Neil McCormick Finding a new path to the waterfall
‘I didn’t want to sound like David Gray,’ the singer-songwriter tells of his new album, Mutineers
DAVID GRAY is sick of the sound of David Gray. ‘‘I’m bored with myself,’’ he confesses within moments of my arriving at his home in Hampstead, north London. ‘‘I realised, after the last tour, I’m fed up with my basic line of inquiry, my angle, my schtick, the density of my voice, all these things needed to be escaped from. I had to find another way, a new path to the waterfall.’’
While a little terrier barks and waggles around my legs, Gray leads me past an elegant drawingroom library into an enormous, modern, open-plan kitchen, one glass wall overlooking a long, geometric garden. Vivid impressionist-style oil paintings hang on the walls, many of them Gray’s own from his art-school years. ‘‘It’s instinctive, it’s where the music needs to go, otherwise the gleam, the sparkle will soon fall away,’’ he continues, trying to home in on the impulse that drives his creativity.
‘‘If you are just doing something by rote it soon becomes like the drudgery of making packed lunches for your children every morning. I was thirsty for something new, like an animal craving minerals and finding itself licking rocks. I needed something badly, and I had to try and find out what it was.’’
I first met Gray before he was famous, during the period when his home-made, self-released 1998 album White Ladder was slowly garnering the word-of-mouth reputation that would eventually carry it to seven million sales worldwide and effectively relaunch the whole sensitive singer-songwriter genre.
On that occasion I had also gone to his home to interview him, but this was a cramped, two-up, two-down terrace house opening directly on to the pavement of a street in Stoke Newington. The current house, behind imposing gates in an upmarket neighbourhood, is an obvious manifestation of success. Yet in most other respects, my visit is exactly the same.
He is a gracious host, friendly and informal, making a pot of coffee, gifting a book he has just finished reading. But what seems particularly familiar is the way he starts talking the moment I arrive and barely lets up until I leave, expressing himself vividly, poetically, enthusiastically, even physically, his body movements mimicking the chopped-up rhythms of the thoughts he is chasing down. His demeanour is of a slightly careworn seriousness lightened by bursts of explosive laughter and self-deprecating humour. ‘‘God, my wife told me to
Singer-songwriter David Gray keep this interview light! She’s going to be disappointed!’’ he guffaws at one point. ‘‘I can’t help it, it’s so deeply felt and lived . . . I’m living it now!’’ Gray’s 10th album, Mutineers, has just been released: 11 new songs, created over four years of writing and months in the studio.
‘‘I keep hearing the music business is in crisis, it’s stricken. But it has become obsessed with form over content. So you will hear music executives talking about what Beyonce or Radiohead did with their album, they didn’t give it to iTunes, they gave it to Google or whatever it is! Do I give a flying . . . what anybody did with their clever release? The patient is on the table! It’s no use messing about with the drip, a new heart is what it needs, beating in its chest.’’ Heart and art are the things he is relentlessly interested in – there is no commercial impulse, no obsession with replicating past success. ‘‘I reflect on White Ladder with nothing but positive feelings, really. I can see the richness of all the possibilities that I’ve been granted by that profound event. It was an enabler, but it was also a restricter. ‘‘It was a big thing to live through, to go from obscurity to ubiquity, but what do you want me to do about that? I’ve moved on. I can’t go back there.’’
It is four years since Gray’s last album, Foundling, and Mutineers feels like a departure from the over-sensitivity, verging on introversion, common in his chosen genre. It is a multi-layered and textured album, replete with mantra-like grooves, atmospheric sounds and tiers of imaginatively arranged vocals transforming sketchy, at times slightly formless material. There were some fraught production times with Andy Barlow of trip-hop duo Lamb. ‘‘Jesus, a lot went into the making of this record. I don’t normally go for the tortured artist bit but this had the tears, tantrums, thrown furniture. As a creative meeting of minds it was profound. Andy’s brief was to take me out of my comfort zone and not allow me to make the same record I’d made before. There was an element of mutiny throughout: I was a mutineer on my own ship! And no one should be like that for too long!’’ Long before recording had begun, Gray was challenging himself by changing his writing approach. He usually composes music, letting the melody, harmony, rhythm and structure suggest lyrical ideas, but this time he reversed the process. ‘‘I began to reach blind into the void. It’s wonderful to be working with no idea of quality or importance: There’s a giant liberation there, because there was no preciousness. You want to rid yourself of the human taint, to become sort of angelic and free, that’s writing in its purest sense, total liberation, being without a body, just being of music. As soon as you begin to clamp it down and stamp the initials DG on it, the preciousness of ownership becomes dangerously restrictive. There’s a moment before that happens and I was trying to work ahead of that curve both in the writing and recording. Which did my head in.’’
Birds feature in the lyrics of several songs, As the Crow Flies, Birds of the High Arctic and Gulls. Gray confesses to being a bit of an amateur birdwatcher. ‘‘I don’t go online: ‘Jesus, there’s a bluethroat in Walberswick, I’m off!’ I only look at the ones that cross my path.’’ But he will be taking his binoculars on tour. ‘‘Birds are very visible, very beautiful, they sing, they are of the air, they are something to contemplate, they have beguiled me ever since I was a child.’’ Gray’s description of windswept album closer Gulls serves as a description of his approach to art.
‘‘There’s a yearning for removal from earthly stuff, you are in music, and gone. That’s how it feels to me, music is the land of the gulls, and the wind that blows through it is nobody’s, you can’t take ownership of it, it’s just there, you have to surrender to it.’’ After all the struggles of writing and recording Mutineers, he had an epiphany when he played the album back, in full, alone in his home studio.
‘‘I just got lost in it, I lived every second of every song, and I started shouting, ‘Over all things, joy!’ It was something I knew in my heart all along but wasn’t courageous enough to deal with. You can slave away at the coalface with a sort of meaningful grimace, working hard, proving your worth, but it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s the joy of the music, and the joyousness it provides you as the vessel for it, that’s the thing that conquers everything. And the only way I’ll ever win any of my battles is through that.’’
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