David Gray was born in
Manchester on June 13th, 1968 but moved with his family to
Pembrokeshire,
Wales at the
tender age of nine. Davids first venture into
music was as a member of
punk band,
The Prawns, later to become
The Vacums, along with three of his friends, with the apparent intention of 'making a lot of noise, and pissing people off'. The band didn't last long, and David moved away to study at the
Liverpool College of Art, where he continued writing songs, although he claims his music was moving into a
melancholy Dylan-esque style. With these
new songs he went on to form his first 'serious' band -
Waiting for Jaffo, and started to play
gigs in and around
Liverpool.
Davids break came when one of the bands demo tapes fell into the hands of Orbital manager, Rob Holden. Impressed with Gray, but not with the rest of the band, he persuaded them to split, and in 1992, David signed as a solo artist to a subsiduary label of Virgin Records, called Hut. A year later his debut album 'A Century Ends' was released to critical acclaim, but commercial failure. Undeterred, David went on to make his second album, entitled 'Flesh' . Again he met with praise for his work, but no-one seemed to be listening, and he was dropped from his label in 1995.
By a lucky chance, the day he was dropped from Virgin, he was approached by a representative from EMI, who promised him commercial success in the US. David moved to Ithaca in New York to record his third album, called 'Sell, Sell, Sell' but relations between him and the record's producer rapidly broke down, and he moved back to the UK to complete it. This records reception was better than that of the first two, and won him a support slot on the Radiohead tour, but all of this didn't help sales, and he was soon dropped by EMI
David and his main collaborator, known only as Clune who plays drums for David (and he's is absolutely fscking fantastic at it), went back into the studio, and the outcome of this work was White Ladder. After an initial release in 1998, on his own IHT label, he was noticed by people in the film industry, who signed him up to provide music for the upcoming Kathy Burke film, 'This Years Love', in which David and Clune both appear as musicians in a band for which Burke is a backing singer . This film led to Dave Matthews, of Dave Matthews Band fame, signing him to his own ATO label, and the release of the 'Babylon' single which catapulted him the stardom, and won him a Glastonbury slot, and causing the album to go 5 times platinum
David has just released 'Lost Songs' as his fifth offering, which garnered him several Brit award nominations.