NEW GRAY DAWNING

“There are names beneath the lichen on these cemetery stones... carnivals of silverfish waiting to dance upon our bones.”

David Gray is doing a Christy Moore. Passionately belting out the title track of new album Draw The Line in his distinctive honey and sandpaper voice, the Manchester-born singer is perspiring so heavily that his grey shirt is visibly mushrooming to black. By the end of the song, the garment is totally sodden and clinging uncomfortably to his back. Hands up if you use Rightguard!
“Shit! I really put on the wrong shirt this morning!” he quips, embarrassedly, pulling the sticky material away from his skin.
Perhaps he’s just feeling the pressure. Today is only the second day of what will be a long and relentless campaign to promote his seventh studio album, and Gray gigs don’t get much more intimate than this. The location is a vast and spacious rehearsal room in The Church, the north London recording studio he bought from Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart a few years ago. There’s only about 16 people watching the 41-year-old superstar and his new band play, and more than half of them are international music journalists.
Having played five songs from Draw The Line, he closes the short set with a couple of older tracks (“Just to remind you who I am!”). Cue enthusiastic lunchtime applause. A good show, but not a great show. Perhaps we’re all a little too close for comfort.
Twenty minutes later, showered and changed, Gray greets Hot Press warmly in an upstairs studio control room. “Ah, Olaf,” he says, shaking my hand, “you’ve done me before – so to speak!”
Actually, it’s been almost seven years since we last met. Gray has changed much in the interim, grown nicely into his celebrity. Having won the musical lottery with 1999’s White Ladder (which to this day remains the biggest selling album ever in Ireland), you get the sense that the man has only recently gotten his head around the bizarre life changes that began just as the last millennium ended and his fourth album began its slow and steady climb to near-legendary status.
The Noughties have been interesting times for David Gray. His beloved father, Peter, passed away from cancer just as his success began to seriously peak. He married his solicitor girlfriend, Olivia, and became a father to two girls. He recorded three more studio albums (including the new one), toured the globe several times over, becoming a multimillionaire superstar in the process. While his Nineties were all about penury and struggle, his Noughties have been sell, sell, sell. Without selling out.
Not that you’d know anything about his massive success from the studio decor. Situated on a quiet Crouch End street, The Church – so named because that’s what it used to be - is a massive, cavernous building, featuring two separate state-of-the-art studios, rehearsal rooms, offices, guest lounge, storage space and various nooks and crannies. However, throughout the place, there’s not a single framed magazine cover or platinum disc in sight.
“I’m not a David Gray denier!” he laughs, when I point this out. “I do exist! It’s just I like to be free of all that stuff. I don’t like to think of the complexity of the whole thing when I’m making things. I just like to think about the music, so yeah, the walls aren’t littered with mementos. I like mementos of a different kind, I guess.”
He tells me that he owns what he reckons is probably the biggest platinum disc ever framed, representing his phenomenal success in Ireland. “It’s ridiculously huge! Peter [Kenny] and Jeanine [Nallon] got the record out, so it’s like, ‘It’s become the biggest record ever! We’re getting you the biggest platinum disc ever!’ It was so heavy. We had to virtually hire a FedEx plane to bring it back to London. And then there was no wall big enough for it.”
Not that you’d want to hang it anyway...
“Actually, I find I’m exactly the same at home. People say there’s no instruments, and there’s nothing to suggest you are even a musician on the walls of your house. It’s like, they’re absolutely shocked by it. I’ve got a piano back there now because I’ve just moved and I’ve got a bit of room. So I’ve got a grand piano and I will build a little studio in the basement, I think. But up to now, my home has basically been instrument-free.”
Down to business... Draw The Line. He explains that the title refers to a line in the sand between the David Gray of old, confused, bewildered and slightly guilty about his sudden fame, and the new enthusiastic streamlined unapologetic version. “I just feel free of that era, and obviously I have changed a lot of stuff and it’s very empowering. And we found a new vein that we are working, and it just feels absolutely bang-on, it’s dead-right. So I am proud of what we have recorded and I can’t wait to go out and play it. So, yeah, draw the line, make the mark, but also, that’s enough of that. That’s pretty much how I feel.”
Certainly things have changed. Gray has a new record company, a new attitude and, perhaps most importantly, a new band. After more than a decade working together, he parted ways with his longtime collaborator, percussionist Craig ‘Clune’ McClune, after the promotional tour for his last album Life in Slow Motion (though he’s retained the services of bassist Rob Malone).
