No Longer Lost in Babylon

New Year’s Eve provided British singer-songwriter David Gray with the latest in a succession of firsts: the first time he had been recognized while wearing a false beard.

On holiday alone together in the small west-country town of Dartmouth on Dec. 31, he and his wife, Olivia, followed local tradition by donning fancy dress. Gray further disguised himself with some Santa-style facial fungus.

Then they gate-crashed the last venue where fans of his hit album, “White Ladder,” might be expected to hang out: the Conservative Club. But at a quarter to midnight, a well-refreshed reveler confronted Gray and said, “You’re that ‘Babylon’ bloke.”

After 10 years of abject failure, featuring three flop albums, it was one more sign--along with rubbing shoulders with Gwyneth Paltrow on “Saturday Night Live” or with Prince Charles at a U.K. charity show--that his world will never be the same again.

This latest album has finally laid to rest the excessive influence of Gray’s classic musical heroes--Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen--to deliver the personal touch of his intense intimacy: lyrics that express emotions directly rather than striving for “poetic” effect, a warm if melancholic voice replacing his former unwonted aggression, and light, unobtrusive grooves culled from dance music to ease aside his earlier tendency to folk-rock stodginess.

And so this ex-loser’s current career conundrum is that America likes him too much. “White Ladder” was completed and self-released in late 1998 on a shoestring, in Ireland then the U.K. However, when it was taken up by the tiny ATO label--in part through the auspices of label co-owner Dave Matthews, with whom Gray toured in the mid-’90s--and released in the U.S. last March, the subsequent slow-building platinum sales kept the promotional cycle rolling.

Suddenly he finds success in conflict with the demands of pent-up creative energy. “My heart is full to bursting,” he blurts. “It’s a ‘madness.’ ”

He can’t sleep for the mental hubbub of ideas and emotions unalchemized into music. But the calm he needs for writing is not available. Instead, he was flying out to play on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” with a six-week U.S. tour (including a Universal Amphitheatre date May 18) due to begin in April and a host of other commitments along the way.

There again, he should worry. Four years ago, he was feeling so low he’d have taken a weekend break in the Slough of Despond for light relief. The tiny, freezing south London studio he co-owns with longtime manager Rob Holden seems an oddly appropriate location for recollecting those depressing times. It’s even on the wrong side of the railway tracks that run past the building.

Gray makes mugs of hot tea and bangs out a few chords on an electric piano by way of overture, then hunkers down into an armchair and his sheepskin coat, snuffling with a heavy cold. Even so, he exudes restless energy, a powerful and articulate urge to communicate whatever the medium, to get more people in touch with his music after being ignored for so long. Game to answer any question without evident evasion, he is also full of laughter, chiefly at his own follies and misfortunes. But this is a man at work every moment.

When his 1996 album “Sell Sell Sell” just didn’t sell, his record company, EMI America, dropped him. So did his publisher, Warner-Chappell. Distressed, he broke up with Holden too. “I said to Rob, ‘I need to work out for myself what am I doing, why am I doing it and do I want to do it.’ ”

Lurking behind the philosophical inquiries, he admits, was a more brutal one: “Am I just crap? I was hurt by all that . . . indifference.”

For a while, utterly miserable, he let himself go. Although Gray is not a directly “confessional” songwriter, certain phrases from “White Ladder” evoke the story: “Can’t tell the bottle from the mountain top” (“We’re Not Right”) . . . “I’ve been talking drunken gibberish / falling in and out the bars” (“Sail Away”).

Often, he accepts, his short-fuse temper got the better of him. “Frustration was starting to shape me. I was becoming isolated from the world--as if I was behind some pane of glass.”

But before he could regroup, he had to deal with a mid-20s crisis unrelated to his hopeless career. Out of the blue, during the “Sell Sell Sell” period, his parents separated and divorced.

For Gray, it was an emotional earthquake. He had no idea they were anything other than the apparently happy couple who shepherded him through a sweet childhood--eight years in urban Manchester and another 10 in the isolated Welsh fishing village of Solva.

When they split up, though, the foundations of every memory shifted: “All the ideas that had carried me through since my youth suddenly seemed redundant. I had to reinvent my world. Because the old idealism was jarring against this reality.”

*

Gradually, Gray began to appreciate the strength and stability already available in his adult life’s extended family. It was a close-knit group. Back in 1991, when Holden chanced upon Gray’s first demo tape, the manager was on crutches after a motorbike crash. But he was so captivated by what he heard that he stumped straight up to Liverpool, where Gray had attended art school, to meet him.

After that, Holden never wavered.

