David Gray: “We are probably at the end of the whole (singer-songwriter) cycle”

David Gray can remember the first time a singer-songwriter affected him. “I must have been 12. I had gone on a road trip with my dad, and the only tape in the car was Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, so we listened to it over and over. I was spellbound by the sound of his voice spinning stories around. I loved that the music was so uncluttered. What loomed large was this mountain range of metaphors.” Gray began writing his own songs soon after.

The singer-songwriter genre is booming in the UK, where droves of young men and women clutching acoustic guitars (or sometimes seated at electric pianos) can be found delivering poetic pearls of wisdom from the darkest corners of MySpace to the top of the charts.

And it started with Gray’s White Ladder. Self-financed and released on Gray’s own label IHT in November 1998, it became a word-of-mouth success, eventually reaching No. 1 in August 2001. It went on to sell more than six million copies worldwide.

Gray is now about to release his Greatest Hits, with a new single (The World to Me) and a sold-out national tour kicking off next week. But when he made his first album in 1993, it was a different story.

“I really didn’t have a hope in hell,” he says. “My manager suggested I get a Mohican. He was thinking, ‘How on earth are we going to draw attention to this?’ But through some strange unfolding, everything worked out.”

Since White Ladder’s success, the musical landscape has changed completely. James Blunt’s Back to Bedlam (2004) is the biggest-selling British album of the 21st century. Damien Rice, KT Tunstall and Katie Melua are all million-sellers. From the US, Jack Johnson, Ray LaMontagne and Rufus and Martha Wainright have enjoyed massive crossover success, while a fertile underground of original alternative folk talent set the critical pace.

And all of that is just the tip of a singer-songwriting iceberg. Entry-level standard is high. For a new band to make an initial impact, it is enough for them to have an attitude and be roughly able to play in time and in tune. But singer-songwriters tend to be able to play and sing superbly and have something interesting to say. And record companies are snapping up these young tyros, so that it is now one of the most over-subscribed genres in music.

White Ladder caught something of the mood of the end of the last century, the comedown from the pomp of Britpop. Gray’s music is both intimate and broad, intensely personal yet capable of speaking to the masses.

“I don’t write behind some sort of cloak,” he says. “I’m the opposite of an enigma, I am just heart on sleeve. The mainstream is where I belong, it’s for anyone who’s got a heart.” Gray wonders if the popularity of the genre can endure. “We are probably at the end of the whole cycle. If there is such a storm, people are gonna switch off.”

It is telling that many of the most successful of the so-called new singer-songwriters don’t even write all their own songs. James Blunt, Katie Melua and Sandi Thom may be talented and attractive, yet, as soon as they were signed, they were put in with teams of established writers to polish their acts. Blunt has composed with the people behind Britney Spears’s …Baby One More Time. Increasingly, singer-songwriters are the new pop idols, photogenic youngsters styled to be soulful, moody and vulnerable.

“White Ladder had a touch of magic about it,” says Gray. “Something happened at that particular time. You can’t blame it for being a catalyst for this whole cloyingly plaintive style that seems to have taken off. There may be a deluge, but I think mine’s got something else. A grain of gravity.”

The Daily Telegraph
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