Gray expectations

On an appropriately grey and autumnal Thursday afternoon, a Manchester-born, Welsh-raised, Irish-adopted and now world-famous pop star is sitting in a luxurious London hotel room, picking unenthusiastically at a plate of chicken salad and chips, and contemplating life, the universe and difficult sixth albums.

“I don’t know how you’re supposed to follow up the White Ladder thing,” David Gray muses, idly scratching his stubbled chin with a well-chewed fingernail and staring distractedly out the window at the city skyline. “In Ireland, above all, it’s just not gonna happen, is it?” He suddenly laughs, burying his face in his hands. “Oh… fuck!”

Given that Mr. Gray’s fifth opus has already spent almost 180 weeks in the Irish album charts and is now officially the country’s biggest selling album of all time (beating off both U2’s Best Of The ’80s and the interminable A Woman’s Heart to the Uimhir-A-Haon position), the only sensible answer to that is, ‘Well, probably not for quite a long while anyway.’ After all, the last one took almost a year to climb the chart to poll position.

The 34-year-old singer smiles wistfully and then suddenly snaps back to attention. “But you were asking me was I feeling pressurised making this new album? To be honest, I didn’t feel a huge amount of pressure while making it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel any. You just need to be wary… always wary.” His brown eyes narrow darkly.

Em, wary of what, exactly?

“You need to be wary of negativity,” he declares. “And you need to be wary of exuberance and positivity, in a different way – when it’s suddenly everywhere and everyone’s suddenly incredibly enthusiastic about everything you do. I just wanted to make sure that I made a record that I wanted to make. And I’m satisfied that I’ve done that.”

The record in question is A New Day At Midnight, Gray’s sixth studio album and his first proper release in almost four years. If the sales statistics are reliable then you’re undoubtedly already well-familiar with its multi-platinum predecessor. Copies of White Ladder have been selling like mobile phones in Ireland since its initial release in 1998, and by now, with more than 350,000 copies sold, just about every household in the country has at least one copy lying around.

Although initially a purely Irish phenomenon, Gray-fever slowly spread – first to the UK, where he’s since won both Q and Ivor Novello awards (for the single ‘Babylon’) and has now shifted in excess of 2.2 million copies, and then to the US, where it was Grammy-nominated and sold in equal quantities. A good-sized portion of the rest of the record-buying world soon followed.

Not bad going for an artist whose three previous albums (his fourth, Lost Songs, actually came after White Ladder but, as its title suggests, was comprised of older material) had all been released through different record companies and didn’t manage to sell diddly-squat between them. But then you probably already know all of this…

Whether New Day will equal its success remains to be seen, but already the portents are good. Commercially anyway. On the flight over from Dublin, publicist Martin Byrne informed me that the advance orders were at an unprecedented 62,000 (practically guaranteeing a Number One with a bullet on both sides of the Irish Sea next week). We’ll come to its critical merits in good time, but first say hello to a man whose shell-shocked facial expression is what the phrase ‘rabbit in the headlights’ was invented to describe.

From pop pauper to pop star, David Gray has made millions since the millennium but, on today’s evidence, has invested very little of his new found wealth in his wardrobe. He looks like he’s slept in the coat – a long, brown suede affair that had already seen better days back when Elvis was still playing Vegas. His denims are faded, frayed and more comfortable-looking than their wearer. Vintage red sneakers complete the look. He looks more eternal scruffy student than multi-millionaire troubadour. Then again, Gray was never renowned for his sartorial elegance (remember that awful woolly sweater in the video for ‘Late Night Radio’?), something that’s probably helped enhance his reputation as the most down to earth pop star on the planet.

He cheerfully admits that he’s always been a messy dresser, but denies that he’s all that wealthy, insisting that the real money’s all tied up in the record company he co-owns with his manager.

“Well, if I wanted to sell IHT Records, I’d be worth quite a lot, but I don’t,” he says. “Because basically you surrender control of your music.”

Still, the royalty cheques must be piling up…

“Oh yeah. Well, White Ladder has done so well that there’s money rolling in on a scale that I’ve never witnessed before,” he admits. “I suppose I just keep on doing what I do. I haven’t really had the time to express it in any way or really deal with it.

