INTRODUCTION

Back in August, 1999, I attended the weird and totally wonderful 10-day Liss Ard Music Festival in Ireland. It’s where I was introduced to great young talent such as Gemma Hayes and Japan’s Cornelius. I bagged fourteen exclusive interviews as no British press bothered to cover it, and while the glossies were desperate to grab major acts like, I found myself chatting away at the breakfast table with the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Will Oldham, the Frames and many others. As you can imagine, it was music hack heaven! I also met many fervent Irish music fans who, without exception, raved over a young Brit artist called David Gray. Gray had appeared at the previous Liss Ard Festival and eventually made a huge impact when promoted by a visionary and hugely popular Irish radio DJ.

Before I departed the festival, I acquired a live performance CD of the previous year’s event which included two fabulous tracks by Gray. As soon as I got back to the UK, I tried to make contact and eventually received a review copy of his new album, WHITE LADDER. It was wonderful (Gray recorded it in his bedroom) and it became one of my best albums of 1999. But nobody else was talking about it! Over the next few months I acquired his largely deleted back-catalogue through Ebay including a quite rare 12″ single. But still nobody was talking about him. The new Millennium came and went and, at last, the media were awakened from their deep slumber by The Sunday Times naming David Gray’s WHITE LADDER as their album of the week (a year after its original release date!). BBC Radio 1 picked up on it and played one of the tracks from the album. The rest is history.

It had taken forever for the album to break through (rather like another artist I interviewed in mid-1999 following a review of another great album; a guy with the rather silly name of Moby…). It went on to become a rare UK global success and Gray was catapulted into the big time; the album stayed in the UK album charts forever. This interview was the first Gray gave in relation to his latest album release, A NEW DAY AT MIDNIGHT.

When did you start work on the new album?

WHITE LADDER just kept on rolling so I had made an attempt to start recording it in the beginning of 2001 - I think there was a small window of time. We built our little studio and we wanted to get in and start doing something. Then things happened and then we were back on the road, then went back in in September and started then. But it didn’t really get underway until January, February this year (2002). The flow of it started properly this year. I was just a bit worn out after everything that had happened when I tried to start it in the Autumn, so I took a little bit of time to recharge my batteries.

Had you been stockpiling songs?

There were quite a lot of songs lying around that I’d had even from the WHITE LADDER period that I had then finished. There were several things I had written probably earlier on in the WHITE LADDER saga. Once it really started I didn’t write very much at all, it was so draining, the promo side of it. I didn’t have any creative energy at all. But I had songs lying around and when we got into the studio, we really had a good try but most of them didn’t make it. I thought that most of them were important songs. Everyone had heard them on the road where we tried them out; we jammed them on the stage a bit. We got a good reaction but when it came down to it they’d missed their moment. When you do things live it’s like you use up the magic that you should capture in the studio. To do something live before you’ve recorded it - that’s a theory that I’ve been hesitant to apply but I’m definately thinking that it’s true now. There’s one song called All The Love which we used to finish the set with and that had a sort of ludicrous end-to-end when we got a bit carried away. I’m sure if I had nailed that one when we’d written it, it would have been on the album. But I didn’t and it’s not. I just couldn’t recapture the charm of it; I’d worn the song too many times and had too many thoughts about it, I think. I always prefer stuff that happens more innocently and self-consciously. I return to those words over and over again because they’re the key.

And also there was a certain amount of psychology-building on this record, and I think when I got into the studio with the songs I’d already had, I was a little uncomfortable about them because they sounded very commercial. That sounds a bit rediculous. I felt like so much had happened to me that I wanted to start all over again, because I knew that if I got on a wave of songwriting, then it would be fresh and free of all that; there wouldn’t be any psychology cos I wouldn’t know what I thought of it myself. So that’s why it started in earnest in January/February because by that point I’d written some new songs. I started from there, and then other songs came out of other songs; lots of songs were written that didn’t make it on the record and haven’t made it all.

Was there a particular song that kick-started this new wave of songwriting?

There is a key song that came in September, Freedom. I think it was when that one came and we recorded it in demo form, I was so…excited?…. Excited isn’t the right word. It hit me hard. It was a very personal statement which seemed to embody an awful lot of what I’d been through. Not so much the success because I’m referring to my private life, things that affected me very deeply. I wrote this song and it was at that point that I think that all the other stuff I had lying around became less relevant. And I thought, ‘hang on, if I can I can get some more of these done…‘ This is a different kind of record entirely but I was more excited about that idea; more so that with some kind of follow-up record which would have sounded a bit like WHITE LADDER did.