A vs B: Part 6 - David Gray vs James Blunt

Aah, the big two. Titans of terrible, behemoths of banal. Or are they?

Oh, yeah, pretty much, maybe, not really.

People ask has there even been anyone like Ed Sheeran before? No, there hasn’t. Not one-man-and-a-guitar with the sheer ubiquity. But these are the antecedents. Both had monster albums which were the bestselling in the UK in a year, both endured the utter loathing of serious music fans/snobs. The loathing was often personal.

They’re also really good examples of where “the line” is. People not tied up with the precise details of being a “serious” music fan might be bemused at what makes e.g. Badly Drawn Boy ok and these two not ok.

I mean, some people just hate this shit. Hate these well-bred sensitive singer-songwriters bearing their soul. But, actually, not me.

This is, or was, my territory. From Dylan on to Jeff Buckley and Nick Drake, I was always searching for the next “mystery white boy” (as Buckley joked about himself). I was a fan of Ryan Adams, Ed Harcourt, Tom McRae, David Kitt, even Damien Rice. I went to see Damien Rice … twice! It was nice. I was primed for Gray and Blunt … (what wonderful names they had ...)

I had significantly strong reactions against both Gray and Blunt at the time, but retrospectively think they’re rather different cases.

Gray was just a pro who did songs – he’d done a few albums, then got massively successful suddenly in Ireland. He remixed a single and did an appearance on ‘Jools Holland’ where he wobbled his head.

People started using the term “coffee table music” or “dinner party music” and I remember I did hear his album White Ladder at a dinner party where I felt out of place, and people were discussing his music in a really dull way and I was young enough to think I was better than all that. And, you know, I was particularly susceptible to the music press then, and they were generally dismissive.

I hadn’t listened to the album all the way through since (though I’ve listened willingly to individual David Gray songs a few times since then). I didn’t think I’d need to listen to them both to write this, but I was a little intrigued. I also listened to a couple of other singer-songwriter albums of the early 2000s which I’m going to thrown into the mix, as I think they’re relevant to my reactions.

‘White Ladder’ is quite a nice album – there are decent songs and it’s got a pleasantly consistent mood. I didn’t cringe, or feel hateful, I realised it’s roughly in my sphere and generally my previous antipathy was a bit of snobbery. Above all, it’s highly competent. Occasionally gently funny and sometimes quite poignant, it has, in retrospect, an undeniable crepuscular charm.

I listened to James Blunt’s ‘Back to Bedlam’, the bestselling UK album of the first decade of the millennium, for the first time all the way through yesterday.

Here are my notes on James Blunt – I happened to see him as a support act at the Borderline in summer 2004 - I didn’t really notice him, I was talking at the back, I remember he had a big backing band for a support act at the Borderline.

The publicity photos for the album showed him on the platform at Clapham Common tube, where I lived at the time. I liked that. He lived on Fulham Palace Road, and in his interviews talked about hanging out in the grotty nightclub by Putney Station. I liked that. People I knew were fans of his. Someone on my PGCE lived near him, saw him around, went to his gigs, said they were great, said he was really nice.

This much seems indisputable. The personal abuse he got seemed a bit rotten. He is now reborn as a self-mocking twitter star with triffic bantz. He’s clearly also someone with a range of talents.

But those songs, that album, that made him a star, they really are as awful as anything you could ever listen to. It’s not snobbery, or assumption, or prejudice. 

Some people berated his background, but I don't mind posh singer-songwriters, far from it. My favourite British singer-songwriter of the era, Ed Harcourt, was as well-to-do as they come.

I remember when he played ‘Goodbye My Lover’ on Jools Holland, my blood froze with embarrassment for him. I felt like an avuncular northern gentleman like Jim Carter ought to have come over to him halfway through and tapped him on the shoulder and said “all right, lad, that’s enough”, “but, sir, let me finish my song” “nay, lad, you did grand, but let’s stop it there, shall we?” …

It didn’t belong there, among “real musicians” with basic standards of how to string words together and not over-emote and not try too hard and not do the most obvious thing imaginable.

I listened to it on the train to London this week and my blood froze again. I really think it’s the worst song ever.

Worse than ‘You’re Beautiful’ and ‘Wise Men’ which are probably on the same terrain of terrible.

How did it happen? How did people fall for it? What is it? Well, I imagine he managed to give good enough banter at gigs that people forgot to listen to the songs … or something … or it sounded just enough like stuff that was good, that made the heartstrings of the cynical melt – it sounded enough like it and took it to another level.

Like I say, my tastes, aren’t/weren’t cool. I’m not above that stuff – that started with Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’, the absolute mothership of it all, taking in Gray and Coldplay and Keane, even Radiohead at times, talents like Tom McRae and Ed Harcourt, and Damien Rice, who I’ve realised may be the key to this tale.

Rice, with his coffee-table breakout crossover slowburn hit album ‘O’, Rice who’s been bracketed with Gray and Blunt and Jamie Cullum and whoever else.

I saw Rice twice – I thought ‘O’ was really a great album. The second time I went was pretty sour – he was sour, the crowd booed the opera singer (one of the oddest moments I’ve ever known at a gig, which I’ll get to), I went off Rice and have hardly listened to him for more than a decade. But I listened to ‘O’ again this week for research and, you know, it is fantastic.

It’s a tense, fearsome, deeply and realistically romantic and dramatic piece of work, with a narrative and a sense of mystery. The singing by Rice and his co-star Lisa Hannigan is so good – they really are the best pair of co-vocalists since Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. He has range, but above all, he uses the dynamics of his voice brilliantly, as does she.

