David versus the goliath

"I think, that when you get really tired – like, deeply tired – you sort of need to take some time off," David Gray is saying, somewhat obviously, but with great, slow deliberateness nonetheless, his expression screwed up in frowning concentration. The last year that David Gray has lived through, mind – the last several years, really – are probably the kind that might cause one to restate the obvious.

"And, you know, I’m still touring, blah blah… coming home… baby… moving house… whatever, all these different things. Now, I’m basically still completely knackered, em, but I think," he posits, putting the idea out there tentatively, as if it is an utterly novel, deranged, blasphemous concept, "that I sort of need to take some time off.

"Well, actually," he U-turns immediately, "comparing the last six months, from January to now, with the previous six months, this has been a doddle. Cos that was the most exhausting time ever. That’d be from just before the birth of my baby, ’til Christmas, with the UK tour, all the promo, finishing the record, baby being born, rehearsals – like, three weeks of rehearsals – that whole period of time was crazy. I’d get up, whenever – with the baby of course, getting up was just all over the place – and I’d get into the rehearsal studios, where there’d be interviews all morning – say, from like 9.30 to like 12.30, which is a lot of interviews – and then into the rehearsal room, couple of hours, lunch. Bacon butty," he gestures, with production-line precision, "cup of tea. Then back to rehearsal. And I just wouldn’t be able to speak. Everyone’s been telling me what I was like during that period. I was monosyllabic. I’d just stare at the floor, at my lists, of what we had to do, and then just start playing, and everyone would have to play along... So… Yeah, that was em… tiring.

"But I think my life’s been sort of… very turbulent," David says thoughtfully, "with great things and difficult things… it’s not sort of been balanced, or in harmony. It’s a bit of a battle. And that’s why I’m so tired I think. The last year, particularly, has been a battle. There’s nowhere I ever sort of get to where I can just kinda kick back and relax."

When was the last time you had a break? Where you literally didn’t have to even go near a piano if you didn’t want to?

"I would always love to go near a piano. So that wouldn’t interfere with my holiday," he smiles, relaxing for the first time in this train of thought. "But the last holiday I went on – last summer, just before the promo started – was a bit of a disaster. I can’t remember the last really successful holiday I’ve had. I’ve got a sort of mad take on them. I put too much stuff in." He sniggers shortly. "Yeah, I’m not very good at them."

Great things and difficult things. We are in Hampstead, in a beautiful, garden-ringed, sun-dappled hotel across the road from a large stately church that turns out, upon enquiry, to be Air Studios, the music-making home of Beatles producer George Martin. A hot white sun is beaming down to split the stones. Occasionally, a horse and trap is heard to clatter past. It’s all very genteel.

Since we’ve last spoken to the tireless, tired David Gray, he has been on massive arena tours of the US and UK. He has played Madison Square Garden, as well as arguably its European equivalent, status-wise, l’Olympia in Paris, on whose floorboards have trod luminaries from the Beatles to Brel and which was the historic home of Edith Piaf. He has toured both Australia and New Zealand for the first time, but was so block-booked with work that he never saw the countryside ("Just the cities. Which were like America, but full of Aussies and New Zealanders").

Two months ago, in a half-week that neatly typifies the kind of existence he has been leading, he did a whistle-stop promo-only tour of Japan, complete with simultaneous interpreters and "absolutely brilliant" culture shock, and flew home to collect an Ivor Novello – for ‘The Other Side’ – the next day. Meanwhile, here at home, where this whole unlikely journey arguably began, he will have played Killarney’s Fitzgerald Stadium by the time you read this, to a mindbending 43,000 people.

Having struggled for years leading up to the thoroughly unexpected, one-in-a-million success of 1998’s White Ladder (6.5 million copies sold worldwide; currently at week 237 in the Irish album charts) and having re-emerged with A New Day At Midnight last autumn – a difficult follow-up in any case, but lent particular gravitas given its intensely personal subject matter – David Gray is now living through the day-to-day reality of the massive mainstream artist. If it looks on paper as if this period ought to be a relaxed one, a coast on the kind of we’re-a-household-name-now plateau that follows tremendous success, it seems, in practice, to have rather more of a riding-the-cyclone element altogether.

Rather David Grayishly, he has lately found his inspiration not in the first-class cabins and the awards receptions and the stadia, but elsewhere. Words practically tumble out of him when he tells you about his trip to Europe earlier this year.