“I’m just glad that my career’s is my own hands. People sign these stupid deals and God knows why, from both points of view, they really wanna do it. I guess it just becomes an irresistible thing, like someone offering a mad amount of money. But it’s the ultimate disincentive to a performer because they’re given so much money they can barely get their head around it. It’s hardly going to inspire you to go out on the road for a few years to try and recoup it for them. I don’t think it works from that point of view.”

“But I don’t intend selling my stake in my music. I just intend to keep making it and licensing it on to whoever wants to put it out.”

The only clue to his financial status is the strikingly square, expensive-looking, triple-dialled watch he’s wearing (which turns out to have been a gift from his wife). Presumably having a watch that tells you the time in three different zones is coming in fairly handy at the moment.

“Yeah, it’s been mad,” he sighs. “It’s been mad for a little while. All go. I had another interview this morning and a little later on I’ve gotta do a song on Parkinson. Then tomorrow I’m off to Ireland to do Tom Dunne and The Late Late Show. There’s been a big build-up and it’s been promo for a good six or seven weeks now. So I’m nearly at the end of it, but then there’s the tour.”

Is this just UK and Ireland promotion?

“No, we did some American… em, it’s the world really. We haven’t done Australia yet but I’ve just done a lot of European stuff. I did this huge kind of press conference in Italy the other day, where it was the multi-microphone situation. I was going, ‘I don’t know why you keep asking me about music – I’m here to talk about the English 4-4-2 formation!’ (laughs). It did feel a bit like that, like I’d gone a bit Sven Goran Erikson. Mad stuff – all through an interpreter who talks while you talk, really throws you off your train of thought. Mad shit.”

Before the mad shit, though, there was lots of bad shit. It’s been well-documented that prior to White Ladder, Gray’s musical career had been on a long slow-track to nowhere. Orphaned by three record companies after three spectacularly commercially unsuccessful albums – 1993’s A Century Ends, ’94’s Flesh and ’96’s Sell Sell Sell – the singer was at the end of his tether when he finally struck gold with ’98’s independently released White Ladder. But even that album took a couple of years to properly lift-off. In retrospect, would he have quit the business called show if Ladder had gone the same way as the others?

“Yeah, well if that had gone the same way as the other ones in terms of the amount of attention it got and the reaction it got, I don’t think I’d have carried on,” he admits. “Although that’s just hypothetical at this point, I think I would’ve been gutted – utterly. So, yeah, it was a sort of crossroads definitely reached before we made White Ladder and White Ladder was the right fork…”

Before recording Ladder, Gray stood back and took a long hard look at his output, and ultimately decided that he wasn’t particularly impressed with himself. He takes equal responsibility for his earlier lack of success.

“I mean, the record companies did a woeful job of nurturing my ability and promoting my music, but what really hurt me was, when I came down to it, I felt like I’d failed in improving myself musically. And I took a long hard look at the records I’d made. Since my first record A Century Ends – which had a sort of energy to it, and a coherence to it, it was obviously a bold and joyful first statement – I found it hard to move on from there.

“When I abandoned the crutch of other people’s production ideas, which just seemed too obvious and limiting, I realised I didn’t know what I was doing. I was under-funded, rather, on the Flesh album, but nevertheless I chose to go a certain way, recording totally live and winging it essentially. But without a really fundamental understanding of how recordings click together or what I was doing. It was self-critical above all. My music wasn’t getting across because I wasn’t making enough progress. So I needed to strip back and start from the beginning.”

The one thing about having always been ignored is that it takes the pressure off somewhat. He describes the self-financed creation of White Ladder – which he mostly recorded in dribs and drabs on his own home studio – as being “a relaxed and magical” experience.

“We weren’t really thinking we were making a record,” he explains. “We were just having fun and enjoying it. And then before we knew it, it seemed like we had an album there. So it was a nice way for it to arrive. That’s why I trusted it so much. Even though the process of recording it was disturbed constantly by technical problems and financial problems, which meant I’d have to go the circuitous route in order to, like, get a microphone or something, it never seemed to lose its thread. We never lost focus for an instant.”

Had depression set in prior to that?

“Em… I dunno really,” he muses, seeming surprised at the question. “I don’t think it did in any sort of pronounced way. Obviously I wasn’t celebrating my obscurity on a regular basis, but I don’t think I was depressed.”

Were you drinking much?

