FEATURE:
Second Spin
David Gray – White Ladder
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AN album that provides…
a combination of comfort, reflection and some wonderfully crafted songwriting, David Gray’s White Ladder turns twenty-five on 27th November. I think that many know it for standout tracks like Babylon, Please Forgive Me and This Year’s Love. I think that it is much more worthy than its singles. You get a greater impression of Gray as a songwriter if you listen to the while album. The fourth studio album from the British artist arrived in a year when music was pushing away from Britpop. With more experimental and Electronic sounds coming to the forefront, it was actually a nice relief and balance getting an album like White Ladder! There were other albums like out around, though few were stronger. Travis released The Man Who the year after – I think it shares some DNA with White Ladder. David Gray’s 1998 commercial smash (it went to the top of the album chart in the U.K.) is one that is often named alongside the best of the 1990s. I am going to come to a couple of reviews for this superb album. It is one I don’t think is explored as much as it should be. I did not know the background and circumstances of White Ladder. During a period where other genres and artists were more in vogue, it would have been hard for David Gray to get a foot on the ladder so to speak. In 2020, when speaking with The Guardian about making White Ladder, he and producer Iestyn Polson discussed the setting and situation of White Ladder:
“David Gray, singer-songwriter
I was a struggling folky singer-songwriter during the 90s Britpop and dance boom. By the time I got to my third album, it was a Spinal Tap-style disaster. At one gig the sign outside read: “Barbecue ribs sold out, David Gray 9pm.”
I jettisoned my manager, label, everything, to work out what I wanted. I’d never captured our live energy in the studio, so I started recording in my bedroom in Stoke Newington, London, with some basic kit: computer, sampler, keyboard. Phil Hartnoll from Orbital gave me a small mixing desk and recommended the Roland Groovebox drum machine.
I’d been going to Orbital gigs since the early 90s and wanted to try on clubbier culture and make music that expressed living at that moment. I secreted myself away with the Groovebox during a dinner party and the chords and lyrics for Please Forgive Me fell out of the sky. The hairs on my neck stood on end. That song was the starting pistol.
Clune [drummer Craig McClune] and I had been gigging as a two-piece and had a joyous musical understanding. He brought rhythmic ideas and [producer] Iestyn Polson was perfect: he was street, naughty, a bit wild, but had this bat-like ear for detail and was super-creative. Iestyn created the drum’n’bass-like effect on Please Forgive Me.
Once we had four or five tracks, we were on a roll. The title track came in a day. Then Babylon landed. The imagery is what my life was like – a young person in London, going out all the time and getting a little bit lost. The album isn’t always autobiographical, but “let go your heart, let go your head” is me speaking to myself. I was in my late 20s, had lost my youthful momentum and was looking at myself. Financially, I was a mess. I’d got married and then my parents split up, which led me to probe everything deeper. I wanted every second of the album to be as good as it could be.
Everything happened fast. We self-funded with donations from my old boss Dave Boyd at Hut Records and another friend, pressed 5,000 copies and initially released it in Ireland, where I had some fans. From the moment we started playing the new music live, the albums sold like hot cakes off the merch stand. Eventually, East West Records licensed it. It took two and a half years to get to No 1, but I’m very proud that an album made in a bedroom is the [UK’s] 26th bestselling of all time. It’s proof that you don’t need much to make something that lasts.
Iestyn Polson, producer
I’d worked in studios but wasn’t known as a producer. Dave’s manager shared an office with the manager of my band. I met him outside a pub and later he said: “Dave’s having trouble working all this gear. Could you go over?” When I arrived, Clune was leaning out of the window.
We were limited by what we had, so I was chopping up beats and making samples, which I was into back then. I got Clune to play some drums in the bathroom – we were lucky with the neighbours. The problem was external sounds. They were constantly digging up the road outside the house and you can hear traffic on the record. On Babylon, there’s a car going right past the house. When I edited it out, the song didn’t sound as good, so I put it back in.
I’d turn up at 10am and we had to finish before Dave’s wife came home from work. The last half hour would be pretty frantic, then Dave would have to rush out to pick her up from the station. It was strict, but gave us time to reflect on the day’s work. Soft Cell’s Say Hello, Wave Goodbye was part of Dave’s live set so we cut that live with Simon Edwards from Fairground Attraction playing bass. I’d seen them on Top of the Pops, so when he came in I was completely starstruck.
There were no great commercial hopes for the album. We were doing fairly full shows in Ireland, then coming back to the UK and playing to 30 people. But then suddenly young girls started coming, then they brought their mums. At Glastonbury, someone [Burt Bacharach] cancelled, so we ended up playing twice, the second time on the Pyramid stage. The reaction was much bigger and you could hear people singing along. I thought: “Wow, this is it”.
