for it all sending us out into the world so I’ve a lot to be grateful for. I went for lunch in Morrissey’s in Abbyleix today and that took me back a bit. I thought about moving here at one stage, and I did look at the artists’ exemption when I was considering selling-out and doing some five-album deal. But I don’t know, for me personally, it’s just a tax avoidance scheme. I don’t want to be running away from things. I’m fully in favour of paying tax. I make enough money. But it gets suggested to you by bankers and accountants all the time that if you moved over here you’d save yourself so many millions. Maybe I’m crazy giving all this money to the taxman.”