Gray's Anatomy

David Gray doesn’t like talking about music and he readily admits as much. In a recent UK interview, he described the act of talking about his chosen art-form as “a fruitess exercise”.

“It’s a funny old thing you’re involved with, every time you put a record out, just gabbing on about it,” he muses down the phoneline from his London home. “It’s just a dance that we have to do and it’s not the most revealing thing. I think talking about football or cookery or gardening would be more revealing. I actually enjoy the more throwaway chats than the serious ‘let’s talk about the album’ thing, when I find myself immediately constipated in terms of my verbal flow.”
For the last seven years, David Gray has had to do more than his fair share of gabbing about music, though.
One of the trappings of success is that one’s promotional obligations are far more time-consuming than they used to be, which he accepts as part and parcel of the music business and his phenomenal success therein.
There are now upwards of six million people worldwide who own David Gray albums.
Indeed, so pivotal has Gray been that there’s an accusation that he's single-handedly responsible for making emotional music accessible again.
Consider the case for the prosecution: pre-White Ladder, the charts were clogged up with manufactured pop acts, whereas now the upper reaches of the top 10 are more likely to be filled with Coldplays and Keanes. How does he plead?
“I’d have to say that I am implicated in this one, but I don’t know if it’s something that’s a good or bad thing,” he laughs. “There was lots of talent around on the acoustic scene when I was starting out, but there was nowhere for them to go. All that changed was that people in the business suddenly saw the whole thing completely differently and they’ve been given a chance.
“But that’s pop music, isn’t it? Once one thing happens, a whole swathe of bands or singers come along in a similar style. So there are a lot of earnest singer-songwriters but it could be worse, depending on your taste. People talk about the need for a cull and they might have a point.”
So does he accept responsibility for James Blunt?
“No fucking way,” he splutters. “I don’t take any responsibility for him. I don’t think that’s anything to do with what I do. I think it only works on one level. They’re going straight for the idiot culture tack: it’s instant but there’s nowhere else to go with it. It’s bollocks, essentially, but it suits the time and place and sounds alright in the background when someone’s giving you a Mister Whippy or whatever. It’s fine. It’s having its moment, but I’m not working along similar lines.”
It’s true that Gray’s taut, emotional lyrics are as far removed from insipid Bluntisms as you can get while still wielding an acoustic guitar. The good news is that he’s still as fired up about writing songs as ever.
“I definitely was as fired up making Life In Slow Motion as I’ve ever been,” he stresses. “I was dissatisfied with A New Day At Midnight, so I was fired up to get back to the music. When we came off that tour, it was preoccupying me.
“But when we come off this tour I don’t want to just do the next record on automatic pilot. That’s something that hasn’t been a problem so far but I’m keeping an eye on myself, because your commitment to making a record has to be total. It’s stressful, it’s intense and it’s an all-consuming thing, so you’ve got to be really up for it. I don’t want to meander into the studio to make a record: I’m looking to feel the fire.”
Where that fire will take him for his eighth studio album is still up in the air. He admits that one part of him would love to “do something more adventurous”, while he also has a “hankering to go back to the beginning”, to the stripped-back one-man-and-a-guitar approach that served him so well on his debut A Century Ends.
Reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles and watching Martin Scorcese’s Dylan documentary No Direction Home have steered him towards the latter genre.
“Listening to Dylan’s early stuff was what changed me, what made me want to do this,” he admits.
"In the Scorcese documentary: it was great to hear him talking in this unmysterious way. It’s usually all smoke and deception when it comes to Dylan’s career: he becomes more mysterious the more that’s written about him. But just seeing him sitting there chatting in a very unguarded way about the past, which he obviously remembers very fondly, was very affecting. And hearing the music, songs like ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’: it doesn’t get any stronger and that’s just him, a guitar and a harmonica.
“Some days I wake up and hear something incredibly simple and I think that’s what fucking music’s about,” he confesses. “Don’t give me all the bollocks, just give me the song, give me words and let me fucking get there: you don’t need all this other shit. But it depends what mood I’m in, ‘cos at the same time I find the soundscapes of a record like Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden or Astral Weeks compelling. Astral Weeks is a journey of sound, with that crazy double bass player who never plays the same thing twice. I want to get into this strange new world but at the same time I’m still hooked on bare simplicity.”
While admitting that he has a lot of tunes left over from the Life In Slow Motion sessions, he envisions them being released in a similar vein to the Lost Songs collection. In fact, he’s planning on taking a break for a few months when the current tour winds up, until he’s at the point where he’s desperate to make another album.
“Everything has an ebb and flow. The people involved, we’ve all been doing this relentlessly for the last seven or eight years and it can be like a pressure cooker, to the point where you start to get annoyed by someone’s choice of shoes. It’s easy to confuse those frustrations, the tourbus madness, with your desire to get back in the studio so I think what we all need is a little pause and then we’ll get back to recording duties.”
Not that Gray or his band have lost any of the tremendous energy that makes their live shows so special. Already this year, they’ve toured Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (“a stunning place but it can be like a five star prison”), as well as treading the boards on the European festival circuit, which he admits is a strange experience.
“During a normal concert, you can’t see anything apart from your bandmates, flashing lights and maybe a couple of people in the front row, but at a festival, you’ve got this insane vista of people picking their nose, falling asleep and eating hot-dogs,” he sighs. “At Hyde Park, they had a giant screen facing us, which sometimes had pictures of me singing but at other times had the World Cup game between Australia and Croatia. I saw someone getting sent off and it completely distracted me: then I got lost in the middle of ‘Hospital Food’ when a goal went in!”
Gray and his band have also crossed paths with Babyshambles a couple of times on the festival circuit.
“While not wanting to add any fuel to that sadly boring blaze, I thought the whole thing was a total mess and rather tragic,” he proffers. “We watched their performance and there was nothing to comment on: it was just falling apart.”
Gray’s own gigs, however, have been as rapturously received as ever, and he’s been enjoying getting back on the road in Ireland too.
“They've been tremendous,” he enthuses. “The last one in Cork, the roof came off: it was like the old days, so I’m really looking forward to the Galway one as well.”