You can look at the modern singer-songwriter market and artists such as Ed Sheeran and Lewis Capaldi. No doubt inspired by White Ladder, that is a mixed blessing to some! I think nobody get closer to the appeal of David Gray. White Ladder is a much more complete, appealing and satisfying album than anything that has come since (sound/genre-wise). The Young Folks has their say in a 2021 retrospective:
“Ultimately, the best way to understand this album’s brilliance is to simply sit down and listen to the thing. You hear the tasteful backdrops he’s concocted alongside producers Iestyn Polson and Craig McClune—not complex, sure, but lush and meticulously woven, the ideal bedrock for Gray’s emotional musings. You experience his unmistakable delivery: a gruff, impassioned growl that recalls a young Bob Dylan, with a unique percussiveness not unlike Gray’s idol Van Morrison. (He even interpolates the latter’s “Madame George” and “Into the Mystic” on Ladder toward the end of an equally-epic cover of Soft Cell’s “Say Hello Wave Goodbye.”) And you quickly realize that there are no throwaway moments on White Ladder—when this fella sings something, he means it. Even all the whoas and yeahs and my-mys burst with a deeply-felt potency.
The word “cinematic” comes to mind here. Take opener “Please Forgive Me,” with its intense flood of piano and synthesized strings girded by a drum-machine loop like running footsteps. It easily could (and still does) pop up at a pivotal moment in many a sappy romcom.
Not a bad thing, of course, as there’s a certain subtle and affecting charm to how Gray captures the feeling of so achingly, desperately wanting someone that you come off a dumbstruck idiot in their presence. In his lovesick suffering, he paraphrases Jesus on the cross: “Please forgive me if I act a little strange/For I know not what I do/Feels like lightning running through my veins/Every time I look at you.” When he croons about “how good it feels/When you look at me that way,” you feel his exuberance as if she were flashing you that look. The real kicker, though, comes in the final verse as we learn just how nuts he is about her: “I got half a mind to scream out loud/I got half a mind to die/So I won’t ever have to lose you, girl/Won’t ever have to say goodbye.” Damn.
Ivor Novello Award-winning cut “Babylon” is the biggest hit off the disc, and for good reason. It remains a flawless pop song over 20 years on, buoyed by that playful guitar/piano hook that’s probably chiming in your brain as we speak. The track demonstrates Gray’s gift for pinpointing and illuminating life’s specific moments—in this case, a lonely, contemplative weekend in London. He walks us through it one color-coded day at a time: a dull Friday evening at home “turning over TV stations,” followed by a hedonistic night of partying and a hungover Sunday spent “kicking through the autumn leaves/Wondering where it is you might be going to.” All the while, he dearly misses the love of his life, kicking himself for not being able to overcome his fear and make his feelings known.
And then it happens: he’s heading back, he turns, and she’s right there! It’s the kind of thing that only happens in the movies, or the words of a song—it makes no sense and it makes all the sense in the world. Gray’s now-iconic refrain—“Let go your heart/Let go your head/And feel it now”—drives the message home: Surrender to the wild, brazen uncertainty of love. It can be as insane and extravagant as life in that titular biblical city, and it may not work out in the end, but how will you know unless you try?
In fact, if a batch of solid tunes isn’t enough for you and you simply must unite Ladder’s songs under the umbrella of a single “concept,” that might be the difficulties that come with launching (and staying in) a romance. These range from depression (“Seems these days I don’t feel anything/Unless it cuts me right down to the bone”) to substance abuse (“Can’t tell the bottle from the mountaintop/No, we’re not right”) to the aforementioned terror of giving oneself over to the pain and mayhem (“…it takes something more this time/Than sweet, sweet lies, oh, now/Before I open up my arms and fall/Losing all control/Every dream inside my soul”).
By the time Gray and his lover “Sail Away” on the wispy seas of Rufus Wainwright/Baz Luhrmann collaborator Marius de Vries’ magnificent co-production, it seems they’ve fully embraced the mantra of the frosty, kinetic title track: “There’s no rhyme or reason to love/This sweet, sweet love.” They’re Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard walking off together at the end of Modern Times, unsure of what lies ahead but content to at least have one another.
If Gray’s songwriting seems straightforward or commonplace, perhaps it’s because of the universality of the feelings he expresses. We’ve all been hurt by those we care for in some way. We’ve all allowed lonesomeness, doubt and insecurity numb us to the outside world. We’ve all feared the vulnerability that comes with opening ourselves up to another person. We’ve all found euphoria at the very thought of a crush or significant other. In short, we’ve all been in love. It takes a special kind of songwriter to chronicle the human condition so succinctly yet so poetically, and Gray is one of them”.