Of course, it appears that the tale soured with the real-life relationship of the two, resulting in him sacking her in 2007. People booed the opera singer at that second gig because, essentially, they loved Lisa Hannigan so much and didn’t want to hear another singer – I know, fucking mental!. One can only guess there was all kind of professional insecurity and jealousy going on … who knows …

But, anyway, I’d gone off Rice when Blunt came along, but I still had the memory of how good Rice was, and that Blunt, this ersatz version, was an insult to the singer-songwriter genre. I think I’ve only just unpicked that properly now.

I also wonder if Blunt rather killed the genre … the way his shtick was polished, the songs were written by committee, he was marketed in quite a pop way, it showed the moneymen what could be done, and from that point we had a series of reasonably talented but clearly controlled crossover stars like James Morrison, Nutini, George Ezra and of course the infernal Sheeran. I don’t know, this really make sense, it’s just a feeling. Blunt killed a genre I loved for me, anyway.

So there’s your answer. Who’s better? Damien Rice and Ed Harcourt, I guess.

Full English

Right, I've got an aphorism. Here's my aphorism. I've had a little search and haven't found it elsewhere, so I'm claiming it.

"If it's not about racism, what about the racism?"

They'll tell you it's not about racism, and maybe it's not. Maybe the day-to-day regular implicit and explicit racism on the streets of England is totally independent of the Brexit thing, eh?

They rely on the liberal metropolitan elite bubble being a real thing, compromised of people who don't leave that bubble, and wonder to themselves if maybe they're getting it wrong, being unfair to the middle Englander.

I don't live in the liberal metropolitan elite bubble. I don't live in it, I don't look like it. I'm just a scrappy frowning overweight guy with a shaved head in the solid satellite towns.

And I hear people being racist all the time. All the time. And I'm an unfriendly person without conversational tricks who mainly exists in the bubble of his own house. I don't go looking for it.

But I overhear it on the streets, I hear it from people I engage in brief conversations with, working people, taxi drivers, casual acquaintances. If eg London is mentioned, people can't wait to say something about all the ghastly people that now live there. They imply it or say it openly. They probably don't think they're racist. They're good respectable people.

Racism gets treated in the media like it's an outrage, a shocking break from the norm which the committer will never be able to live down. It's not. It's every day, all sorts of people. The strongest targets vary, but it's always there.

Anyway. I wrote a poem when the Windrush scandal was going on, inspired, if that's the right word, by a black guy I saw, probably in his 50s, in my local supermarket, wearing a Jam t-shirt inscribed with the words from 'Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" - "They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs, and too many right-wing meetings".

It was, on various levels, one of the greatest things I've ever seen. That's my country, please.

FULL ENGLISH

I’ve been with you

in your England

since its birth, in desperation,

From the ashes of an Empire

gorged on cruelty and loathing.

Born here as it dragged itself

through shame-faced reconstruction,

I’ll die here as it suffocates,

entranced by its own embers.

A traveller’s child is not himself

a slave to expedition.

I know my roots

but made my bed

in brittle little England.

I know each tiny detail

of my difference

and your myth-wish

For England, some new England,

which, in truth, never existed.

I’ve never not been English,

I am older than your memory

Of battles on a pink map

won by white men

with a black book.

My tanks are not on your lawn,

your gates are not beleaguered,

We’re English,

just as English

as your forlorn deathwish protest.

We’re British

as the Celts

who grasped the bitter joke you bleated -

“We’re all in this together”,

in the same breath as you told us

That a jolly hostile send-off was

the very least you owed us

Yet I know more of England

than these puffing thin-eyed wreckers,

Who only know

their corner

and believe it replicated

In every neuk and hood

where their imagination fails them,

Yet I know every England

like a stranger feels a welcome.

I’m the only black man standing

at the Hammersmith Palais,

Bellowing indie anthems

like a reveller at a wake,

I fought like a true Englishman

in Dublin and on Green Street,

Sometimes, only sometimes,

these boys barely even see it.

In some pub off Charing Cross

that night the Germans mugged us off

I’m just another snarling English voice

rich in expletives.

I’ve lived a modern English life,

I’ve bought myself the t-shirt

“They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs … too many right-wing meetings”

An in-joke and outsider howl

in every brazen detail,

I wear it as I’m marching

through my mid-life small-town exile.

I’m English all the way through,

I am London and the counties,

I’ve heard every expression

which excuses me my colour,

“present company”,

“not like them” …

as if I should be flattered

By ghoulish poisoned savages

who’ve never known a black man.

They’ve seen me on their TV

In the joyous throes of Blackwash

Greeting Richards, Holding, Marshall

Off HMT Empire Windrush

And they’ve damned me for my graceless

Jumped-up unenlightened blackness.

They’d damn me with the Tebbit test,

The lauded racist’s Sunday best

(I’d pass it, but I gave myself

That glorious day of rest)

They call it like they see it

And they see it as they’re taught it.

They wouldn’t know I’m English

From my birth-cries

To their doorstep.

I fought like a true Englishman

At Goose Green and in Belfast

And, then and there, those boys

I swear

they couldn’t tell us apart.

I’ve seen an Eltham Six

in waiting

Each corner I turned

Looking to release themselves

By some unfettered act.

But English is my language

And my manner and my way.

I’ve hardly missed a step, lads,

And never shown a crack.

My grandkids will be English.

Or at least that’s what I’d hoped.

I’m home. My home is England.

There’s my passport. Here’s my word.