“Yeah, but I’d always done that,” he grins. “It just wasn’t… you know, it just wasn’t the happiest situation. I was banging my head against a brick wall. But I mean it’s quite a long time ago. Somehow or other, I’d been beaten off the track and I was wondering – you know, radio play, record companies, management, agents and me somewhere in the middle – well, what’s all this about? I wasn’t on some, like, ludicrous bender. Yeah, you can take things a bit too far, that’s all part of the human expression and then… it’s nice when you come back.”

Nice indeed. But that was then, this is now and It’s A New Day At Midnight – a far darker, deeper and weightier collection of songs than the last. As a follow-up, it sounds exactly right (he was hardly going to go the death metal route) but, without being glib, it could’ve as easily been titled Black Ladder. Musically he hasn’t strayed particularly far from familiar ground, but the lyrics are more personal and perhaps less universal. He’s still wearing his heart on his sleeve, but the hurt is different this time around. We’ll talk about that in a moment, but as the days count down to the new album’s release, is David Gray anticipating a backlash?

“Well, there’s inevitably gonna be one,” he laughs. “I’m expecting one. The last fucking record is ubiquitous. It’s in every shoe shop! It’s out of control in a certain sense, and I have to keep on reminding myself that it’s the same humble thing that we made for all the right reasons. That hasn’t changed. It’s just the way that people hear it. I mean, if it’s everywhere it kind of gets under your skin. You encounter it differently. It’s not like you’re making a choice to hear the fucking thing, people are playing it at you all the fucking time. That’s different. Anyone who takes listening to music seriously starts to get irritated by that – myself included. But what are you supposed to do about it? Modern society seems to deem it incredibly important that there’s music pumped into every public place. I think give music a break!”

Does criticism hurt?

“Of course it hurts,” he says, matter of factly. “I’m no different than anybody else. I don’t read my press but occasionally people read it to me, if they think it’s particularly funny. Occasionally you stumble across something. Now there’s been so much. You have to swallow it down and then make sense of it yourself. But I don’t dwell on it.”

Having spent the best part of the last four years on a seeming never-ending world-wide promotional tour, breaking only to record this album, he’s now bracing himself for another period of full-on madness. He’s aware that he could be in for a bumpier ride than last time, now that people have a musical yardstick to measure him by.

“Since it’s been completed I’ve felt the whole thing kick in, because I’ve suddenly been navigating through the dark and stormy waters of opinion. There’s no facts yet on offer so everyone’s going, ‘Whoo! We can just say what we think because nothing’s actually happened.’ White Ladder sort of wrote its own story and people came on board at varying stages but it was already up and running. It wasn’t something that was given permission by the press, media or music business to be a success. It just succeeded on its own terms. Obviously we gave it a helping hand in various ways.

“But, with this thing, you just realise the altitude that you’ve climbed to when there’s a tangible sense of madness (laughs) as we look at where we are. You know, you do a TV appearance or something, a pre-record, and you’re playing songs that no-one’s heard before but everyone in the room is looking at you like, ‘Go on then – is this gonna be as good as White Ladder?’ You can feel it and the people onstage are thinking, ‘Christ, do people like this?’ So we’re all just driving ourselves mad.

“Essentially there was no masterplan with White Ladder – we just did what we had to do and then went out and played it live. We absolutely winged it for a long time. Obviously we became very tight as a band because we played a lot of the same songs, hundreds, if not thousands of times.”

Are you sick of the old songs by now?

“No, I’m not,” he shakes his head. “What was tiresome was having to construct the set out of all the old material. I was yearning for more new sound. There was a point where I think I’d naturally be making another record but I was still on the road playing the same stuff. We tried changing the arrangements, brought some old songs back, threw a few out, put some other new ones in there. We tried to keep it interesting and we succeeded to a certain extent. It’s difficult but I was really more frustrated about not writing new songs, than I was about playing the old ones.”

How do you chill out when you’re on the road?

“It’s a good question – I dunno,” he shrugs. “My tours are not chilled out. They’re fucking ballbreaking trips around America, that’s been my experience so far. In theory, this time around it should be slightly easier. The shows are different but it’s still three nights on, one night off – which is pretty hardcore. I really don’t know. I don’t seem to be the master of chilling.”

Do you smoke dope?