I am going to wrap up with parts of Pitchfork’s review for the 20th Anniversary release of White Ladder. The 2020 review (the same year the reissue came out) makes some interesting observations. Maybe quite divisive at the time, there is no denying the influence David Gray has had. How remarkable a success story White Ladder is:
“Adding 1998’s state-of-the-art electronic beats to his sturdy, occasionally sappy folk-pop gave White Ladder an air of novelty, even if it was hardly anomalous during a time when the coffee house and the club converged into a veritable subgenre: Think, for instance, of Everything But the Girl’s Walking Wounded, or Beth Orton collaborating with William Orbit. Though “Sail Away” featured production from Marius de Vries, a collaborator of Bjork and Madonna, White Ladder wasn’t intended as a reinvention. The newly aerodynamic production contrasted with Gray’s endearingly po-faced image, emphasizing what he already was: a self-described sincere guy with a guitar, and also a man slightly out of time, someone watching from the periphery as others less burdened by regret lived, laughed, and danced without care. Paul Hartnoll of Orbital weaponized the four-on-the-floor thump that brings “Please Forgive Me” to a climax into an unlikely Ibiza smash, while the single “Babylon” was given an industrial remake. But on White Ladder, these underlying elements of dance music sounded like they were being experienced from a safe and sad distance, a drum’n’bass track muffled by a midnight cab’s dull engine roar. The synthetic percussion of White Ladder betrays its origins as a home-recorded folktronica album—the hollowed-out trip-hop drums of “Nightblindness” bear the requisite influence of Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls,” while the lightly carbonated shuffle of “Silver Lining” makes Gray sound like he’s suspended in a glass of OK Cola for six minutes.
“Please Forgive Me” was also included in the pilot of Scrubs, more indicative than its club cameos of the album’s future in meet-cute media. Half of its 10 songs were released as singles, so White Ladder clearly worked as a collection of episodes that could be experienced discretely and repeatedly. There’s no linguistic subtext to any song on White Ladder: Recall that Gray’s sincerity and plainspokenness are his main selling points, but the lack of specificity leaves space for emotional interpretation. “This Year’s Love” likely did soundtrack countless wedding dances and many drank alone to it. The pleas of “Sail Away” are either bravely passionate or absolutely desperate; “We’re Not Right” can either be a blithe acceptance of alcoholism’s grim fate or an agent for change. “Babylon” tells a story with a clear conflict and resolution that still leaves room for projection—to tell someone you love them or that you loved them or even that you wish you had told them these things. “If you want it, come and get it for crying out loud,” and whatever it was, you could get it: “Babylon” was a festival anthem disguised as a counterbalance to the monsters of Glastonbury.
The frontloading of its biggest, most unabashedly optimistic hits lends White Ladder a narrative thread: As I always imagined it, here was a skeptical romantic hitting the bars with a precarious hope of finding connection; slowly sulking into the corner while his friends laughed and flirted; bitterly going home to commiserate with his favorite records. It all ends with an unfathomably sad, nine-minute cover of Soft Cell’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” that interpolates Van Morrison’s “Madame George” and “Into the Mystic.”
While White Ladder was virtually inescapable in public spaces during the early 2000s, its influence has dissipated in the time since, though it is audible in the crystalline, cosmic folk of Amen Dunes’ 2018 album Freedom. Gray himself suggested that he had paved the way for folk-pop idols like Ed Sheeran and James Blunt. “When I started out, a man with a guitar baring his soul wasn't in vogue at all. Suddenly, it's everywhere!” Gray exclaimed in 2011, despite soul-bearing guitar men being the primary vessel for acclaimed rock music for the past 50 years.
Yet he’s not totally wrong. Man or woman, guitar or no guitar, the world will always be full of people who believe that they’re the only ones truly baring their soul, doing so in a way that brings them constant misunderstanding and disappointment at their jobs and relationships, an exception in a world where dishonesty and artifice are the rule and guys like David Gray get dropped from their label. And then an album like White Ladder comes along to sell millions of copies and offer the hope that living the exact same way can be the best revenge”.
An album that was widely played and ubiquitous in the late-1990s, I think that White Ladder is not as explored as much as it should be. Perhaps seen as a product of its time and not relevant today, the fact that a wave of artists influenced by David Gray have stolen attention might betray a debt to the original. An artist whose fourth studio album was a big success, at a time when Folk and Singer-Songwriter sounds were not that widespread, popular and seen as cool. Timeless and simple songwriting with messages that resonated meant that White Ladder became a massive success. It is an album that needs to be heard more widely. Released on 27th November, 1998, the supreme White Ladder became that year’s love. You can feel and see its influence spread far and wide…
TO this very day.