Saying Goodbye to the Band David Gray | Big Think

Saying Goodbye to the Band

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It was a difficult but important decision for David Gray when he decided to move on from his original band that he travelled with from obscurity to multi-platinum fame. Gray told Big Think the story and stressed the importance of being motivated to make music by necessity, not by money.

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David Gray:

David Gray is an English singer-songwriter. His most recent album is Draw the Line. Although he released his first studio album in 1993, he did not receive worldwide attention until the release of White Ladder six years later. It was the first of three UK chart-toppers in six years for Gray, the latter two of which also made the Top 20 in the U.S.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What led up to changing the makeup of your band?

David Gray: Changing the band was a huge decision but one that came to me gradually. But really, doing the making of Life in Slow Motion in 2004 and 2005, I already knew. I could sense that whatever had been there once wasn't there anymore. Things come and go, and people change. and obviously we had been through a lot together: we have been very compressed, making records, touring, TV studios, all rubbing against each other and everyone needs a bit of space.

But everyone makes sense of success in a different way and I think some people try to horde it as if it proves something. Whereas, for me I find that it's useless beyond the point of itself and it doesn't mean you're justified making another good record—just because you made a good one once doesn't justify the next one. It moves on, as you see, at an alarming rate. People make a great record and then you never hear from them again. What happened? Did something get trapped inside their heads that shouldn't be there? It's like that. So there's a degree of transparency – you have to surrender the past and go, “Okay, well that was all well and good. Here we go again.” Because you have no right, the next thing you do, etc., etc.

So I felt that certain people were looking at things differently and there was a degree of complacency, which isn't there for me when I write and do things. But basically it just wasn't as much fun, or it wasn't as sparky as it could've been, and I sensed the thing you fear the most, which is that we were going to repeat ourselves any time now. Also, I throw out certain sort of ideas, sort of templates of ideas in terms of the way it form the words for that kind of tempo of songs, or the mood of songs and the same people react in a similar way unless they have some rabid, ferocious appetite for reinvention. And unless they’re all the little individual Radioheads and want to sort of tear everything up just for the sake of it, you find that you start to make the same kind of songs, and that’s what was starting to happen.

So, its part of a sort of – it was a difficult thing to say good-bye, particularly to Clune because he – well they were all very talented people and we had a brilliant time, and they had done great things. But, Clune was the big one. He was there with me through all of the years of misery and hardship, or nearly all of them anyway, missing the first couple. And he's such a big-hearted guy and was such the heartbeat of my whole sound for a while. So, saying goodbye to Clune was really a big deal. So I went and saw him personally and there's no nice way of putting it; I just basically said I need a new challenge and I'm going to have to move on. I don't know what the future holds, we might work together again. So these things are awkward moments.

Question: How did he respond to you?

David Gray: Well I think he sensed it was coming so he just thought that maybe I was moving in a sort of direction that he didn't really want to go in and he sort of said that, or he seemed to be wanting to go back more to this almost kind of like a folkie type of sound. And he was more interested in more of the pop element. And that's how we've sort of worked it out for himself that I was going off on a different tangent slightly. So, you know, [it’s a] “Good luck” kind of thing.

It was difficult getting rid of everything when there was nothing yet to replace it. But as soon as you have the need, you find people and you find what you need. It's interesting how works. It's like; it makes you realize that you ‘never hear the melody until you're needing the song.’ It's a Tom Waite’s lyric.

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