“Yeah, but after the show, not before. You need to unwind somehow. Invariably there’ll be a few drinks, a bit of a chat and a few spliffs or whatever. It’s all part and parcel of it. On the last tour we were drinking a lot of champagne, because we were always celebrating. It became part of our ritual – there was loads of champagne all the time. And it’s just ridiculous because it picks you up. It’s like drinking Red Bull or something – but far more pleasant. When I think of the last tour, I just think of ludicrous amounts of champagne. Once you’ve had ten bottles on the rider, you start thinking, ‘Well, this is a bigger show so obviously we need 20.’ It just becomes ridiculous. You need a hand. It’s like, ‘Go and get the road crew!’”

Did you manage to do any writing on the road?

“Yeah, but less and less, because this whole thing just grew out of all control and essentially it just eats up what’s left inside your head. There was no room for creating or writing. I was like a zombie half the time, I was exhausted. I could just about get a hangover together, get on and off the tourbus and do the show. The amount of promo I did was just stupid. Yet there’s a sense that after years of trying to get on things, everything suddenly becomes available – and it felt wrong to say no. Like I needed to make up for lost time. But after a while that in itself becomes a false economy because you’re so fucked you can barely do what you wanna do. And certainly the writing ground to a halt. But I wasn’t worried about that because there was so much going on in my life I knew that when I started up again it would come out.”

He admits to feeling a tangible sense of relief now that he’s finally got another album out.
“After such a long time working one record, it felt important to get another one out and put another chapter in the book. Make White Ladder not the last thing you did. Otherwise that sense of pressure and expectation would have just continued. I felt it was important to get this done. And it’s ended up being this very personal statement because of the things that have been going on in my life. So it’s quite a different animal to the White Ladder album.”

The songs on A New Day were written between the end of August 2001 and May of this year, and recorded in Gray’s Clapham studio with long-standing musical partners Clune and Iestyn Polson. It was a time of mixed emotions for the exhausted singer. On the one hand, his wildest musical dreams had come true and he was suddenly a global star – winning awards, selling-out tours and shifting millions of records. And on the other hand, reality was kicking in heavily. His wife Olivia was pregnant with their first child (baby daughter Ivy was born just two months ago) and his father Peter was slowly dying of cancer, passing away last November. These experiences of loss and mortality obviously heavily informed the songs he was writing.

“I think White Ladder was a very heartfelt record but it doesn’t have the gravity of this one,” he says. “There’s a lot of loss and mortality imagery on this record that takes it down. Some of the songs are made of another substance and there’s a weight to it.”

A New Day certainly finds Gray in fine, lyrical form, as evidenced on poetic tracks like ‘Real Love’: “The dawn in all its majesty/Is stealing me away/The dawn in all its honesty/Is turning me to clay/And through the bars of iron rain/Way beyond and back again/I hear the voice of Eden cry/Lift me up, I’m walking on high.” Once the songs started coming to him, they didn’t really stop – thereby rendering all pre-prepared material irrelevant.

“We had a few songs from before – a lot of stuff lying around from that period directly after White Ladder was released – which we thought were gonna be really vital, that wound up not being used at all. Because there’d been little breaks in the touring at the beginning. We’d get a month and it’d be into the studio, I’d have an idea, we’d build a little bit of momentum and then go back out on the road again. So I had a sketchbook full of stuff. But once I sat down and wrote ‘Freedom’ – it was the first thing that I finished once I’d come back to earth from the planet White Ladder – it seemed to weigh more than all the other stuff put together.

“And the record became more about continuing to mine this particular seam, which was compelling, and trying to make a record fit around that. I abandoned all the preconceived ideas about what might be on the record or how it might sound, what we were gonna try and do. The songs just dictated the flow of it.”

You haven’t changed your sound much…

“Yeah, well I think in order for me to have furthered myself sonically…,” he says, before pausing to think about it. “I mean, I think we’ve taken a few things further. In a way this record is a bit more stripped back, but I would need longer in the studio in order to just experiment with sound. It’s a sort of tantalising thing – the deeper you get into making an album, you sense that there’s another album there. But you’d really have to experiment to find it. I’d have to spend a long time in the studio with no particular goal.”

He says that the writing of this album has started a long, lyrical process which probably won’t reach fruition until maybe the next record. At least three of the songs deal directly with the death of his father, most especially the superb ‘Last Boat To America’: “Make me a boat/Away I’ll float/Into the stillness of a pure blue sky/There’s nothing here to hold me now/And I got no more tears to cry.” He doesn’t particularly want to talk about his dad’s death (“If I start talking about it now, I’ll have to talk about it in all my other interviews – and I’ve got thousands more to do!”), but admits to having shed an onstage tear or two in the recent past.

