“I’ve always been a ridiculously stubborn person, I wouldn’t accept any wanky producer bollocks. It’s like someone trying to dress you. It’s like ‘go away, I know I’ll find the trousers somewhere that I’m after!’ And eventually I did. It just took a long time.”
In a way it’s only fitting that a tradition like singer songwriting, with its own momentum and it’s own heroes should produce another major artist with his own way of doing things.

In 1997, five years since he signed his first record deal at the age of 23, after three acclaimed but largely unheard albums, David Gray and the mainstream music business parted company. Although Joan Baez had called him “the greatest lyricist since Bob Dylan”, there was a consensus amongst those that knew his work that it’s finer points and rougher edges, the absolute power of his live performances-the intangible forces and nuances that make great music what it is-were somehow getting lost in the business of making it.

The divergent paths of art and commerce were much in evidence as the end of Dave’s EMI deal coincided with a period of unprecedented creativity on his part. Disillusioned by experience but also suddenly inspired, Dave built a home studio and began recording there with writing partner and co-conspirator, Clune. Pausing for a summer tour of Ireland (where Dave’s popularity had risen steadily since his first single) the two wrote and recorded the songs that became White Ladder.

“I came to a cross-roads,” says Dave, “where I had to let other people in or just wither and die. Clune reared his head and we started writing songs in a different way. It became a more light-hearted enterprise…It took us a while to get our shit together. I suppose it’s about confidence and I realised that the vocal stuff I was doing was the best I’ve ever done. I always liked home recordings, they were raw but more importantly they were done in the absolute moment when you were thinking of it, but you’re not quite aware what (+I) it (-I) is. Capturing that spark was the absolute central thing of my recording philosophy. That bit that you want that you don’t yet know about.”

It’s an old story-label hiatus sparks creative opus-it happened with The Beasties and Paul’s Boutique (the definitive Hip Hop album of the time, a world away from it’s predecessor and recorded under their own auspices between spells at Def Jam and Capitol) and it happened with White Ladder. Convinced, like most who hear it of it’s intrinsic merits and unwilling to entrust what had in effect been seven years in the making to the forces that had frustrated him before, Dave formed Iht records, and released it himself.

What takes place between then and now is nothing short of phenomenal, but then this record is a remarkable piece of work. Born into an era obsessed with the organic, the decidedly unmodified White Ladder, without advertising, promotion or marketing flowered into a true phenomena. Anybody with a soul who heard it knew that this was one from the heart. With support from London’s acclaimed music station GLR, live shows and the occasional play on national radio the word was out. In Ireland, groundswell turned to apotheosis. Within a year of White Ladder’s Iht release (autumn 98) Dave had supported Robbie Williams (an instant convert) at Slane Castle before 80,000 people, sold out his own show at The Point (8,500), and eventually top the album charts for six weeks this year, outselling everyone from Travis and Macy Gray to Westlife.

Meanwhile, the word had reached Ibiza (what is it with islands?) with an ecstatic Pete Tong reporting that Paul Hartnoll’s (Orbital) mix of Please Forgive Me (the album’s opener) was a dancefloor smash. In the UK the (presumably) undilated eyes of the makers of the movie This Years Love were already fans. Dave’s involvement produced the films title track and appeared himself in the picture as the leader of a band featuring Kathy Burke. It had all the makings of a good old-fashioned groundswell. So the legend spread, demand increased (with over 100,000 sold so far) and it was time to renew relationships with the music business, but this time on level terms.

Artists as diverse as The Chemical Brothers and Radiohead have attested to the power of Dave’s music whilst Jo Whiley made Please Forgive Me her “song of the week..” The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick pronounced, “this could be my album of the year” and Bono pronounced the record as “life changing”.

We aren’t surprised when genres like dance and dancehall deliver fully formed talents to the mainstream, sometimes that’s just the way it goes. Even Led Zeppelin had to go to America to crack the UK, and so it goes with David Gray. In an era when it seems to be six of you, all pervasive, all young and all dancing, to get on Top of The Pops, something better change, and this could be it. Something that succeeds purely on its own merits, formed in its own timeframe is unlikely to be diminished by whims. It just keeps getting stronger. So brace yourself for the slow explosion, and don’t cover your ears.