David Gray, Edinburgh review: 'pleasingly gruff-voiced'
This Edinburgh show combined enduring nostalgia hits and misty-eyed singalong numbers with a few genuinely spontaneous moments, writes David Pollock
David Gray, Edinburgh Playhouse ★★★
“My first gig was in this room,” said David Gray, just as his encore began. He’s never performed in the Playhouse, but as a schoolboy in “the wilds of west Wales”, his best mate’s big brother – who served in the Navy on HMS Edinburgh – invited them to see the Smiths’ Meat is Murder tour here. This was 1985 (although Gray misremembered it as ’84), so he would have been 17.
Now, a David Gray gig is nothing like the Smiths must have been in their prime, a far more civilised and less fanatical affair, but his fans still exhibit a firm devotion. Their response to the mid-paced, folky opener After the Harvest alone was fierce, and there was excited clapping along to White Ladder and a charged buzz throughout the room for the fan-favourite The One I Love.
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The pleasingly gruff-voiced Gray and his band make music which is mannered and professional, and the most enduring nostalgia hits (specifically the blissed-out, head-swimming groove of My Oh My and the short, neon-lit urban evening of the soul Babylon) take the listener back to the chillout days of Lamb and Zero 7.
More conventional hits were revisited too, like Please Forgive Me and This Year’s Love - all good fodder for a misty-eyed singalong.
Where most artists’ sets furrow in the middle, Gray’s got more interesting, taking in the affecting Ain’t No Love, from his soundtrack to Amma Asante’s Wales-set 2004 social realist film A Way of Life, the big, pining power of one of his personal favourites Flame Turns Blue, and duets with support act Talia Rae on Plus & Minus and Fighting Talk.
Oh Ramona, sounding bizarrely (and rewardingly) like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen duetting over the melody of Kenny Rogers’ Lucille, was played unplanned after a pleading shout from the audience, while Speaking with the Pharaohs merged unexpectedly (and less rewardingly) into Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough. Clearly Gray’s nostalgia for the 1980s has deep roots.
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