Why David Gray has given in to nostalgia with White Ladder tour
David Gray has spent the past two decades trying to wean his audience away from lazy greatest hits shows. So why is he now embracing the nostalgia with a White Ladder 20th anniversary tour?
Confidential
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David Gray isn’t one to look backwards.
Yet the British singer/songwriter is about to embark on a tour playing his album White Ladder in full, to mark the 20th anniversary of the record’s breakthrough year.
This from the man who’s spent the past two decades trying to wean his audience away from expecting lazy greatest hits shows by always showcasing new material and reinventing his biggest tunes live.
“It is about nostalgia, there’s no getting away from it,” Gray admits.
“I don’t know what I’m getting into as far as making a rod for my own back by gratifying the audience on such a grand scale. People are getting sick, we’re all getting older, friends die and you think ‘Yeah OK if we’re going to do this maybe we should do it now’.
“Celebrating White Ladder is more than celebrating the music, it’s celebrating the story of something unlikely that happened, a real-life fairy tale. We came from nowhere. We weren’t sanctioned, we weren’t a corporate creation, we weren’t given the gatekeeper’s blessing – ‘Yes, come in, you’re going to be big’ – we just did it ourselves. It was a word of mouth thing that became an unstoppable force. The record had this energy. It’s this underdog story as well as the music.”
The story of White Ladder is indeed fascinating. He released his first album, A Century Ends, in 1993, to little attention – trying to get folk heard in the era of Britpop. A year later the follow up Flesh also came and went, but introduced him to drummer Craig McClune (aka Clune), who’d go on to become pivotal in the White Ladder story.
Dropped by his record label Virgin, Gray moved to EMI for 1996’s Sell Sell Sell – the title sadly wasn’t prophetic and he found himself dropped from a second label.
In 1997, a broke Gray borrowed some money from friends to make White Ladder in the bedroom of his small London apartment – traffic noises and his neighbour’s vacuum could be heard in some of the demos.
Clune and producer Iestyn Polson joined Gray in experimenting with a mixing desk he’d borrowed from brother in law Phil Hartnoll from dance duo Orbital, who’d also recommended a drum machine to use.
“We had hardly any equipment or tools, so we had to be really creative,” Gray says. “We knew what we wanted – this hybrid singer/songwriter album with a twist, a little bit of cheeky, earthy London electronica worked in. But how to do that without it sounding clamped on? We found a way to do that which just felt natural.”
They initially pressed 5000 copies of White Ladder in 1998 on his own IHT Records and released them in Ireland, where Gray’s music had connected most. Live shows saw the White Ladder material really connect with audiences, and soon the album hit No. 1 in Ireland.
That success saw Gray picked up by Warner, while US musician Dave Matthews signed the record for America as the first release on his ATO label. It was a slow build, fuelled by heavy touring, but by August 2001 White Ladder hit No. 1 in the UK and would make No. 35 in the US, spending an entire year on the chart. It reached No. 34 in Australia, going double platinum.
White Ladder has sold three million copies in the UK, 7 million globally, is the highest-selling album of all time in Ireland and sits at No. 26 in the UK’s list of highest-sellers of all time.
“I mean, that’s remarkable,” Gray says. “It wasn’t unusual to make a record for nothing back then, but to get that kind of mainstream success back then with an album recorded at home wasn’t that common. We’re in a world now where the means of making records at home have become so much more readily available. What happened to music and the music business, and the lack of finance that was suddenly available, the idea of doing it yourself became a thing.”
It wasn’t just the DIY aspect of White Ladder that was influential – Bonnie Raitt and the Eagles have both covered Silver Lining, a million buskers still sing Babylon, Please Forgive Me, This Year’s Love and Sail Away while Adele and Ed Sheeran have cited Gray’s songs as major inspirations.