“It wasn’t a bad vibe with Clune,” he explains. “I went to see him and just said, ‘Hey… you know.’ And I guess he could maybe feel it coming a little bit, but maybe he didn’t. But I just said, ‘I need a change. I don’t know what the future holds, we might work together again. But for now, I just need to go off and do something different’. And he felt that, you know, his leanings were … I was starting to go off into a place where he perhaps didn’t really want to go. He wanted to do more electronic stuff or go further down that avenue. But I was getting a bit more back to the acoustic guitar, and so he thought it was probably a good thing because he could sense the sort of sea change in me, maybe. So yeah, it’s all perfectly amicable.”
Although he claims that Draw The Line represents a new Gray dawning, in reality the album is quite reminiscent of his earliest work. The production may be a lot slicker, but the rawness, anger and angst of some of the eleven songs indicate that he’s been tapping back into his old life experiences for inspiration.
“Lyrically, as a writer, I‘ve reconnected with something that’s been hiding from me,” he admits. “You know, it’s like, for some time there’s obviously been some things I’ve been itching to say and not quite had the musical vehicle to say them with. And suddenly I found this new sound and it had a slight lurch to it and a little bit of aggression, and suddenly the whole panorama – this banquet of images – was mine, and I was just having so much fun writing the thing.
“So I sort of went backwards in order to go forward. I found that this record has got a spirit of A Century Ends (1993) about it, a little bit of my first album, in that it’s trying to sing about everything. But I have been stuck in a very sort of personal zone for whatever reasons. I think that success, celebrity and all the things that happened around that time was a tumultuous moment, one that’s hard to grasp. It turned me in on myself a bit, that’s my natural inclination. Just like I turned in on myself when things weren’t working out in the ‘90s. And then I found my way out of it again, the season changes and suddenly you wake up one day and you are just so glad to be alive. And, Christ, thank fuck that’s over! Let’s get on with it. Time is short.”
Were you suffering from writer’s block at any point in the last few years?
“No, I’ve been writing like a demon. I really have.”
Actually, I love that “carnivals of silverfish” line on the title track.
“Me too!” he enthuses. “I had that line for about ten years. I wrote that down ages ago, and suddenly everything falls into alignment again, and it’s like, ‘Yes! I have somewhere to put my line.’ Sometimes you remember these things, you know, I’ve got notebooks full of shit that I thought up, but I’m not going to go and read them again, so I don’t really know what the point is. Obviously, if that line is really going to ring out for you, you’re going to remember it.”
Now that you’re married with two kids, have your song-writing methods changed?
“Yeah, it’s more like work now.”
Nick Cave has a studio near his house and apparently works office hours, switching off when he goes home. Are you a little like that?
“Yeah, I can totally relate to that. That’s exactly how I treat it – nine to five. Well, not quite, ten-thirty to seven or whatever. That’s how I work. And if there’s an exceptional day then I’ll just text, ‘I’m going to be late. You’ll have to put the kids to bed. There’s something going on today and I need to get with this’. Because sometimes the songs come right at the end of the day or whatever, or you’re just having one of those magical days, or you’ve worked for three days and nothing’s happened and suddenly you can feel the ice starting to break. It’s like, great, we can get back in.
“It is like lucid dreaming, the whole creative process, sort of stepping just off to the side and out of yourself that little bit so you can really grab hold of things. It’s very hard to loosen it up sometimes. You’re kind of just stuck in this rather pragmatic kind of, ‘Yeah, here I am. Sitting here. Hoping something’s going to happen.’ You know... how do you conjure that? How do you get there? Some days it just all comes together just like a beautiful summer’s day, you wake up and there’s not a cloud in the sky. Well, likewise, some days the song just arrives. You can’t quite believe it, it’s breath-taking.”
I’d imagine that’s quite a change from the ‘90s...
“It was just so different then,” he laughs. “I was so utterly naïve. I just did what I was doing, there was no promo, there was nothing. There was just the odd gig here and there, short tours, and I was just writing and thinking about it all the time and just trying to do the best I could. Now, it’s obviously, it’s become like an industry around me, you know. And I have to be more disciplined about creating boundaries for myself. I find that’s how I deal with it anyway.”
For all its occasional angst, Draw The Line is often a warm, exuberant affair, particularly on the two collaborations with guest female vocalists. American blues singer Jolie Holland sings backing vocals on ‘Kathleen’, while Annie Lennox duets on the powerhouse closer ‘Full Steam Ahead’.
As a former Eurythmic, presumably Lennox was well familiar with the studio?
