0.12.2 - Friday night, I'm going nowhere
Sometimes, cultural osmosis spurs us out of our comfort zone. "Everyone is talking about Chappell Roan, maybe I should check out some of her songs?", for example; however, publicity is a sword that cuts both ways, and sometimes an artist inherits a reputation which steers you away from their music. They're boring, they're corny, they're music for teen girls and bored housewives, or specifically for LGBTQ+ people, or a specific ethnic group. Steer clear. Go back to your swimming pool.
That's a hard mentality to break through, to climb your way out of. Without a doubt, the thing that has most successfully rewired my thinking on a particular artist is seeing them perform live; but if people are unwilling to challenge themselves to push a button on a music streaming service, they're unlikely to take a change on a night out seeing an artist they've been told is Not For Them. And this, as if by magic, gets us to the point I was struggling towards. Because fundamentally for me, this is the true value of the music festival. Maybe people don't approach them like I do, maybe the majority of people will sit away from the stages until its time for the one act they came to see to perform, but I doubt it. You can be there, in a space, with 30 different bands performing live, and you can build yourself a sampler platter of live performances, be open to new experiences, forge new musical connections and redefine your relationship with a musician in the space of ninety minutes.
If you had asked me how I felt about David Gray in, say, May of 2000, I would have told you he was boring, that he was incredibly popular with middle age mums in suburban houses which is why you suddenly couldn't move for copies of White Ladder in HMV. I would have told you he made boring music for boring people to play on Radio 2 while they had a cup of tea and then had a nap. As has been previously established, I was also an idiot musical elitist who had wrong opinions about everything. But an unforeseen circumstance and a chance exposure on a Sunday morning changed my opinion on the spot.
Burt Bacharach is a musical legend, one of the greatest songwriters of all time. When I think about him, I think of him in the same context as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and the greats of Motown. He's a legendary pianist and a musical icon, and the chance to see him perform live, if only to say I had done it, wasn't one I was going to pass up. So when I saw his name on the schedule for Glastonbury, I made a point of keeping my schedule clear for 3pm on the Sunday to hear him play.
In the year 2000, Burt was 72 years old, and unfortunately for me, also had a broken shoulder by the time summer rolled around; an injury sustained close enough to the time of the festival that they couldn't source an easy replacement for that time slot. I was oblivious to all of this as I made my way to the Pyramid stage to see him perform, only to instead by greeted by one David Gray, who explained that Burt had injured himself playing Frisbee (I have not been able to confirm whether this was really the case) and that he was filling in last minute. I could have walked away at that point, feeling secure in my knowledge that I didn't like or enjoy David Gray's music based purely on preconceived notions of what it was. Something - curiosity, apathy, inertia, whatever it was - compelled me to stay and hear him out. And in return, what I got was not a carefully rehearsed set of performances from White Ladder; instead, David Gray, just himself and a piano and a guitar, went back to his roots busking on the streets of Liverpool and played a selection of Burt Bacharach songs, old standards, and his own songs, shot through with conversational exchanges with the audience.
It was there, in a field in Somerset where David Gray won me over with a live performance, and in turn rewired the way I thought about his music. I emerged, fifty minutes later, a subtly changed man, more open minded, more willing to form my own opinions rather than relying on the opinions of others. Shortly after I returned from Glastonbury that year, I joined the ranks of the suburban housewives, and owned my very own CD copy of White Ladder.
The last night, 25 years later, and for the only time since that fateful summer day, I saw David Gray live in concert again.
I love Sheffield City Hall as a venue; it's just the right size, small enough so that everyone feels close, big enough to have seats (oh how I love a seated concert now I am getting older and my back hurts more), baroque and elaborate, but quiet and well managed. And crucially, only 15 minutes drive into town from our front door, a true blessing on a Thursday night. I bought a David Gray Tshirt as part of my ongoing Tshirt concert tradition, and took our seats for the support act, Talia Rae, a London girl with a motown blues style which cast shades of Amy Winehouse. I would have listened to her album on Spotify if she had one, but sadly only an EP, and those don't count. She took the bold step on including a cover of Purple Rain in her set, which she sang very well, but who's going to improve on Prince? I'm far less judgemental of people including covers in their live sets, so maybe she just likes the song and likes singing it?
