No wonder David Gray is good - Waits and Dylan were his mentors

By definition, a mainstream is wide, steadily flowing and deepest in the middle. And that's exactly what you see when you stand outside a David Gray gig for 15 minutes or so, as they enter and then leave, profoundly satisfied at either end. This mainstream is made from arm-linked couples of a certain age, cargo-pant wearers and goatee sprouters, some silver surfers dragging along red-eyed student grandchildren, a wide demographic sea, without obvious shores. Security staff have turned out their pockets for weapons and bootleg recording equipment; the table shows no Stanley knives, but a profusion of mountaineering gadgets and mini-disc players. So it's Gray for the mainstream, the mainstream for Gray, the greyness of the mainstream... if you really wanted critically to dump on a gravelly-voiced singer-songwriter, playing to an mildly affluent audience yearning for even milder consolations, you could stop right there. But that's what rock pundits usually feel they must do to the mainstream. They are usually frightened by its size, its implacable movements, its deep undercurrents, the way that the mood of a mass of people can rip their critiques to shreds. Even more challenging when, with an artist like Gray, the energies of the mainstream are being invoked with skill, passion and authenticity. What happens when you make a record that talks to people right where their complex, juggled, bitter-sweet modern lives actually are? Well, this happens. A handy guy in white plimsolls, overwashed denims and a guitar comes on stage, bashfully says hello and then begins singing about 'What we gonna do when the money runs out... how we gonna find the eyes to see a brighter day?' Connection, big-time. That's the first rock of meaning that Gray drops in tonight's waters and it keeps rippling to the end. All this is not by musical chance - Gray has woven himself from some of the finer threads of the last 30 years. If you credit his biography, the singing voice, a flexible, rasping, froggy, room-filling rumble, has been conditioned by his dad playing Bob Dylan in the family car; by his youth being wasted to Van Morrison; by his wife being wooed to Tom Waits; by his tour bus being soothed by Carole King. The crossover twist that marks the hit records - what if Van the Man could sing to drum'n'bass? What would Dylan sound like, trancing out in Ibiza? - is faithfully reproduced here. 'Please Forgive Me' and 'Babylon' are perfectly poised between programming and performance, with Gray's lippy collaborator Clune particularly stunning on brush-drums. Yet when Gray plays a song from one of his lost-in-America years - 'Everytime', from 1996's Sell Sell Sell - you can see what he had to leave behind to enter the sensibilities of this middle-youth market, stranded somewhere between Ikea and Homelands. And the baggage was a kind of subterranean, very homesick bluesiness. Rocking out for the only time this night, Gray spits out more ornate metaphors in one song ('Your spine a white ladder, your eyes singing sadder... nightingales calling, shooting stars falling...') than in the rest of the new album put together. As it was recorded in LA, for an American record company which wasn't giving a cold taco at the time, you can understand the overreaching. So the much-recounted tales of how White Ladder was conceived and recorded in the domestic bedroom, trucks outside rumbling on to the master tape, with no major deal and the money running out, make perfect sense. If Gray is trading in simplicities at the moment, it's because they're the right simplicities, tempered by experience. Find me a double-earning household in Britain where Gray's music doesn't resonate - two adults doing table-top therapy amid the chardonnay, soggy joints and domestic bills - and I'll give you my winning Lottery ticket.

Pat Kane - Sunday December 17, 2000 - The Observer