GIG REVIEWS

David Gray
@ The Octagon, Sheffield
16th October 2000
www.vanguard-online.co.uk

 David Gray, you imagine, doesn't really know what's hit him. "Fucking hell," he booms. "1500 people in Sheffield. The last time I was here there were 30." Then he laughs uproariously and rather inappropriately while the 1500 look on bemused. After all, a couple of months ago few of those here had even heard of him and fewer still owned copies of the two casually ignored albums he released in the nineties.

But then came 'Babylon', dark and delicious, melancholic and alcoholic, the single of the summer, a radio favourite, the people's choice. And suddenly, David Gray became public property. His third LP, White Ladder, was a more fashionable acquisition than a micro scooter and Babylon blasted from every shop and every bedroom window. On the back of it all, he's touring the big league venues, selling out two nights at The Shepherd's Bush Empire and attracting 1500 punters in Sheffield. Blimey!

David's loving it. His head is flimsily attached to his shoulders by a pogo spring and he galavants around the stage like a pilled-up nodding dog. New single 'Please Forgive Me' reaches it's conclusion and then flails out at a tangent for a frenetic, big beat, wah wah finale like it just can't stop dancing. David Gray can't - his head looks in danger of pinging off out into the crowd.

And there's the paradox. He just looks far too happy, far too clean cut, far too much like he's courteous to old ladies to be singing the songs from White Ladder. Gray produced the record himself and the honey coating he applied bestows a languid, insecure, unsettling feel on the songs as they sound on your stereo. His lyrics are surrepticious and filmically real, conjuring misty images of falling in and out of the bars in 'Sail Away' or going nowehere on a Friday night, the lights changing green to red.

But live, with that masterful production stripped away, the potency of those luscious images is diluted. You just can't imagine that the cheeky chappie on stage who's grinning from ear to ear is the haunting protagonist of White Ladder. Babylon is a singalong hit single now, not the hazy, stumbling paen to love loss it once was. And there's something just a little perverse about a pop star singing, "what we gonna do when the money runs out" to a crowd that are proof of his financial stability.

Whilst he has called on his pre-fame experiences to channel uneasy introspection, fear and self-doubt into these songs, you just can't imagine him as anything other than the grinning idiot lapping up the acclaim. "Can't tell the bottle from the mountain top," he sings, and then takes a slug of his mineral water.

There's no repressing Gray's voice though. And what a voice! Sod the trad fare comparison, Bob Dylan would have given his right arm to be able to sing like this.

Gray's vocal range and dizzying power make his voice by far his most potent instrument, and it is not until you hear it live that you can begin to appreciate just how good he is.

An irony, perhaps, that the highlight was a cover version. With the Mark Almond penned 'Say Hello, Say Goodbye,' concerns over the gulf between the man and his music were abolished. Gray's voice caressed the chorus with such feeling that - singing someone else's song - it sounded truly devastating.

Guernica