“The last time was probably… ,” he furrows his brow and looks away. “Well, I haven’t broken down sobbing, but I’ve had a tear in my eye on a few occasions. Well, obviously, without wanting to go into any detail, the gigs became very highly emotive because my father had just died or was dying. All the concerts around that time were charged with a lot of emotion. And I’d imagine that the ones coming up are going to be, because essentially it’s all part of the catharsis of actually making and singing these songs – they’re gonna strike a chord I’d imagine on some nights.”

Are you a sensitive type?

“Yeah, of course!!” he guffaws, not stopping laughing for a good 20 seconds (in fairness, it was a pretty dumb question).

Olivia, your wife of nine years, is a solicitor. Does she ever go out on the road with you?

“No, not very much. It’s obviously not a straightforward thing, but you sort of say meet me on the other side, as it were. But of course there’s a strain because you’re both essentially living in totally separate realities. One is in London, going to work and coming back to this empty house, empty bed. And the other one is zooming around the world, with his mates, playing glamorous concerts and doing glamorous promo (grins wryly). It only takes a certain amount of time before all you’re really recalling is faint memory. Things disappear into the haze fairly rapidly. After months of touring, you wake up wherever you are and you have to consciously try to remember what life was like before, because it just disappears. And then when you’re back together, you have to find your feet again.”

How’s fatherhood working out?

“And ye shall know us by the trail of our nappies…,” he laughs. “Great, but the timing of all of this isn’t easy. The time burglars keep breaking in. There’s not a great deal of time. A weekend is like… (makes benign facial expression). It’s a wonderful thing but there’s a bit too much going on at the moment. I’m hoping that coming out into next year things will calm down a bit and I’ll have a bit more time to put into the whole thing. Because it’s different having a family to leaving one person behind. But yeah, it’s all fine. Just life, you know.”

Of course, David Gray doesn’t just have a family at home. His musical collaborators and roadcrew – people like Clune and Dubliner tour-manager Trevor Plunkett – have been married to him for almost as long as his wife. He’s pleased to have people around him that’ve been there since the beginning.

“I think the fact that it’s taken so long and that so many of the same people that have been with me from early on are still there, makes it a more stable foundation than if the success had come overnight on my first album,” he says. “Then you just basically get a load of mercenary fucks who’re just working for you for the wedge, and they’ll tell you whatever you wanna hear. So obviously I was spared those pitfalls by the fact that it took me forever to break.

“I mean, I used to be tour-managing, putting the whole thing together myself. At the beginning of White Ladder I was making all the phone calls. It was a major relief to not have to do that anymore, but it wasn’t so long ago. You start to appreciate everybody’s job anyway. I understand how it all fits together, the internal politics and the fact that people work really fucking hard so you can go on that stage and everything can be right. It’s not just all about you. I like to have a team anyway. It’s a loyalty thing, people who want to be a part of it in the long run, not just people who come in, take a bit of money and then piss off. A family vibe I suppose. We’ve got that.”

“At the moment we’re on this sort of collision course between family life and the whole thing starting up again on a scale that is quite hard to get your head around. So I’m just waiting for it all to kick in. It’s like I’m standing in the middle of the motorway and there’s a huge truck coming towards me and I’m caught in the headlights and I can’t seem to get out of the way.”

Is it a heavy responsibility knowing that so many people are reliant on you staying on the road for their living?

“Yeah, I suppose so, but you know… I do take that on board I have to say, but then I think when I take a bit of a break, I’m gonna be fully entitled to take it. Essentially, I’ve been hard at it for quite a long time. That would be on my mind, but the fact is they can all go out and do other things, and hopefully if you’ve treated them well, they’ll come back to you. But I have pressures on my own life that I have to attend to. If I’m not living the way I wanna live then the whole thing’s gonna break anyway. So I have to look after my wife and my child, my family, myself first.”

DAVID GRAY’S TOP TEN ALBUMS

Astral Weeks – Van Morrison (1968)
Fire Of Love – The Gun Club (1982)
Nebraska – Bruce Springsteen (1982)
Blue Valentine – Tom Waits [pictured] (1979)
One Step Beyond – Madness (1979)
Low – David Bowie (1977)
Clear Spot – Captain Beefheart (1972)
Nevermind – Nirvana (1994)
Pink Moon – Nick Drake (1972)
Blonde On Blonde – Bob Dylan (1966)