David Gray: “the charts have become meaningless”
UK singer David Gray says the struggle to play new songs when the audience are waiting to hear your hits is real. However he’s found a compromise that works on his latest tour
Confidential
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BRITISH singer songwriter David Gray is testing exactly how many songs from his latest album he can crowbar into his new tour.
One night he opened with six tracks from Gold In a Brass Age, another night he upped it to eight in a row from the get-go.
He figures getting the new material out of the way, then moving into familiar songs, is the best option.
“The set is uncompromising,” Gray admits.
“I’ve got to breathe the new air. I’m born again in this music. If the crowd fail to recognise that fact, if they can’t see the sincerity and the radiance of something that’s being made for the first time then the relationship is going to be difficult between me and them on any given evening.”
SITTING V STANDING AT CONCERTS
Gray then reveals his spirit animal.
“Like a tapir in the Amazonian rainforest craving a mineral, I go in search of the new and the reward that comes with it. Once I get that, I’m a cavorting tapir who will give the audience everything they need. It’s always a complex relationship between the past and the present. That’s what gigs are. I’ve got to get what I need before I can give them what they want.”
Gold in a Brass Age sees Gray, who turned 50 last year, return to the electronic experimentation of his million-selling album White Ladder, which turned 20 last year.
The musical connection between the two records also syncs the songs in his latest concert — by using technology (his last tour, for a greatest hits compilation, was all acoustic) his band have been able to load up many of the original samples from White Ladder songs like Babylon, Please Forgive Me, This Year’s Love and Sail Away.
“The official album versions haven’t been done live for quite some time. There’s a muscle memory there in the crowd and when you trigger it there’s a tremendous response. It’s been moving, the reaction has been overwhelming at times, it’s been quite a trip. It’s been incredibly intense.”
Gold in a Brass Age got an amazing critical reaction, hailed for its experimental direction, but did not trouble the charts greatly. Gray wasn’t concerned.
“The record I crave to make is somewhere between Astral Weeks by Van Morrison and Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk. It’s like musical undergrowth with poetic flowerings. Music even I don’t really understand. Life’s too short to just repeat yourself. If you’re happy to do that and stamp out the dollars that come with it, that’s fine. That’s just not what interests me. So when I’m making a record I’m not thinking ‘How am I going to get back in the charts?’
“I think the charts have become almost meaningless. It was a top heavy world that favoured those who had the money to promote something with great intensity across the board. That was 30 years ago. Now, what you see with success stories like Amazon is people who are worth a trillion pounds. It’s the same with streaming, it’s so weighted, a teenager will listen to an album 30 or 40 times a day, whereas one of my fans might listen to my new album a few times a week. You’re never going to be able to come close to that.
“The really gratifying thing has been able to see how the tickets have sold on this tour, on a global level. That’s because there’s a loyal fanbase and there’s a connection that’s been made. Maybe I’ll get a song in a movie and everyone will love me all over again on a mainstream level, who knows? All I’ve ever known is that you’ve just got to follow your heart and put it across with all the passion you can muster and see what happens. It’s not like it’s a quality driven decision making process, the world works in mysterious ways.”
While Gray let the 20th anniversary of White Ladder’s original release slide last year, he has started work on a reissue of his breakthrough record and is contemplating a tour next year to mark the 20th anniversary of its global success.
“The White Ladder anniversary is a movable feast. It was released in Ireland in 1998, in the UK in 1999 on our own record label, then re-released in the UK by Warner in 2000 and in the US in 2000 — that was the year it broke around the world. Clune my old drummer wants to get together and do something, so 2020 would seem like the year, it’d be rude not to do something.”
Gray is currently going through the White Ladder vaults for unreleased material.
“The archive is quite a moving experience, it’s quite odd to listen to us finding our sound. I can state with great certainty there’s at least 10 extra tracks and at least a dozen different versions of the songs everyone knows. There’s a lot of material. It was a real life fairytale that record. It was incredible.”
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