David Gray conquered Ireland and then the world with 'White Ladder'. He sold millions of CDs but ended up with an image problem, dismissed as a male Dido. So how come 'Grey David' has just made such a good album? He tells Shane Hegarty about his DIY approach to music and fame
Last year David Gray bought a studio. A converted church in the Crouch End area of north London, it used to be owned by Dave Stewart, of Eurythmics, which explains why its frayed interior is carpeted in the Stewart tartan. "I saw the list who've recorded here, and it was vast," says Gray as he shows off the place. "I know Dylan was here. Joni Mitchell did some stuff. Dave Stewart is such a name-dropper, though. I think the Pope recorded here. The Pope recorded a duet with Jagger." He laughs so loudly that he threatens to propel himself face first into the tartan. "Edge on guitar! Lou Reed wrote the lyrics!" Radiohead finished OK Computer here. Gray points at a sound desk. "All the music for Sesame Street was recorded on that. And in this room here Camberwick Green and Captain Pugwash were produced. That's pre-Dave Stewart. That's when the good shit was going on here. Forget Sweet Dreams."
Almost seven years ago Gray arrived in Ireland for a two-week tour to promote an album he'd made at home and that had sucked up all his money. Journalists would ask about his hat-trick of record-company rejections. About hanging on, getting by. He was proud of White Ladder, he would say, but whether it would sell was another matter. It sold millions. Today he wears a bespoke grey suit, pink shirt and impressive brogues. He looks healthier, wealthier than he did then. He looks famous.
"It's very hard to process the sheer scale of what has come out of it, owning this building, this fantasy thing. I walk around it and sometimes I think, Jesus Christ, I actually own this. I don't ever walk around like lord of the manor. When I bought it Dave Stewart had a throne with 'Dave' written on the back. Unfortunately, he didn't leave it behind, because it would have come in quite handy. He had it in his chill-out room for when things weren't going so well and he wanted to get a proper sense of his place in the world.
"So I don't have illusions of grandeur. Or at least I've resisted them so far. It just seems completely unimaginable, and it seems less real to me now. People used to say: 'You must pinch yourself and think, Is this happening?' But there was so much going on that it was very real when White Ladder went off. As time passes it becomes less so. I know what happened, but how the hell did I get from that point to this point?"
He was a pebble that rolled on to become a snowball, then an avalanche and, eventually, a glacier. White Ladder became the ultimate DIY record. An album that started life being sold from tables at gigs went on to become the biggest-selling Irish album ever. It went back into the Irish charts only this week. That bit of information baffles Gray, who can't believe there's anyone left who doesn't already have it or who might still want it. In Britain it became the second-biggest-selling album of the decade and the 18th-biggest-selling of all time.
Good-luck stories make for dull reading, though. Grey David, the press has called him. A purveyor of dinner-party music. A writer of soundtracks for Mondeo men. As one writer put it, you get the impression that the disdain is less for his music than the people critics believe are listening to it. He may have the second-biggest-selling album of the decade, but when Dido is at numbers one and three it's not going to do much for your credibility. "Yeah, you're just a sitting duck. I haven't got the energy to contend with the sort of spin that gets put on things. It's a waste of energy to go there. I don't read my press. I've barely read a review in the past five years. Of course if something's lying around you'll always read it, and you always wish you didn't. It winds you up, because you're just a human being, and you think, for f**k's sake."
He has passed those salesmen, cruising along the motorway with the window down and the suit hanging in the back, tapping a finger to White Ladder. But that's the consequence of selling so many albums. "There's so many naff characters. It's like Little Britain. It's scarier than that, in fact. It's truly horrific." He is, he points out cheerfully, very popular with builders. "It's the sensitive side of the working man," he grins. "Sometimes I think, yeah, I wish I was portrayed in a cooler light, but then I've never been interested in being that. I've never wanted to create that for myself. And I'm never going to give it the time or the energy, because I really don't give a f**k. People think it's important - they think it's important the pose that you strike - and maybe it is. I mean, I like Iggy Pop as much as anyone else, but I'm never going to be there. I just think I'll plough my furrow; I'll play the long game. I can keep evolving and keep the music coming; the story of the music will be the only thing people will pay attention to."
For all the statistics and jibes and wealth, his forthcoming album, Life in Slow Motion, reminds you that behind it all is a very fine songwriter. This sounds much more like a proper follow-up to White Ladder than did A New Day at Midnight, from 2002. He is obviously happy with the record and talks about it with honest vigour. He knows that he had reached a stage in his career when his name alone sold three millions albums, which is why A New Day at Midnight, written after the death of his father, sold a few more copies than even Gray feels it should have.
"There was an awful lot going on in my private life as well, and I virtually exploded by the time I came to the last record. I'd become very uncomfortable with what it all meant, and I was a bit raw with grief and had written these songs. That was an uncomfortable moment. I think the cycle of White Ladder was so long that I missed a beat creatively and lost my footing. The tail started to wag the dog.