"It was for about a month, and I’m not as successful there, but it was one of the most enjoyable things we ever did. It was a downscaling of our big show that we went round America and England with. We had a crew of maybe 50 for the UK tour – in an arena, you have to build the whole stage, and carry all the drapes in, and build the lighting rig – whereas Europe was like: less than half the crew, all back on one little bus, going into clubs, no visuals, very few lights," he says excitedly. "Totally back to basics.

"And the war was about to break out, and it was so inspiring to go round Europe and see what was going on. The first gig we did was in Florence, and there were peace flags everywhere – I mean, amazing amounts of them. Thousands of them. From almost every building. And we found that in so many countries. And there was a real tension out there about the war, but one I could totally understand. And we got some really good crowds. People were really passionate."

Did playing Europe as war was starting make you think differently about the kinds of songs you might write in future?

"Well, in fact, we’ve started doing a couple of sort of… more ranty ones, in the set," David Gray says, using the word ‘ranty’ to describe his music with a delightfully straight face. "I’ve been singing ‘Birds Without Wings’ [from his debut album A Century Ends] again. Some of those earlier songs feel too naïve. I can’t wear them with any confidence anymore. But that one seems to have found its way back onto the agenda. And we’ve been doing ‘Ballad Of Hollis Brown’ by Bob Dylan. It’s not overtly political, but it has a sort of bite, to it: the fragility of human life is a thread that runs through the lyric. ‘Cos I felt that tension, and I wanted to actually" – he strains palpably to find the word – "get – get – express it in some way.

"But yeah. I totally feel like that at the moment. Without having made a decision about it, I just feel myself… opening out. And the way that the world has moved, the direction the world seems to be going – or America, rather, has gone – is politicising, and I can see evidence of it in the lines that I’m writing. I felt a while ago, in fact, that my sort of drift had changed. I mean, songs about your dad dying: you can’t get more personal than that. I can’t see how I can keep going down this particular avenue. I feel –" he says with visionary fervour – "I want to get involved again.

"But it was great," he remembers. "It was like: hot, sweaty gigs. We were crammed on the stage. It was like being in the Mean Fiddler in Dublin [now The Village] in some of them: about a thousand people and about two hundred degrees. It was fantastic.

"And it leads to this other kind of playing. And because this whole album, and set, and all our minds, have been so minced by having to build for these massive tours – I mean, talk about pressure, you know, in front of thousands of people every night – it was brilliant, it was like the pressure was gone. And suddenly it was like: ‘Let’s just enjoy the songs.’ And we got really into it. And the music just suddenly burst into life."

The most striking thing about meeting David Gray in person is the impression he gives of overwhelming, unbelievable youth. This goes beyond the bleached-out fronds of his hair, beyond the fact that his clothes – common-or-garden jeans and indie-boy runners, not flashy or new – still speak of an old-school, student-to-mid-twenties sensibility rather than the moneyed cool of the Famous Person or the pressed and spotless ‘casualwear’ of adulthood. More than that, it has to do with a certain hyperactive, restless quality he has, physically and otherwise: an energy that, even when he’s at his most still and silent, comes off him in sparks.

His physicality, in an interview situation, is permanently set to ‘intense concentration’: when he’s asked a question, he sits forward, his gaze fixed into the close distance, pursing and re-pursing his mouth, as if the answer is hanging invisibly approximately an arm-and-a-half’s reach away and he has only to sit forward and struggle to see it for long enough. He cares about crystallising his ideas into language as precisely and beautifully as possible, to a degree not generally found in people as they become older – and certainly not to an extent typically characteristic of someone already famous, successful and rich. He speaks with immense decisiveness, as if he means every thing he says one hundred and fifty percent, at least.

Simultaneously, he’s extremely funny, with a wild, raucous laugh – as if pressure is being let off via each brief comic interlude. He seems the sort of person whereby, if you had to go through the surreal, exhilarating, quite trying decade that he and his band have done, en route from grinding hardship to ridiculous, mind-melting success, you’d want to do it with someone nervy and passionate, someone like him, at the helm.

So David Gray is not a man who is relaxing paunchily into a successful career as a million-selling ‘troubadour’ for the Cold Feet brigade, as he is frequently painted – regardless of whether this is or is not largely the listenership who have helped turn him, in five years, from Ireland’s best-kept secret into the human epicentre of a multimillion-pound cottage industry.

