A Brighter Shade of Gray

By Jason Fine

David Gray was twenty-eight when he first thought his career was over. He had released three albums, toured the U.S. a half-dozen times - including opening spots with Radiohead and the Dave Matthews Band - and endured so much humiliation he'd almost begun to enjoy it. "I was marinated in failure," Gray says. "I'd just sort of take it all on the chin. When something bad would happen, I'd laugh, like, 'Bring it on. I've seen much worse.'" Some moments stick out, like the time his tour-bus driver abandoned him and his band at a gas station north of San Francisco and hijacked the bus (along with all their equipment, clothes and a bag of dope) back toward Seattle; or the time he showed up for a gig in Rock Island, Illinois, and his name was listed below the food on the marquee: BBQ RIBS, SOLD OUT; DAVID GRAY, $9.

Then there were all the times no one showed up to see him play. In 1993, after the release of his first album, Gray was touring solo, with "a rental car and a credit card" - only his credit maxed out in L.A., and he had a show the same night ninety miles away near San Diego. Gray managed to scrounge enough money for a plane ticket and a taxi to the venue, and he made it just in time. He was the only one who did. "The place was dead empty," Gray says. "I'd come all this way, fought and struggled, I felt like a hero just showing up, and I get there - no one's around. When you work so hard and you're just not getting anywhere, it's hard to avoid this feeling of absolute irrelevance - the sheer pointlessness of it all."

Gray had a gig the next night in Arizona. He didn't go. "I called the agent, said the car broke down. I bought a bottle of wine and went to the beach. It was like, 'What the fuck am I doing?'"

By the end of 1996, two more albums had flopped and Gray found himself dropped from his second label, EMI America, after Sell Sell Sell - a compromised assortment of folk songs amped up with rock guitar - sold less than 5,000 copies. Gray fired his manager and spent the next few months at home in London - "brooding," he says, "drunk a lot, really." He was depressed. Confused. He briefly considered becoming a milkman.

What Gray did instead was retreat to his bedroom, where he made a record that combined his acoustic folk with a new palate of electronic sounds. White Ladder was first released in Ireland in 1998 on Gray's own label, IHT Records ("it's hit messed up," he explains). In Ireland, the 4,000 copies Gray had made sold out, and the album hit Number One. By July of 2000, it was Number Two in England. Here in the U.S., Dave Matthews released White Ladder on his own label, ATO Records. Slowly, it has sold more than a million copies, driven by the single "Babylon," a tour of a weekend's worth of romantic regret set to a skittering drum-and-bass-style beat. With its effortless merger of singer-songwriter clarity and club-hopping ambience, it has become a refuge for listeners frozen out of the teen-pop, hip-hop and new-metal markets.

"It's phenomenal, an amazing piece of work," says Matthews. "I think of it like Blood on the Tracks, like Tapestry."

Gray has also just released Lost Songs 95-98, an album of material written between those years, which he recorded with his band in late '99, and he is right now in the middle of a major U.S. theater tour. "I had become so well-versed in my own insecurity, but what's been amazing over the last year and a half is watching all that fall away," he says, "letting go of that agenda of blame - you know, the world's fucked up, the record company's wankers. All that negativity. When you do something right - when you just let something happen, and you're doing it with every pore of your being - good things happen. And I can't help but think that's one reason people respond to this record: The story is real."

On a rainy Sunday afternoon, Gray is walking through London's Regent's Park toward a pub in Primrose Hill. He points out the zoo, where a scene from one of his favorite films, the British comedy Withnail and I, was shot. He has a hangover. Last night, some friends of Gray and his wife, Olivia, came over for dinner, and it turned into a dance party. "We started with Diana Ross, 'Upside Down'; then we had Kraftwerk, 'The Model'; then Madonna - the old stuff, 'Like a Prayer,' " Gray says. "It ended with 'Smells Like Teen Spirit.' It always ends with Nirvana."

Gray is a good talker, and he likes to talk about music more than anything else. Right now, he's humming Marvin Gaye's "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," which he says is a great hangover song. Wandering through posh Primrose Hill, he notes how yuppified the neighborhood has become, then wonders aloud whether he'll need to put up gates around the new house he plans to buy in order to keep strangers away.

He's dressed today, as on most days, all in denim. A long, hooded coat covers his close-cropped bleached hair. He is not a large man, but he has broad shoulders and a strong build. His face is dominated by a wide, flat nose, small brown eyes and an easy, almost goofy smile. Gray carries himself with a mix of cockiness and humility. These days, there's also a sadness about him.

