David Gray on rediscovering Babylon and embracing his legacy for a new Australian tour

Ahead of another trip to Australia, multi-million-selling UK singer-songwriter David Gray reveals how he learned to embrace his past and love his biggest hits again.

There was a time when UK singer-songwriter David Gray played his beloved signature song Babylon so many times that he couldn’t even recognise it any more.

At the peak of his fame for his breakthrough 1998 album White Ladder, which become a global sensation after its international release in 2000 and went on to sell 7 million copies, he estimates he played the earworm love song at least 20 times a week – at gigs, sound checks and radio stations – for a period of about 18 months.

“It was total overkill,” Gray says over Zoom call from London, where he is taking a breather from a world tour that will bring him to Australia in November.

“I couldn’t hear the song anymore. I didn’t really know what the feeling of the song was. I lost contact with it. It was like seeing too much of someone and you can’t tell who they are anymore. It took years and years and years before that feeling recovered.”

Gray had similarly conflicted feelings about the whole White Ladder album – he knew it had given him a career after his first three albums barely made a ripple, but its runaway success also left him feeling “boxed in” and wanting to move on to something new.

“It felt rude to be too negative about doing all that stuff when the world had gifted me this remarkable thing,” he says.

English singer-songwriter David Gray is touring Australia in November.

“But I had to move on and the only thing that made a difference really was just time and keeping going and keeping doing it and really getting back into making music and pushing and pushing myself, my writing, my ideas further on, further on, further on until suddenly I got to a point where I realised I didn’t feel like I had a point to prove.”

Twenty-five years, nine albums and another five million album sales later, White Ladder remains far and away Gray’s biggest hit, but he’s now come full circle on the audience favourite. His 20th anniversary tour for the album – postponed for a couple of years due to Covid – sold out arenas around Australia in 2022 and he looks back on the trip as “the right thing, at the right time”.

“After all that crazy Covid lockdown, it was a real celebration and I set out to do nothing but just play the biggest songs and really push the audience along,” he says. “And surprise, surprise, it worked.”

“It was just perfect timing to be playing that record, which has such an open-hearted and celebratory feeling to it and at that particular time the shows had spice to them. It was really remarkable.”

He’s even found the joy in Babylon again, and is sometimes overtaken again by emotion as he’s immediately transported back to milestone moments such as recording it, the first time he heard it on the radio and performing to 50,000 fans in Ireland, where White Ladder remains the biggest selling album ever.

“I played the song a couple of weeks ago and I actually got very emotional during it because I’m making myself a bit more available,” he says. “I’m in a good place and I’m allowing that stuff to come in. But you can’t direct emotion. It either happens or it doesn’t. There was an emotion there. That’s what the song sprang from and I can now get to the point where it actually caught in my throat.”

English singer-songwriter David Gray and his crack live band.

Revisiting the simplicity of some of those White Ladder songs while performing them over and over and feeling the ecstatic energy of the crowd also fed into the creation of Gray’s most recent album, Dear Life, which was released last year. He says that the new songs were “born standing up” to the point that even before taking them on the road he could envisage them neatly slotting in with the greatest hits of his catalogue.

Fittingly, he’s called the new tour Past & Present, proudly embracing as it does his entire career – from the monster hits, to new tracks, to rarely visited deep cuts from early albums and even a smattering of covers thrown in. In the 22 shows he’s played in Northern America so far, he’s unveiled 66 songs and says he wants no two shows to be exactly the same when he arrives back in Australia to play capital city theatres around the country.

“It’s not just the big songs, but also we’ll take a deep dive into parts of particularly those early records, anything from A Century Ends through to Life In Slow Motion. Lost Songs, New Day At Midnight, we go deep into those records,” he says. “It changes night by night. There’s also a whole swath of cover versions that crop up. So the idea was that it’s quite a rich tapestry.

“It’s worked really beautifully. The big result is that the new songs have fitted in amazingly well and had a fantastic response.”

Gray says that in his many visits over the years, he’s noticed “a passion and an immediacy to the Australian crowds” that feels relatable and reminds him of the audiences in his homeland. But he also says that the audience response can be “spiced up by the fact that it isn’t so assumed that you’re going to make that long journey every time”.

Singer David Gray at the height of his White Ladder fame in 2000.

Indeed, as a passionate environmentalist, Gray now thinks carefully about his long-haul tours and the effect his carbon footprint is having on the planet. He’d like to see venues wherever he plays around the world encouraging people to use public transport or ride sharing – or even provide their own when it’s not available – and says he’s frustrated by the lack of action on an issue he has been pushing for years.

“I said this six years ago as we were building up for the White Ladder thing and I came back for this tour and not a damn thing had changed,” he says. “In fact, no one even raised the subject. It’s a passion because I think if anyone wants to persuade themselves that there’s something happening on the environmental front, I’d ask them to think again because it’s just window dressing as far as I can tell.”

Gray knows he is part of the problem and while he recognises he might not be able to completely offset the environmental effects of his coming dates in the UK and Europe, he can at least mitigate the impact by giving a share of profits to environmental causes. After becoming an ambassador for the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in England last year, he’s encouraging his audiences to donate to the charity to counteract the impact of attending his shows.

British singer David Gray says seeing him in the flesh is very different to listening to his albums. Picture: Frank Hoensch/Redferns

“They have this wetlands creation scheme, which is very ambitious, and wetlands sequester carbon and they’re amazing for wildlife, mitigating flood risks and all kinds of things as well,” he says. “They’re also local, relatable, actual places and I’d like to have my for tour the option for people to recognise their negative action – let’s say they drive 100 miles to see the show and then home again – by making a small donation.

“That’s my rather simplistic and a straightforward approach to what we might do. I’m crazy about nature and I don’t like the separation of climate and nature. The crisis is one and the same thing.”

David Gray plays the Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide, November 7; Palais Theatre, Melbourne, November 9; State Theatre, Sydney, November 12; QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane, November 15. Tickets on sale March 20, frontiertouring.com

Originally published as David Gray on rediscovering Babylon and embracing his legacy for a new Australian tour