The man you meet instead puts you in mind, not of White Ladder, not of multiplatinum discs, not of fame and wealth and stadium tours and Ivor Novello awards, but, in fact, of the bloke who electrified a packed Whelans in 1994. Whether you’re a fan or not, whether you like the new album or not, whether you preferred his music pre-beatbox, pre-White Ladder or not: when you meet David Gray in the flesh, you understand – or remember – why Donal Dineen and Donal Scannell, meeting him all those years ago, wanted to move heaven and earth for him.

A New Day At Midnight is a dangerous album in the way that only a downtempo, emotionally blunt album about love and death, issued directly after one of the most spectacular music-industry success stories of recent memory, can be. As a collection from which to perform live, it presents its own particular problems ("Yeah, it’s definitely been difficult. If we’d have had another White Ladder’s worth of sort of poppy songs, it would have made these big stadium gigs so much easier"). But when you are performing music that mourns your late father, admits to feelings of profound nihilism and questions (with some optimism, but only some) the whole idea of marriage, the challenge presumably doesn’t end there.

Is it hard to perform this music, some time having elapsed, now, since the events that brought these songs into being? Because we’d imagine – having no personal experience of any of this, we explain – that at a certain point, a person might really feel the need, or the desire, to put grief, and things that remind you of grief, behind you.

There follows a long, long pause.

"That point hasn’t come, yet," he says, finally. There is another silence. "I know what you’re saying. But there’s –" (pause; then, as if arguing with a point he has just posited in his head) "Well, no, it’s just more like having a photograph. And taking it out from time to time."

He continues, each phrase very deliberate, sounding a bit wan.

"I think there’s like… an idea, that you’ve got to get rid of this in some way, and put it in a closet, and forget about it. But it keeps things alive, in a good way. I mean, it’s not all utterly mournful. There’s a thread of hope, and memory, sort of interwoven.

"No matter how personal the song," he says ruminatively, "when you sing it every night, it changes, for you, and occasionally, the rawness of the emotion with which you wrote the song and brought it into life, will return to you… and you touch back on the electrical impulse that started the whole process off, and you’re transported… and it gets a bit overwhelming. It can do. But it’s not like that all the time. And because these songs are about… (pause; changes tack) My music’s very sort of emotional, and this is a particularly personal record, in places. The idea of having to go through that every night, would be… sort of morbid."

Or difficult. I’m not saying to do so would be morbid, I’m just saying it might be hard.
"It’s been difficult at certain times, during the tours," he agrees, a bit tightly. "On nights where, you know, I wished my dad would have been there, it added a… Well, obviously, a huge – (pause; breath out) …additional weight to the songs. I’d be very much singing into the void, with these songs.

"I mean, during the British and the American tours, when ‘Freedom’ came on, all the lights would go down, and the audience would be lit, and because the lights were off on the stage I could suddenly see them all – and every night, during ‘Freedom’, I would look out…"

He raises his head, looks across this tiny room, and instantly you see him looking over thousands of illuminated faces, a quarter mile’s worth of them, a canopy of black overhead: ecstatic faces, singing, smiling faces, all of them unfamiliar.

"I was very much singing into the void, with that song," he finishes, finally, and we return to this room. "On a nightly basis, at the beginning.

"But I do wonder what’s gonna happen with these songs," he contemplates. "Whether – like, I’m in this phase now, and because the spell isn’t yet broken, and because we’re still touring this album, it’s like: it’s OK. But when it’s finished, will I want to keep playing them? Hopefully, when I next tour in a big way, it’s gonna be in a decent while, and I’m going to have written at least one, maybe two albums. And I’ll be concentrating on that music. And it’ll be a matter of picking the odd song, from maybe this album, or White Ladder, or before. And maybe then I’ll feel… it doesn’t fit so well. Maybe when I come back to them they’ll feel uncomfortable. But I don’t think they will."

With his huge success in the UK and America and his nascent rise in Europe, David Gray is in the enviable position, for now, of having the best of everything: the crazy, circusy fame of playing the enormodomes, the novel delights of playing cosy mid-size theatres and the sweatbox rush of playing clubs, of really having to fight to win the night. Appositely enough, he loved seeing Radiohead play a club date in Shepherd’s Bush, was very fired up to witness their small-scale reimagining of themselves.

