Galway Advertiser 2006/2006_06_08/GA_0806_E1_059.pdf 

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Th W e e ek
David Gray on a life of artistic evolution
BY KERNAN ANDREWS AVID GRAY isn't a man who likes to be stuck in the same place too long. "I think my strongest attachment is to Wales but I live in London now," he tells me. "I'm a London boy for the foreseeable future". Change has not only marked his living arrangements, it marks and continues to mark his music as well. When David Gray last played Galway he was a struggling singersongwriter, ignored by all but a loyal band of Irish fans. When he returns on Wednesday July 19 to play the Big Top at the Galway Arts Festival 2006, it is as one of the most successful singer-songwriters of the day. Fortunes have changed for David since the early 1990s, as they have, by a strange parallel, for the country that first took him to heart. "Since I first starting coming here in `93/94 it's been remarkable to witness the changes," David tells me over the phone during our Wednesday morning conversation. "When I came first I found Ireland `quaint'. That's what I liked about it, it was sort of `old fashioned' but it's moved on leaps and bounds. For me it will always be special. There's a new confidence and new social problems with the money and the influx of new people. The whole place has a different feel." By 1999, David had released A Century Ends (1993), Flesh (1994), and Sell, Sell, Sell (1996), and was about to release a fourth album. He did not know it then, but it would change everything. White Ladder struck a deep chord with Irish record buyers, becoming the biggest

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

Galway Advertiser
June 8 2006

Page 59

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selling album in this country to date. Over the next two years it would finally provide David with his British and American breakthrough. He is still stunned by the sheer phenomenon that is White Ladder. "The success of White Ladder was on such a scale that it did my head in!" he laughs. "I didn't know how to play it. I used to swagger around, my head in the air. I didn't know what my state should be. I'm more relaxed about it now. I've taken time to get my head around what happened. It's very easy to be inward looking but when people took to my music I look forward to playing it for them." White Ladder not only marked a change of fortune it also completed an important phase in David's artistic evolution. A Century Ends was characterised by social concerns, morbidity, and a troubadour feel. By White Ladder his music had become more pop and romantic. "When I began I was a wide eyed young man," he says. "There was an idealistic side to my make up which should have got stripped away by successive record deals...but I think I got to a point where I abandoned the political lyrics as I didn't feel it was successful. So if politics features it would have to be on a more intimate scale, where it would feed into the personal, as it does in life, so I began to focus on the intimate. White Ladder is the open hearted sound of me healing myself of the negativity that had begun to dominate my life which had stalled, in fact was going backwards, for the previous five to six years. White Ladder was the sound of a release." That more personal side was

developed to the full on 2002's magnificent A New Day At Midnight but by then David felt he had taken that as far as it could go. It was time for his next evolution and last year's Life In Slow Motion saw him develop different lyrical means of expression. As David reveals, the search for new ways of writing is a constant goal and challenge. "My lyrics have changed again," he says. "There are certain poets who throw images at you. It's like a snowstorm of imagery - people like Pablo Neruda - whirling images, and I'm intoxicated by that and by the storytelling of people like Dylan. As I have moved along I have used less adjectives and gone for a more pared down approach. I turned more to abstraction. I have tended to stay away from the story telling side of it. If there is a story to be told I will use it but it's not what I am looking for. When I sit down and write I'll follow where the lyric is going to go. "After this tour I will be sitting down to write new songs and I have no idea what they will be about. You go in blind, not knowing if anything is going to happen - I might never write a decent song again! As you go on I guess you get more relaxed and objective and you use your experience. You lose a little bit of that fire and gain wisdom and approach songwriting more scientifically and self aware but it's a mystical process. You open yourself to something invisible when you write a song." Before that though, there is this current tour, which takes in the Galway Arts Festival. Although David prefers to play more intimate venues such as theatres, he admits enjoying the atmosphere and energy

David Gray.

of a huge audiences. "Doing bigger shows and the crowd gets going, you can feel this immense wave of energy," he says. " They give an energy back and it can be a whale of a time." When I interview Rodrigo y Gabriela recently, they told me David is very shy and quiet. David admits this but he's also one of those people who is introverted anywhere except the stage - it all has to do with standing in for a wizard when he was a small boy. "I was very shy as a little boy," he says. "I lead a reasonably normal existence despite of my shyness. I

conquered it in loads of ways. If the mood takes me I can be as mad as anyone. I remember the first time I was on stage. It was at a play in primary school. I had to step into the breach when the guy playing the main part - a wizard - fell ill. I had to stand in by doing improvised lines and dance routines. The audience loved it! I loved being on the stage and feeling not at all shy and that's the way I am. I'm not an extrovert on stage but I love being up there in that spotlight." Tickets for David Gray are available through Ticketmaster (www.ticketmaster.ie).

Morwax remembers Reagan's visit to Galway
BY CHARLIE MCBRIDE EADAR DE Burca and Morwax are in the Town Hall next week with deBurca's new play How the West Was Won, which recreates Ronald Reagan's momentous, and controversial, visit to Galway in 1984. On a sunny Monday afternoon De Burca met up to discuss his play, beginning with his own recollections of the occasion: "I actually remember very little to be honest. I was only 10. I was standing down at the hospital and I just remember seeing Reagan's black limo turning into the college, that's all I saw of him - then again that's all most people saw of him. In putting the show together, I interviewed people like the former bishop Eamon Casey,

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Dep Michael D Higgins, Joe McMahon, Owen and Eva Bourke - who were involved in the protests against the visit. The show is 80 per cent factual, and there's one fictional storyline running through it as well." What kind of reminiscences did De Burca's interviewees provide? "Eamon Casey was very good," de Burca declares, "telling me his own personal thoughts such as when he refused to attend the conferring ceremony for Reagan's honorary degree and because he was on the college board at the time there was a lot of upset about that. "Michael D was telling me a lot of people wouldn't talk to him afterwards or would insult him because they felt he was damaging the Irish tourist industry or whatever. Then there was the story about the protestors who were taking

Ronald Reagan.

this big replica Statue of Liberty down Nuns Island but they couldn't get it under the

telegraph wires." What sort of performance style has De Burca adopted for

the show? "It's done in style of shows like Stones In His Pockets, Alone It Stands, or John Godber's Bouncers. There are a lot of short snappy scenes. There's just four actors who play about 60 parts. The actors are Aimee Leavey, Kevin Neary, Brian O'Gibna, and Vincent O'Connell - they've a heavy workload but they're coping well." Do we get to know Reagan any better in the play? "Reagan is like the shark in Jaws - you don't show him at the start!" De Burca laughs. "He's been caricatured as a dummy and we haven't gone that route though we do pull the p**s out of him and show him as a guy who wasn't all he should have been. We're trying to show the situation around him, we're trying to investigate the attitudes people felt at the time both

pro and anti. We're trying to capture the mood of the 1980s as well." De Burca reveals that, as well as remembering Reagan, the show is also about remembering some of the positive asects of Eamon Casey's career. "Eamon Casey is nowadays remembered mainly for the Annie Murphy affair," he says. "We tend to forget he was chairman of Trocaire and spoke out against injustice and USbacked corrupt regimes in central America. We need to clebrate the stance taken by people like Casey and Michael D who risked the wrath of the business community to take a principled stand. They had a social conscience and did something about it." How The West Was Won runs at the Town Hall studio from Monday June 12 to Saturday 17 at 8.30pm.