“I know Ed is a fan, I’ve met him. He’s a charming guy, very disarmingly honest. He was very upfront. I gave him an award on his first album, since then he’s conquered the world about 50 times over. I’ve heard quotes Adele said about some of my songs, but I’ve never met her. She’s got a tremendous vocal delivery, she’s got a real authority when she sings. They’re two pretty heavyweight presences that are both on board.”
Gray says he’s lost count of the amount of White Ladder song titles and lyrics tattooed on fans he’s seen.
“I’m not sure what I think of it. I’ve had people say can you sign my arm, I’ve done a terrible job and they tell me they’re going to get it tattooed over. Please don’t! Get a picture of Moby Dick or a lizard or something. I’m not really a tattoo kind of guy. It’s not something I can relate to. But people have revealed my lyrics on their bodies in all kinds of places. I don’t know why you’d want Sail Away tattooed on your arse but there you go!”
For the 20th anniversary reissue of White Ladder Gray not only remastered the record, but went into his vaults to dig out b-sides and rarities.
“It was fascinating and I had a big smile on my face a lot of the time. On a dull technical level all the old technology we used, I can’t believe I got rid of because this moment was always going to arise and I hadn’t foreseen it. When you want to go back and listen to the master tapes, but technology has moved on so fast, so DAT tapes and all the old formats get corrupted, that was scary. I found some fantastic things that were unusable because the tapes had not weathered well.
“I was on a knife edge a few times, I’d find the thing I was looking for and the tape was buggered so I couldn’t listen to it or use it. Listening to the music we made while we were making White Ladder, there were a few ideas that didn’t come to fruition, it was like being back in the room. It was quite a powerful thing to listen to them. It was wonderful to listen back to things I hadn’t heard in 20 years.”
Gray included an early version of My Oh My, then called What On Earth. “We did about 10 versions of that song, but it’s a chord sequence I’ve always been quite proud of. It’s quite deft the way it goes major to minor and moves through a few keys through the chorus, it’s a bit more Marvin Gaye than David Gray.”
The demo version of Please Forgive Me may sound familiar. “The demo version is the album version, we just changed the drums and added guitar. The finished version you heard was when I’d just written this song. It had this freshness that is hard to grab hold of.”
The only cover on White Ladder is Soft Cell’s 1982 UK hit Say Hello Wave Goodbye.
“I think what I did was something you wouldn’t have thought of, play this synth driven song on acoustic guitar, transpose it into this slightly Van Morrison esque acoustic world gave it a new life. It unlocks something in the song.”
The success of the album (and Say Hello Wave Goodbye being released as White Ladder’s fifth single) was a financial windfall for Soft Cell.
“It was a god send for them at that moment. In a beautiful irony the classic story of Soft Cell is that their biggest hit was Tainted Love and they chose to not put one of their own songs as the b-side, they did (the Supremes’) Where Did Our Love Go, and it went on to be the biggest selling single in the world in 1981/1982 and they didn’t make a single penny in publishing on that.
“To have someone else cover their song and make a few quid without having to get out of bed must have been a nice thing. I met (Soft Cell’s) Dave Ball at the time, I only met Marc Almond recently, he was so lovely about the cover, I think he might pop up and sing the song with me during this White Ladder tour.”
The White Ladder tour will see Clune rejoin Gray’s band after many years. The plan is to start with a greatest hits set, then an interval, then White Ladder in sequence with the original sounds and arrangements from the album.
“It’s going to sound like the record. In a way that sounds kind of boring, but because I haven’t done it like that for so long that’s the part I’m actually quite excited about. It’ll be better than we did it at the time, the technology will allow us to reproduce it in a more interesting way.
“It’s going to be an emotional night. I see this as an end of an era really. We’re going to celebrate it in style and then I really will be going off just doing my creative thing in no uncertain terms. That’s how I’ve proposed it to myself. It sort of makes sense at this moment. It’s a big celebrational moment, a big stepping off point but afterwards I am just going to do exactly what I want. I’m going to be doing the opposite of this for the foreseeable future!”