"There's a sort of rationale that kicks in at a certain point. People begin talking business sense to you. 'We have this many people who bought your record. You need to play to this many people and play in this many places.' And I was like: 'Yeah, I suppose that makes sense . . . Christ, is that the point we've arrived at?' So you start weighing up things in a different way, and I like to take a keen interest in everything that happens, but it became too much. I couldn't keep a handle on the thing."
By then White Ladder had became aural wallpaper. "The nature of something becoming so omnipresent is that it just cheapens it, in that it's hard to listen to it in the way you once did. That's from a punter's point of view, never mind my own. You have to have faith that you've done something that works on a level beyond that and that it will stay the course and be there for you when you need it, 20 years down the line."
Gray's sets - including one at the Olympia Theatre, in Dublin, on September 18th, which sold out in 30 seconds - will feature pretty much all of Life in Slow Motion. He can hardly bear to utter the word "Babylon" any more, let alone play the song. "It died for me. It was a victim of what happened, because I had to play that song 100 times more than any other. Whatever feeling was there once has evaporated. It became like a mechanical process."
A raft of singer-songwriters followed in the wake of Gray's success. In Britain this week James Blunt tops the charts with music that sounds scarily like Gray's. In Ireland, record-company heads were dispatched to Whelan's in droves to find the next Gray. Now we have Damien Rice, Paddy Casey, Damien Dempsey, David Kitt, Declan O'Rourke and 1,000 kids with guitars auditioning for You're a Star. The Frames might have been the musical godheads of the scene, but Gray was the proof that making an album in your bedroom could bring success.
"I wouldn't say I'm responsible for it. That would be ridiculous," he says. "These people were there long before my record came out, and they would have done something whether I came along or not. The big problem was what the industry thought of home-made records until the success of White Ladder. There was a hesitancy, let's say, in the more moronic quarters of the media, who would never back that sort of horse. What? A local boy who made it in his bedroom? Yeah, all right, it's a good song, but it sounds a bit rough around the edges. Then, suddenly, I make a record at home and it becomes a triumph, a success all round the world. It changes everyone's mind."
He was notable by his absence from Live 8 this month. Although he puts it down to lack of rehearsal time, he also says he watched the event with growing disquiet. "It was grotesque in many respects to witness the vanity and the self-congratulatory tone of so much of the presentation of it." When he gets going he is hard to stop. He clenches his fists, rocks in the chair. "If it was just Wipe out the Debt for Africa, but it was called Make Poverty History, an obviously ludicrous idea that's never going to happen. It's so unhealthy. What they're talking about is, basically, restructuring world economics. So is anyone going to do that? No."
Then again, as he admits, he did "f**k all" and could be accused of nit-picking when the event put real pressure on politicians. But he wonders if politics is not about doing the small, tedious work. "As you can see, I feel very deeply about it," he says, almost rocking off his seat. "I'm basically very deeply politically frustrated. Because I can't find an outlet I would want to join in with, my politically active side has dwindled. I've become busier but also more cynical and jaded as I've got older. But the political bite just wasn't there [ at Live 8]. You can't have these stupid, meaningless slogans."
He talks about songwriting with equally rampant effusion. He talks of a cascade of imagery. Of the goosebumps he gets thinking about the moment when the creativity kicks in. He was supposed to have taken some time off after the last tour, but instead he wrote more songs. He is, he reckons, a workaholic, who has been loyal to much of the team that was with him at the beginning. But he also has little beyond music and family - and sometimes knows there is little room for both. "It just chews up your life. And I think it makes Olivia [his wife] feel insecure, because everyone around you starts to react differently. It's all about 'it', 'the thing'. The reason I love her so dearly is that she never gets involved in all the glamour of it, never gets caught up in the excitement of it. That's why she's such an ally, because our lives have remained pretty normal. And you can only really appreciate that now, as the whole mechanism begins again."
They have two girls, three-year-old Ivy and seventh-month-old Florence. On Thursday he said goodbye to them so he could go to North America for three weeks. It is the opening round of a tour that could last 18 months. It "vaporises your family life", he says. "You just shut it out. And then it comes slamming back in your face at some point." He doesn't know how bands bring their kids on tour with them. It's like army life, he says, and you have to accept that you'll be away for large chunks of time.
"It's just going to be difficult. It's going to be all-consuming, the magic of the music. If you've captured something in the music, it has a life force, and that suddenly takes over your life." Children are "a lot more perceptive than you give them credit for", he says. "They notice things all the time. Ivy's noticed I'm going away, but I haven't told her about it. We haven't sat down with her. She's picked up on the fact that I'm going. She said she's going to miss me, which brought a tear to my eye. I said, What do you mean? 'I'm going to miss you when you go to work. I don't like it when you go to work.' "
Later in the evening Gray plays a short set in the studio. The audience, mostly invited industry types, are initially a little too keen on their canapes to show due enthusiasm. Ivy is there, the first time she's been at one of her daddy's gigs, and the guests sitting in the light of the old church's stained-glass window are kept entertained by her commentary. "She's into death metal," Gray quips. "They got her young." Then the drummer counts him in, and he goes to work again.
David Gray's new single, The One I Love, is due out on August 26th. His new album, Life in Slow Motion, is out on September 9th