Things can get weird in the Gray area

By GRAHAM REID

There's a saying in rock which newcomers might take as a warning: you have eight years to write your first album and eight months to write your second.

After a successful debut and the touring that accompanies it, "the difficult second album" can be demanded quickly by a record company.

Often it is made up of tracks which didn't make the first one and stuff knocked out on the road between gigs. While the "great debut" is not uncommon, the list of "great follow-ups" is considerably shorter.

David Gray, the modest, Manchester-born singer-songwriter whose album White Ladder has sold more than four million copies since its release in '98, was faced with "the difficult second album" - but it was his fifth.

Gray has been recording since his 1992 album A Century Ends, when Joan Baez extravagantly described him as the best lyricist since Bob Dylan.

He was signed and dropped by a couple of record companies, and in '96, when EMI waved him goodbye after his third album, Sell Sell Sell, didn't live up to its title, he focused on Ireland where he had a cult following.

White Ladder, on his own independent IHT Records, started shifting there and has now clocked up sales of 350,000 in Ireland. England and elsewhere followed Ireland's lead.

Gray was discovered by an audience who thought White Ladder was his debut, because his previous three albums sank without a trace. The misconception was reinforced when he had a Grammy nomination for best new artist.

And so, with the expectation of a record company and an audience which had taken him to heart, he was faced with "the difficult second album" after years touring and with little time to write.

As White Ladder continued to sell, his record company released a compilation of his earlier EPs and a collection of unreleased tracks, Lost Songs, as stop-gaps to satisfy the demand. But Gray admits he knew he would eventually have to write his "difficult fifth album."

That album, A New Day at Midnight, was released this month to uniformly excellent reviews and debuted at No 1 on the UK charts.

"It was actually when I stopped recording and the album was finished when I really felt the pressure," says Gray from a London hotel room after appearing on Top of the Pops.

"I thought, 'Jesus, the weight of expectation, I've never had that before'. The last one came in under the radar and people took it to their hearts without being told to, but this is quite different because everyone is looking and there's severe media scrutiny.

"We're all thinking, 'God, remember what happened last time? Is it going to be like that again?' There's a lot of intense over-analysis because there's nothing else to do.

"Once we start playing the gigs we'll relax because we're just doing what we do."

When he was considering writing for the new album he imagined he'd get off the road and "write hits", he laughs.

"I never write thinking of the radio, but the last album happened to have a load of songs which sounded really right for radio and consequently got a lot of play.

"I hope people play this record as much. It has got some things which are considered to be singles, but I gravitate towards the moody and personal songs like Freedom and The Other Side."

A New Day at Midnight is an intensely personal album, many of the songs prompted by an unexpected event he had to deal with.

"Because of what happened I needed to write songs and that in the end was what shaped this album.

"It wasn't what I imagined I was going to write when I was on the road doing White Ladder. But losing my dad had a much bigger effect on me than the success, so I was dealing with that and that's where the songs headed.

"It solved a problem in a sense that it was music I urgently needed to make. I certainly wasn't sitting there wondering what to write."

Scattered throughout A New Day at Midnight are ruminations on mortality and loss, and the search for love. Gray notes that some of the songs written closer to White Ladder are more story-based, like that album. Those written since his father's death tend to be more poetic.

"When I got down the emotion of what was inside me I dealt with it more in imagery because it doesn't have to be nailed down. It's not a story, just a mood hung with images and they form their own kind of sense.

"It's a much cooler game now when I write. It used to be just an outpouring of passion and much more raw earlier in my career, but I've learned to pull out now during the writing process.

"I didn't set out to write directly about my dad dying, but as the songs developed the images formed and were a mirror of what was inside me."

Gray also says he was glad to be off the road and writing, getting back to what he calls "my life" and doing ordinary things like going to the shops.

"When you're on tour you don't do anything. Washing up? What's that? You just go to the minibar or out to dinner. But when I was at home it was normal again.

"Occasionally you get people coming up to you in the grocer's but generally they're very nice.

"It was a bit weird when I went to a pub and everyone would turn around and just clock you, or you'd be at a party and everybody knew who you were, which is bizarre. You're getting off your tree and there's all these people looking at you.

"And there's people who want to know you because the fame thing makes people's heads go weird."

Gray says he was lucky that the success of the album was spread over three years. The fact that he was in his early 30s, married, and had been around a few years also tempered any desire to let things go to his head.

While admitting it was a rollercoaster, the album took off incrementally after Ireland and it was 18 months before things started happening in England.

"That's when things really went mega. I remember lots and lots of parties because there was always something exciting happening, like your first journey in a private plane, or the first time on Letterman, or a gold record in England, or a platinum record in America.

"It just got daft and you just sort of surrender to it, but it wasn't a mindwarp thing, I felt in control over it."

And never let it go to your head and take advantage of it?

The quiet, plain-speaking Gray laughs for a very long time.

"Well, you've always got to watch what you're doing, especially when you're blind drunk."

* A New Day at Midnight is out now.