You should do a sneaky one in Whelans at some stage.

"Oh, I’m sure I will," he says without hesitation. "Of that I’ve no doubt. I think that that’s what comes next, is to gear the whole thing around the music, rather than the spectacular success. That’s what’s underlined for the next stage. First of all I’ve got to get into the writing and the recording…"

Where are you mentally at with that at the moment?

"I haven’t started. I mean, I’ve started writing tunes, but I haven’t got a plan for where we’re going to record, how we’re gonna record, or when," he says dismissively. "I’m in no rush about it. I really want to go back to the drawing board, take a long hard look at everything I’ve done, and what’s been good about it, and what I don’t like about it, and start again. I did that for White Ladder, and I feel it’s time to do it again.

"It’s like: you know… commerce." He smiles blackly. "I’ve done five years’ hard sell, and now I want to just get back into the music. Fuck everything else for a while. You know? It’s all well and good…" Then he catches himself. "Well, it’s all bloody brilliant, in fact. But it’s all going to have to come down to what happens in the studio.

"I’ve been listening to a lot of records, actually," David says fervently. "I’m really, really enjoying listening to music at the moment, I’m in a real listening phase. Like the Sigur Rós record – it’s very ambient, and hence, when I’d been listening to it doing the washing up or running around the house, I’d never got into it, but then when I suddenly went on tour, and started listening to it on a stereo, late at night, it was like: Aha. I understand! Give me more. I’ve drenched myself in that record. And the Lucinda Williams album… and Gillian Welch, that Down From The Mountain DVD, where she plays with all the other bluegrass people… and these electronic compilations on Rough Trade… and Donal Dineen put me on to The Bad Plus record…"

That’s an amazing record.

"The fourth track on it, ‘Everywhere You Turn’ – that’s the one," he says, eyes afire. "It’s worth the money for that track alone. That is awesome. God, I love that. Every night, when we come back to mine for a listen, after the gig, that’s always making an appearance."

When who goes back to yours for a listen?

"Various members of the band or crew. Cos I’ve always got the biggest room."

David Gray, who always gets the biggest room because he is David Gray, grins widely at me for a second – and then detonates into the loudest hooting laughter you’ve ever heard. "HAHAHAHAHA! Hee hee hee… Heh. And," he calms down somewhat, "cos I always make sure I have a stereo in mine."

That’s a really good tradition.

"Yeah, it is good. We’re in a listening phase at the moment and I think that’s cos I’m in that phase at the moment," he says, his intensity building. "I need music, and I need people. I’ve got into too much of an isolated, fucked up, anxious space, and I’ve suddenly needed to come back to humanity.

"We’ve all lived through something," he says. "Not just me, but everyone involved in this. It’s engulfed us completely, this tidal wave of… (breathes out; pronouncing it as if it’s a bad thing) you know, success. Popularity. These great big venues, the pressure, the sort of… It suddenly all becomes incredibly important. And everyone sort of splits off from each other.

"Success is fragmentary, you know. It isolates people, because everyone’s ego tells them to work out how they’re important within it, and why they’re so important. Why are all these people cheering at you? Why has this happened? And then, you get to a certain point, and that just doesn’t work as a human… means, of… getting through life anymore. And you have to come back together.

"And I’ve been watching this sort of… concertina effect, and we’ve definitely come through something. We’re still going through it," he finishes. "It’s been a mindfuck."

One of the new tunes David Gray is currently excited about concerns Ivy, his daughter, now eleven months old.

"It was quite traumatic when she was born, actually," David says, matter-of-factly. "It all went really badly wrong, and my wife ended up in intensive care. And I was there, going (expression of horrified helplessness) ‘FUCK. What is going on?’ But, at the same time, as anyone who’s been there will tell you, it’s an amazing thing. And so I wrote a song, called ‘A New Day At Midnight’." He giggles at the revelation of what has apparently become something of a pet theme. "I’m stuck on that. It’s what everything’s called now. Heh. It’ll be on the next record. It doesn’t go on about – I don’t describe her coming out of the womb or anything," he cackles, "but it’s kinda about, you know, these seismic changes that happen, and how fragile everything is, and about how life is about these kinds of changes, that you can just about deal with. Or that you don’t have complete control over." He breathes out rapidly, definitively. "Or any control over."