Conveniently, she also provides vocals on two of the tracks on David Gray's most recent album Dear Life, and off a single listen, they're the tracks which stood out to me the most. I am starting to feel a certain guilt when I pass judgment on an album after one run through, but time is tight, and this to me was absolutely fine, an enjoyable listening experience with songs I wasn't really familiar with and weren't Life In Slow Motion or White Ladder. You can cut and paste that paragraph for A New Day at Midnight and Draw The Line, both of which I was listening to for maybe the second or third time ever, having used Setlist.fm to check the concert setlist and making a point of listening to every album which was included. None of those three albums felt life changing, just an expansion of the canon of music from someone who loves to write and perform.
I included Sell, Sell, Sell in this exercise in part because 6 album covers is easier to tessellate together than five is, but also to point out how insane it is in this day and age that White Ladder would be David Gray's fourth studio album. His first two albums got some critical plaudits but little commercial success, and Sell, Sell, Sell simultaneously reflects the frustration at that truth while giving into it; moving to more radio friendly, more pop styling. This was my first encounter with David Gray, as a girl I knew put Hold On To Nothing on a mix tape for me. The fact that he was able to keep putting out music, instead of being discarded into the dustbin of history after not becoming an instant overnight sensation, feels like something that just doesn't happen any more.
No matter the number of albums he produces, however, it's without doubt that David Gray's contribution to music will be founded on the two pillars of his career, White Ladder and Life In Slow Motion. The success of the first was a puzzle. There's obviously a certain combination of the right amount of radio play, a certain catchy element, something with appeal across all demographics, which in turn leads on to another hit single, and another, until the momentum of the album avalanches down the mountainside of our collective consciousness and buries a small alpine ski village with its velocity and power. This was the trajectory of White Ladder, and its ubiquitous fame and success was why I was so resistant to listening it it - if so many people like it, it can't possibly be any good**.
It's an impossibly successful record. It went ten times platinum in the UK; when I said everyone I knew owned it, I was not messing around. Unlike the others, this is an album I've gone back to multiple times since I first bought it. It's great music to drive to, to sing along to, to feel a certain joy and innocent nostalgia to. It's a ten track album with five singles which made the top 20. It became patient zero for the James Blunt to Ed Sheeran strain of popular music.
Then his father died, his daughter was born, and he retreated from the relentess pressure the fame of White Ladder had brought to him. Five years later, he released Life In Slow Motion, which I think will always be his best album. Less of a pressure to be popular, performative, to play for the radio now his breakthrough had been achieved, its an album which blends elements of his critically praised and commercially successful songwriting into alignment. It's bittersweet and mellow without feeling maudlin, but the pop hooks are still there in the background, bringing you back again and again.
And from those two albums David Gray and his band drew the majority of their setlist last night. As is the law of live music, despite the average age of the crowd being in its middle forties I still managed to end up sat next to a couple who would not stop having their own fairly audible conversation throughout the performace, forcing me to glance angrily at them and roll my eyes multiple times. Despite that, and the audience taking a little while to warm into full voice and loosen up, the performance was excellent from start to finish - David Gray is a terrible dancer, but he doesn't let that stop him; he had fun engaging with a fan who wouldn't stop heckling him to play Be Mine, and told a touching anecdote about the death of his father which made me choke up a little. Obviously, we got the obligatory "I wrote these songs during COVID lockdown" anecdote, which I guess will start to dry up soon but are still the final symptom of a terrible global pandemic. But he's still, twenty five years later, a performer with the ability to take a sceptical audience and win them over, as he did me, all over again.
Nice one, Dave.
* it's a good job I go back and proofread these before I publish them, as I managed to use the word 'vast' four times in this sentence - see if you can figure out where I edited them out!
** this same inverse hipster logic is also why I didn't watch the film Trainspotting for two decades, because a some point everyone I know told me how amazing it was and I instinctively dug my heels in like a contrary bastard and refused to engage with it at all.
