What happened with White Ladder involved more than music. It was a sort of heart and soul moment of total surrender for everybody involved, for me and the audience. That was it. It doesn’t get any better than that.”– David Gray To counter that dismissal, the subsequent compilations The EPs 1992-1994 and Lost Songs 95-98 wisely capitalized on Gray’s sudden fame while reminding new fans of his humble origins. The right-sizing of his public persona was made explicit by 2002’s muted and morose A New Day at Midnight, which began with a song called “Dead in the Water.” A New Day at Midnight still sold well, if not quite at White Ladder levels: 4x platinum in the UK instead of 10x, and in America, gold instead of platinum; likewise, the chart success of 2005’s Life in Slow Motion could only be considered disappointing by the standards of White Ladder. Life in Slow Motion was Gray’s last major-label album before Draw the Line brought him full circle four years later, without a label and recording in his own studio (albeit an upgrade from his apartment to a studio once owned by the Eurythmics). His fourth studio album failed to chart when first released in 1998, but became an enormous success when re-released on ATO Records in 2000. The album spawned five singles including ‘Babylon’, ‘Please Forgive Me’ and ‘Sail away’ and has now sold over three million copies in the UK alone. 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. 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.”

It was a sort of heart and soul moment of total surrender for everybody involved, for me and the audience.Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. David Gray‘s best selling album White Ladder will be reissued for its 20th anniversary in February next year David Gray has also personally crafted a series of writings about his White Ladder experience, chronicling the people involved, and the stories behind some of the songs and most memorable shows. A 2CD deluxe edition echoes this content, with all the bonus material on the extra disc. In the unlikely event you just want a single remastered CD, then that is available, as is an album-only 2LP white vinyl set.

What happened with White Ladder involved more than music. It was a sort of heart and soul moment of total surrender for everybody involved, for me and the audience. That was it. It doesn’t get any better than that.” – David Gray By 2001, Gray was on a level with Eminem and Britney Spears—at least in the sense that his music was used alongside theirs to torture prisoners at Guantanamo; Haj Ali, photographed as a hooded prisoner of war in Abu Ghraib, claimed that he was stripped, handcuffed and forced to hear a loop of “Babylon” so loud that he feared his head would burst. Twenty years later, that Gray never really felt as famous or infamous as Eminem or Britney Spears only enhances White Ladder’s aura as an isolated incident that defies explanation: a modest collection of songs about lost love, drinking, and drinking over lost love, by an Everyman who was soon Everywhere.

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