In February, Gray's father, Peter, died of cancer, and he's still trying to sort out his feelings. His father had been sick for nine months, but even when he was undergoing chemotherapy, he would show up at gigs. "He was probably my biggest fan, which made me uncomfortable at times because he was so excited about the whole thing that he wanted to tell everyone, and not always in the most dignified..." He stops himself. "Oh, Jesus, life is not a subtle experience, you know? It's actually quite in-your-face, isn't it? Jesus." He laughs nervously, holds back tears. He says he doesn't want to talk about his father anymore, then continues. "My dad was up for anything. He came to [the British rock festival] Glastonbury. He was bloody bonkers. He was having chemotherapy at the time, and he came down into the dressing room chanting, 'Chemo! Chemo! Chemo!' He was pissed out of his head, basically."

Then, as Gray often does when the conversation gets too personal, he turns philosophical. "My dad has died, there's a lot to be learned, it's an enriching experience," he says. "Fucking hell, that's what life is about, as trite as it may sound. It's impossible to avoid all the cliches. But, you know, life's a bit of a mess, isn't it?"

Gray was born in 1968 in Manchester, where his father worked with his own father as a baker. When Gray was eight, his parents abandoned the family business - and what Gray describes as "the poisonous interfamily madness" - and took Gray and his two younger sisters to Solva, in a remote corner of Wales. "We had this tiny little cottage with this shanty bit on the side that was the kitchen," Gray says. "I remember walking out the back when we first got there and climbing through the fence, and there was a hill going up, and then just woods, and you know how things seem a lot bigger when you're small? Well, I thought, 'Fucking hell, this is amazing. It's a forest.'" He laughs. "'Action Man is going to have a brilliant time!'

"Something just ignited," he goes on. "It was a million times better than living in the city. My imagination could run wild. I don't remember missing any of my friends at all, or missing anything."

When Gray was about thirteen, he discovered the Eighties ska-pop band Madness on the British TV show Top of the Pops. "They were going absolutely mental, seven of them squashed on a tiny little stage, and every bastard in the house was dancing," Gray says. "I learned all the dance moves. You know, the danger of living in the middle of nowhere is that there's no cool people to judge your fantasy of what's cool, and there's also no shops to get the cool gear, so you're, like, tailoring your own two-tone gear with potato sacks - not easy."

At sixteen, Gray formed his first group, a Cramps-style garage band called the Prawns, then renamed the Vacuums. ("We moved away from seafood and into domestic appliances.") The band's specialty was a nine-minute version of the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." "We were totally confused; we looked like total lunatics fucking about. I remember playing our first gig, a beach party that happened every year. It was so exciting, like Woodstock to us, but it was really about fifteen people in the pissing rain in Wales, with a generator that was louder than the band," he says with a laugh.

After a year of art school in Wales, Gray enrolled at the Liverpool College of Art - the same place John Lennon attended - to study painting. The money he earned selling paintings went into the band he'd started, and in 1991 his demo tape got into the hands of Rob Holden, then a senior A&R rep at Polydor and the manager of the electronic group Orbital. Holden persuaded Gray to ditch his band and come to London.

At the time, London's dance-music scene was exploding, and Gray's Dylan-style folk didn't exactly fit in. But Holden had a plan. "He thought the worst crime we could commit was to be perceived as old-school folkies," Gray says, "so I would only play gigs in the most inappropriate places. I was playing at raves. I remember at one place there was free acid pinned to one of the doors, and I came on in the middle of this ridiculous hardcore groove to do a few numbers. It was like, 'Who? What?' Then people started to get into it somehow. Bizarrely, those gigs usually went all right."

In 1993, Gray released his first album, A Century Ends, on Hut Recordings. It is a raw and memorable affair, cut in six days, and its guitar-and-piano narratives carry the influence of two of Gray's favorites: Dylan's Blonde on Blonde and Springsteen's Nebraska. His voice - scorched with anger, trembling with vulnerability - has immediate impact. The album, however, garnered little attention. "Nobody was interested," says Hut founder David Boyd. "I mean nobody." But Gray found an audience in Ireland, where he toured frequently, and the next year he released another album, Flesh. It tried to grunge up Gray's sound for a rock audience. It didn't work. "We just couldn't get anyone interested," says Boyd. "David was beating his head against the wall; I was beating my head against the wall."

Boyd let Gray go, and a few weeks later, he signed to EMI America with promises of a U.S. push. But Sell Sell Sell sold less than his other records, and Gray found himself stuck touring middle America. "EMI pulled the plug on our national tour," he remembers, "and sort of said, 'Right, the plan has changed. We're sending you to the Midwest, because we want to see this record work in microcosm. If you can get it going there, Dave, then we'll take it to the whole country.' Christ, it was bad. There's that John Prine song, 'Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone' " - "The roadies got the rabies/And the scabies and the flu" - "it was a little along those lines. It was bleak."

