At the point I met David Gray, I had just read my hundredth "Irish David Gray Interview". All these interviews constantly going over the same territory. I wanted to ask him about his marriage and his relationships with his parents and friends. The bloody nerve of me! At the end of a long day of interviews, he answered all my questions and listening back to the tape, I'm struck by what an honest bloke David Gray really is.
Ken Sweeney.

Has this new album, White Ladder, changed things in your life?

"Things are constantly changing, so this album is going to have a big effect on the way I think about things, it’s been so successful. There’s a little bit of pressure to follow it up which I don’t think I’ve had before (laughs). So in that respect White Ladder will change the way I look at things. I’m going to have to be dead serious without being too precious about it all."

You’ve been very consistent: White Ladder is your fourth album. Have you ever gone through a writer’s block ?

"Well, I haven’t written or finished a song since September last year which is the longest I’ve ever gone without writing a song. Before that I had an unprecedented run of writing and writing. White Ladder was the fourth wave of writing, on top of writing three waves before that. . . each wave getting me towards what I wanted; each time thinking I’ve written too many songs… that I’m pushing it too far. I’d written forty-odd songs over a couple of years but since then I’ve done absolutely nothing.
"One of the reasons is that I’ve been working setting up a record-company; for practical reasons I’ve been busy. I haven’t been free to go into songwriting mode. Normally this gap in my songwriting would freak me out (laughs)….but things have kind of changed. I’m watching myself more to see how I feel. How can I put it? You have to go through some stuff, to re-stock, in order to get somewhere else. I’m pregnant with a whole new wave of stuff at the moment so I’m starting to get broody and moody. That’s how it’s working at the moment."

I know you’re married: how is that affected by being on the road, travelling or being a songwriter?

"It’s not the perfect situation….When I was touring in America, it was pretty hard, touring all the time, touring for ten weeks, coming back and going off again. It was really difficult for a while because you become kind of estranged. You don’t actually see each other. In theory, you’re married but you’re not actually seeing the other person… it gets weirder and weirder. There’s no custom built nine to five monotony."

How did you deal with record companies when you were signed ?

"I didn’t deal with them very well. I didn’t have a full picture of how everything worked and fitted together. I was innocent in that respect. I just wanted to make my record Century Ends. I was, like, let me in there. I want to sing my heart out. But now, because what I’ve been through, I have all sorts of opinions. You think ‘woh! I’ve been given all sorts of money, this is marvellous’ … but when you think about it, what was it based on? Nothing. It was a load of bullshit. "That’s all they’ve got to throw at you: loads of money. That’s all they’ve got: money, so it makes them feel better. ‘Hey’, they say, ‘here’s loads of money, let’s buy some trainers and go to an expensive bar’. That’s all they’ve got to offer you but they ain’t gonna build you a career. I’m well out of it. It works for some people; if you’re the trendy new thing, you can make it all work for you - if you’re clever - but it’s a perilous thing."

You’ve got a certain level of success now. Would you like it to turn into Global Stardom?

"Yeah! (collapses into giggles). I’ve been looking at myself to find out what the answer to that is. I’m not quite sure. Yeah, it’s going to get a lot bigger than this. Where Ireland is going like a steam-train, it’s time to get somewhere else going because you can’t tour here for very long. It’s no good doing four days, it doesn’t really satisfy you. We’ve got something really good going on; what you want is more people to inspire you to inspire them. "That’s what I want. I don’t think getting bigger is the answer but you have to find a new challenge. At the moment, getting bigger is the objective. We’ve got to get some money in to sustain the whole thing. It’s a rather fragile situation. I mean I want to take it to its natural conclusion but you never know what’s going to happen next. I might fall over, trip up, and all this might be an irrelevant conversation."

Do you have friends in your life from way back?

"I’m a bit of a funny one with friends. I haven’t really got anyone from childhood and I don’t think now I’ve got anyone from school. I think I’ve "been set on my own thing" and that might be why I haven’t kept any those early ones. "I’ve got a whole bunch of friends now in London. I think friends are very important. I think it’s something I’m started to realise a few years ago, that I was missing out on a very valuable thing in my kind of solo existence. I was married but I just try and keep it to a minimum: a wife.- a soulmate! That’s efficient friend-making (laughs). I don’t know why it is. It’s a quirk of mine that I don’t seem to be very good at keeping the friendship thing going. I tend to move on and be thinking different thoughts. I can be in a completely different place. I mean, I moved around a lot and when I got married, I fell in with a new bunch of people that my wife knew. So that was like starting all over again with a new bunch of people."

To be a singer, travelling around, outside of a normal 9-5 day job. Is that a strange thing?

"Yeah, but what isn’t strange? Life is strange. My life is weird in its own way. Being a songwriter does remove you a little bit. I think fame is real remover because if you get famous, you get hassled and you have to live in the world of the famous people who don’t seem to have that many feet on the ground, collectively. It’s just a different world."

What do you’re parents think of your success?

"I was very lucky - they were very encouraging. I’ve always been very into doing my own thing and they never said ‘you’re not going to do this’. They were delighted I wanted to do things. I cocked up all my exams at school. I got bored with things because I knew what I wanted to do. So I worked out the path of least resistance -Art School! Brilliant! A few dodgy paintings and I’ll be there: form a band and stone me ! It all sort of worked. "My parents have been tremendous. My dad has been pretty intense about it. He’s dead proud and he goes on about it and sometimes I’m like "shut up, dad!’ because he’s telling everyone what’s happening. But (grins) parents, they’re embarrassing aren’t they?!"

Tell us a story about being on the road in America?

"We had this strange experience being on tour in America. The record company weren’t giving us very much money so we had this incredibly tight budget. So instead of having hotels we decided to opt for the sleeper buses and we basically got the crappiest sleeper bus in the U.S.A.; this thing had done nearly two million miles in twenty years. Going around and around America. "The driver had been in it the whole time, a sort of Hobbit type with really long hair and we should have known there was something really funny about him. He had contact lenses and he never took them out. He just squirted stuff in them early in the morning. This guy lost his mind on the tour. He fell in love with a woman and asked us if she could come on the bus for the rest of the tour, and I said, ‘absolutely not!’. "So he decided to take matters into his own hands and faked the bus breaking down in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter. It was in a place like Hicksville. We pulled into some garage and he said, ‘there’s something wrong with my back tyre, we’ll have to pull in here’. And it was a little café with one guy behind the counter with teeth going everywhere. This guy in the bus had tampered with the electrics so all the power went off. "We were watching the video in the bus and we all had to go into the café and the moment we’d got into the café, he preceded to drive off into the distance. He took all our gear, everything…. back towards Seattle. We were left open mouthed, standing in this service station and we had to call the cops. We had a full motorway chase over a hundred miles before we caught up with him. "And I’m not even telling you half the story. We missed three gigs because of that. The police couldn’t do anything about it because it was a civil thing. That was the weirdest thing that happened."

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