“She came in and she just took the piss out of me for the first ten minutes about the fact that I hadn’t changed the carpet! She couldn’t believe it, she was gob-smacked, she was calling me a tight bastard and everything. So she was just super-relaxed, actually. Christ, can she sing! Can she do it! I know she has been keeping a really low profile and singing a lot of ballads for the last 10 or 15 years, but fucking hell, she can still … she can just do it. She was brilliant, she blew us away.”
As he tells it, the duet with Lennox happened as a direct result of the credit crunch. “That was one of the huge advantages of the massive delays we suffered in getting the record out, because the record business ground to a complete halt, it’s been in a state of paralysis since the credit crunch. The phone stopped ringing and we were trying to get our record out, but we didn’t quite know how. We were thinking about going independent, but we worked it all out in the end.
“Anyway, one huge advantage of the delays was we managed to get Annie in, because originally I did a version of ‘Full Steam Ahead’ where I sang all the bits. I could never fully realise it without the second voice, which I knew needed to be there, but it was just trying to find the right voice. Who was it going to be? Then we had a bit more time to think about it. Someone suggested Annie so we sent her the track and she got straight back to us, like, ‘Yes!’ We ended up singing it like Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton – through the glass. The first few verses are actually done duet style, so it was magic. It was just magic.”
As it happens Dolly Parton was his first choice for the song that Jolie Holland eventually sang on. “I originally sung all the backing vocals on ‘Kathleen’ myself and it was going down this sort of Dolly Parton trip – ‘Joleen’, kind of – belting out these high lines that were very country. So I thought, ‘Dolly Parton, why not? Let’s give it a try’. Then... Dolly is busy for the next five years! They actually got back to me before I thought I had even sent them the letter. I sent this email to Dolly over to my manager and I said, ‘What do you think of this?’ He didn’t know I was looking for an opinion, he just sent it straight on. By the time I had rang him up to say, ‘Did you look at that email?’, he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve already got a reply.’ I’m like, ‘You’ve already got a reply?!’ He said, “Yeah, I sent it yesterday. Dolly’s busy for the next five years!’”
Not that he feels he settled for second best with Holland. “Well, I know Jolie because I was touring with her in the past, and I’m a massive fan. I think she is absolutely amazing. The last sixty years of music is basically people just copying blues singing, you know. But when Jolie sings it is encoded in her DNA, the country, the jazz, it’s like she’s got the DNA of someone in New Orleans in 1910. It’s not an affectation; she’s completely unselfconsciously in this music. She’s brilliant.”
His press officer appears in the room and asks us to start wrapping it up. He has at least eight more press interviews to get through today. Immediately beyond that there are some European festival dates next week (including a sold-out show at the Galway Arts Festival where some additional quotes for this interview were garnered) and then a promo tour of the US. Go, go, go... sell, sell, sell.
What’s your main ambition in life now, Mr. Gray? Cracking America and all that malarkey?
“Nah, I don’t think like that,” he says, shaking his head. “What you do is you sort of go into graceful decline because everyone’s got a few of your records and there’s something else on their agenda.”
We’re certainly living in a newly disposable musical era of ‘next big thing’ after ‘next big thing’. . .
“Yeah, well the way that the Americans consume music is with a bit more seriousness, kind of ‘Hey I’m with you for the long haul, babe!’ They kind of come on board, and the Germans are intense, there’s more loyalty. I think maybe Ireland was once a bit different, but it is certainly exactly the same as the UK now, people are on to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. Some people stick with you, but you need to reinvigorate that, but people know when something is going on. So that’s out of my hands. I don’t know, all I know is that I’ve made some stuff.”
Whatever happens, Gray has plenty of confidence in the new songs.
“You can turn the hoses on these songs and they’re going to be fucking standing there in the road, you’re not going to move them one inch,” he states. “So, whether everybody decides that they all want to come to the party, I don’t know, that’s a whole other thing. But I am going out there because I really feel that I am going to give everything to this record. It’s got everything; I feel like I’ve managed to say everything I wanted to say.
“I feel Kevlar-coated, even though you’ve got all your vulnerability and you are just waiting for that massive kick in the balls which you always get when you put a record out. Someone will say something that really fucking gets your goat, but I don’t care. I am looking the world right in the eye. There’s a White Ladder-y element to it, I feel strong with it and I am going out with this thing and just see where it leads. That’s where I’m at. Yeah, I want to be back up there. Fuck all this afterglow shit, you know. Draw the line. There’s a future to be had.”
There most certainly is. Can he handle it? No sweat.