It's often reported that after the Sell Sell Sell debacle, Gray stopped making music altogether. But Gray says he kept writing songs and even traveled to the U.S. in search of a record deal. He and Olivia, whom he married in Los Angeles in 1993, owned a home in London's outskirts. She had just started her career as a lawyer and was able to keep up mortgage payments when Gray's income dried up. "These events have become so mythologized," Gray says, standing at the bar at the Queens pub with a pint of Guinness. "But I'm always wary of calling them 'hard times,' because, fuck me, they're not hard times. Let's go have a walk around the streets and see some people having some hard times. I had a terraced house in Stoke Newington. I had a wife, and a career, even if it was going nowhere."

He drinks his beer. "I'd gotten a bit twisted up by the whole process. But you can either become bitter or you can try to learn from it. I looked at all the work I'd done and how badly it had all gone, and I thought, 'Can I do better?'"

Gray and his drummer, Clune, began on new songs at home. The first track they attempted, "Please Forgive Me," started as a straightforward piano ballad, Gray says, but Clune - a slightly manic veteran of countless bands who favors sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts - suggested a drum-and-bass-style beat. Next, the pair added bursts of synthesized strings, bells, keyboards. The song - and Gray's approach to recording - was transformed. "There was this spark that just shot right through the room," Gray says. "Something clicked. Finally, I thought, 'This is the sound I wanted to hear.' I was no longer aping Van Morrison. It was an unselfconscious creation."

Lyrically, Gray's songs had grown simpler, relying more on raw emotions than on rambling narratives. "I learned that the more you have to say, perhaps the simpler you need to be saying it," he explains. "As life teaches you lessons, it strips away the fussy detail, and just suggesting things or leaving a space to let someone read between the lines is a very powerful tool."

Gray re-teamed with Holden in early 1998, and the two formed a label and released White Ladder on their own. They pressed 4,000 copies of the album - paid for partly with £9,000 Gray had accidentally been overpaid by his song publisher - and shipped them off to Ireland. "There was a real thrill," says Gray. "You could just sense something good started to happen."

Those albums sold out, and they pressed 5,000 more. Soon Irish radio caught on to the single, "Babylon," and Gray and Holden began looking for a U.S. distributor. Dave Matthews, who had brought Gray on tour in 1995 and was a fan of his first record, thought the singer-songwriter would be a great initial signing for his new label. "I closed my mind to anything else for probably a month after I listened to that record," Matthews says. "It was the only record in my car."

Gray signed with ATO in part because he liked Matthews' grass-roots marketing style. "It's the only way we know how to do things," Matthews says. The first push ATO gave the record was sending label president Michael McDonald and vice president Chris Tetzeli across the country on tour with Gray to play it for radio stations. "It must mean something if the president of the record company drives from city to city with it - that's a pretty big endorsement," says Matthews. "We thought the record didn't really need anything more than for someone to listen to it. Once somebody's heard it a couple times, you're in."

"I listened again to that Frank Sinatra track, 'Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars,'" says Gray the next day, standing in a corner of his studio, tucked away in a quiet industrial complex in South London. "It's fucking brilliant. Christ, how simple." He sings: "'Quiet nights of quiet stars/Quiet chords from my guitar/Floating on the silence that surrounds us . . .' Christ almighty."

The song, from Sinatra's 1967 collaboration with Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, exemplifies what Gray is striving for: "Mind-blowing lyrics, ultimately simple. I want to say things in the most simple way." Asked whether he has a songwriting rule, he responds, "Less adjectives."

Today, Gray is working on the first song for his next album, a gentle, almost prayerlike melody called "Real Love." He is here with his core crew - Clune, 40, and programmer-engineer Iestyn Polson, 28. They are moving slowly, trying out new equipment, testing beats and programming sounds. After adding drums and a minor keyboard part to the song, they break. Polson lights a joint; Clune makes a sandwich. Gray messes around with a toy African rhythm instrument. The control room is so small that, as Polson and Clune swivel in their chairs, they knock into each other. Gray laughs at the scene.

"This is luxurious, for us," he says. "You should have seen us doing this in my bedroom!" He unscrews the top from a bottle of water, then screws it back on. "I used to feel like I had to do everything myself, but all that pressure has been lifted, and it's great to work with people you believe in. The world pisses me off as much as it ever did, but I think all those hard years taught me that there are different ways of fighting. That struggle does not have to permeate your work. There are other means of protest. To do something beautiful in the face of an utterly bland, pointless music business is a form of protest," he says. "Revenge is to do something good."

From RS 868, May 10, 2001