“With David, it’s like watching a bird fly,” he says. “You don’t know how it works, but it’s right. I had that feeling the first time I saw him play.”

Holden, who served his apprenticeship in the ‘80s as assistant manager to the Pet Shop Boys and boy band Bros, was already managing Paul and Phillip Hartnoll, a.k.a. the ambient-techno hit makers and remix stars Orbital.

When Gray moved to London the following year, Holden introduced him to Phillip’s wife’s sister, Olivia, and within a few months they were married--in Los Angeles, as Gray happily recalls, “at a wedding chapel on Wilshire and La Brea. I actually had a gig later that day and a radio session at KCRW. . . . Bonkers, but very rock ‘n’ roll.”

In 1996-97, Olivia stood unshakably sensible through her husband’s internal uproar. And eventually, when Gray’s head cleared, he got back together with the indefatigable Holden. Gray’s self-analysis runs: “I stopped hanging on to all that angst, that defensive stance, that insecurity. My very internal period was over. I opened myself up to other people’s ideas.”

The fourth member of the adult “family” was Craig McClune (“Clune”), the drummer and bassist Gray had worked with on “Sell Sell Sell.”

When Gray resumed songwriting, Clune became his right-hand man.

“I was so thirsty for more modern sounds,” says Gray. “Please Forgive Me,” eventually the first track on “White Ladder,” proved their “Eureka!” moment. With relish, Gray recalls, “I laid down a completely dull beat, recorded the song, played it to Clune and he said, ‘Oh brilliant, because you can do this with it.’ He put this jungle-fied drum machine beat on, mad compared to everything else I’d done. . . . We’d created something unlikely, but organic at the same time.”

Retooled and revived, he poured out potent new songs--not just “White Ladder,” but the acoustic album “Lost Songs,” recorded cheaply in October 1999, soon out in the U.K. as an “interim” release and probably to go public in the U.S. later this year. Instinctively, he hit upon words and melodies that reached out and, in due course, connected with millions.

“The torment in the songs is not autobiography. To be convincing, you have to see the world through someone else’s eyes,” he says. “You walk down the street, someone holds their hand out to you and you enter them for a second, let your imagination take you to where they are.

“If you did that constantly, it would break your heart, but it’s about coming into contact with what’s real in other people’s lives, your parents, your friends, people you don’t even know in situations you encounter by chance. . . . You make a leap and you write a song.”

From there, all it took was total commitment.

*

To record “White Ladder” and, initially, manufacture 6,000 copies, Gray and Holden founded IHT Records (that’s “hit” messed up in honor of their previous track record). The manager put in all the spare cash he had, the artist remortgaged his home and threw in the morsels of profit from some gigs and work on a low-budget British movie, “This Year’s Love.”

But the release, in November 1998, heralded a slow-burn phenomenon. In Ireland, where Gray’s constant touring had won a following, it did 100,000 in a year. In the U.K., early in 2000, the Eastwest wing of Warner Bros. licensed “White Ladder” for the world, apart from Ireland and North America. Holden told the label: No hype, let word of mouth do the work.

The major label duly restrained itself and the album’s quiet magic did the trick. Finally launched on national radio by the tune “Babylon” and a version of “Please Forgive Me” remixed by Gray’s brother-in-law, Phillip Hartnoll, “White Ladder” began its ascent toward the million mark in the U.K.

Reviewers who had missed the original release suddenly chimed in, 18 months after the event, lauding Gray’s “emotional honesty” (Sunday Times) and “delicately crafted, beautifully sung pop rock” (Heat).

A similar approach brought a similar outcome in the States, where Gray is ATO’s first and so far only signing. “There’s no smoke and mirrors here,” asserts label co-founder Michael McDonald. While Gray is inclined to regard his earlier U.S. tours on the under card to Dave Matthews, Maria McKee, the late Kirsty MacColl and others as fruitless endeavors, McDonald argues that they did have a crucial impact: “Those who were interested were so passionate that it took only 5,000 of them to start spreading the word.”

So, apart from the creativity/scheduling contretemps, David Gray is sitting pretty at age 32 and, when he thinks about it, is rather looking forward to his 11th U.S. tour. “Yeah, it’s a bit of a stonker,” he says with a grin, employing a term for “strong,” as in drink. ‘We’re playing some fantastic venues: Radio City Music Hall in New York, Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, the Warfield in San Francisco.

“In America, they don’t like these poncy English bands who come over all full of it, do a couple of gigs on the West Coast and in New York, then [head] off back home and think they’ve cracked it. They like a good song, some decent lyrics, and if you can do it live, you’re for real and they’ll take you on board. Touring America is like joining the Marines; they want to see you get down and dirty.”