David Gray Interview: Have A Gray Old Time

We don’t usually think of David Gray as an angry singer. But when he looks back on his early career he is struck by the passion, the darkness, and yes, the fury.

“It was very edgy and raw back at the beginning,” reflects Gray, over tea at Dublin’s Clarence Hotel. “It’s not the same now. I’m singing softer. I think the songs still cut it; the delivery is different,
that’s all.”
That’s not to say he has calmed down. The former angry young man may not be quite as fresh-faced as before. That’s as far as things have changed.
“I couldn’t say I’m not the angry middle-aged man,” he grins. “If you drove with me across London, you’d see. I drove one of the guys from the office the other day on the way to the rehearsal room. The traffic was particularly bad and the quote that he’s using is ‘Hammersmith flyover? Hammersmith fuckover’. So there is no mellowing: on the roads of London, I’m still as angry as I ever was. It makes the A Century Ends incarnation look tame.”
Speaking of that seminal debut, it’s now 21 years old. At the time, the youthful David had no idea that he’d make a career out of his music: “Back then, I didn’t know what I was doing or why, in terms of making a record and putting one out. I wanted to sing my music and I hoped it was going to connect with someone. I did it in earnest. I’m still doing it now.”
Listening to Mutineers, one could be forgiven for not immediately recognising it as a Gray record. For one thing, his voice sounds quieter.
“One of the things that becomes imprisoning when you keep making records is the sound of your voice,” he confesses. “You have to try to find some way to change the feel of it. One of the ways was to layer the vocals.“ The result has Gray singing all the vocal parts on the album, with some particularly delicious multi-tracked harmonies.
Mutineers also sounds like Gray’s happiest record in years. I wondered if the opening track, ‘Back In The World Again’, is something of a manifesto. “That song just came pouring out from that feeling, the inference being that I haven’t been in the world, maybe, for a little while,” he admits. “So I think the spice of the record, the energy and the fizz, comes from this sense of returning. I think it’s a rebirth. I don’t think it’s to do with album cycles: I think it’s bigger than that. I think this is a total restart.”
Having come off the road after his last tour, Gray describes feeling “beat up”. It was time for something new. “I knew all the things I didn’t want but I didn’t know what the thing I wanted was,” he admits. “So I had to perform a sort of creative traverse. I couldn’t go any further up the mountain, the way that I was. I had to discover tiny handholds and find my way across to a new place and new vistas that came with it. It took a little bit of effort but it was worth it. Everything feels completely renewed and I feel in the singing, on stage, on the record, like a different person.”
Was he worried about alienating his fanbase with the change of direction?
“Naw,” he looks incredulous. “There’s nothing fucking alienating about this music. It’s completely immediate and yet intricate. It’s got fucking depth as well. I’m not worried about any of it. I don’t have any worries about that, but then, I never have done. Well, there was a moment just before we put White Ladder out that Clune [percussionist] and I went, ‘I wonder if people are gonna like it’, ‘cos at that point, we didn’t really have any evidence to the contrary. Up to that point, I had made these raw acoustic records and now we were putting this out. What are they gonna say? Maybe we’re gonna lose the few fans that we’ve got... But it didn’t prove to be the case.
“I feel there’s an immediacy to this music. Having sung these songs live, the authority it seems to have over the musicians and the audience... there’s something there. So I’m not worried about that.”
Lyrics-wise, there are quite a few references to God and praying throughout Mutineers. The aforementioned ‘Back In The World’ sees him asking, “If it’s love put the joy in my heart, is it God by another name?” Has he found religion?
“I’m not a believer,” he says, “but, you know, it’s a nice concise word for being plugged into the whole picture. So it recurs, and that’s obviously telling. But it’s not like I’ve found my faith: I haven’t. It’s music that’s my faith. It’s through that that I feel close to ‘God’ in inverted commas. Music is a form of prayer; it can be.
“So I have a sort of religious intensity about what it is that I’m doing. It’s so from the heart, so vulnerable, and yet that’s what gives it all the strength. I’m totally open-hearted again. I’ve let go of the last shreds of fear and uncertainty. It’s been a transformation that’s taken place in the making of this record, the furnace-like intensity of the making process. It was very tumultuous. There was a lot of arguing and difficulty there. I found the whole thing very difficult. But I could console myself with the creative successes we were having, and as they began to weigh up, I calmed down a little bit. But it was a completely new way of working for me. I had to fall in line with somebody else’s vibe [producer Andy Barlow from Lamb], where I’m used to dictating the pace and the terms. But it did me good. It humanised me. So in terms of God, I couldn’t find another simple way to say it, so why not just say it: towards the seed that God sowed.”
It’s surprising to hear Gray talk of fear. Considering the success he has enjoyed throughout his musical evolution, it would be easy to imagine that there wouldn’t be any fear.
“I’m not full of fear,” he argues, “but the last shreds of fear, uncertainty and doubt were just suddenly gone. The self-justification, the arguments just stopped being there. Trying to present yourself in some way to show that you are something of worth: it just evaporated. Now I’m just doing it, just doing God’s bidding, to return to that word again. I’m just singing it.
“But we’re all human,” he concedes. “You can be doing this a long time and still be haunted by fears, paranoias: everybody has them. The knives are always out and putting yourself out there in the world is not an easy place to be. It’s a hostile place at times, and that’s what breeds these anxieties, I guess. But I felt in the making and doing and the singing of this record that I’d stepped beyond a chapter in my life. I suddenly realised that it was gone.”
He describes it as “a different way of being and thinking”, but it was also a different way of working. Normally, Gray writes music first and lyrics second. For Mutineers, he changed tack. “I started to hear music in poems and in words I was reading and work back from that,” he admits. Sometimes, he didn’t know where the songs would take him. “Like ‘The Incredible’,” he says. “I don’t know what that song’s supposed to mean but somehow I know it’s right. It holds me in its spell.”
In the title track, Gray implores the object of the song to “kick off your shoes”. It’s a long way from his invitation to “roll down your tights on the rug” from his classic ‘Debauchery’. He laughs, before confessing that the ‘Mutineers’ quote is inspired by Van Morrison in ‘Ballerina’.
“At that point in the recording, there weren’t any drums on the track,” he recalls. “I was just doing the vocals and Andy said, ‘the vocals sound brilliant, just do some improv, do whatever you want over the end of the track’. That was the very first take. We turned it up so fucking loud, my ears were nearly bleeding. We got so excited about that track that we were running around hugging each other, jumping around the room.”
Thinking of ‘Debauchery’s more intimate lyrics, I wonder if he ever gets embarrassed by some of the words from those early albums?
“Of course I fucking do,” he snaps, but with a twinkle in his eye, before laughing. “There are some songs, I go, ‘aw for fuck’s sake, that’s shit’. It’s embarrassing. But if you’re going to put it out there all the time, it’s going to catch you out. I don’t linger on these things but occasionally, I’m forced to,” he grins pointedly. Ahem...
Gray, however, has been “reconnecting with the early material” with his new band, “because if you don’t water them, they die”.
“With this new band, everything we seem to be touching at the moment turns to gold,” he enthuses. “There’s joy coming out of the music, out of me and out o f the band. On some sort of chemical, cellular level, the whole thing has changed. This is the shit, what’s happening now.”

Mutineers is out now on IHT Records