If youtube had existed in 2000, 'Babylon' would probably have come up on my youtube algorithm then, as something youtube thought was a bit like the kind of things I like, and I'd have curtly dismissed it as maybe in the same rough territory as the kind of things I like, but very much not the kind of thing I like.
But, in 2026, I watched/listened to it, and thought "aah, good song, after all".
I distinctly remember the first time I saw Babylon performed by David Gray, which was on Jools Holland in April 2000 - me, John and Alex watching on a Friday night in our student place on Baker Lane, cruelly distracted by Gray's wobbling head, and deciding this guy was not for us.
I'd heard of him before, I think I'd read about him being a big star in Ireland (indeed I think I thought he was Irish) but that was the first time I heard/saw him. After that he was everywhere, or rather his music was everywhere. That was a star-making performance - Babylon became a hit, and the album White Ladder, which had first been released in 1998, became the ultimate sleeper hit.
It is still the biggest selling album of all time in Ireland, and is still, I think, in the Top 10 best selling albums in Britain this century. It also sold over 2 million copies in the US - indeed Gray had sustained success over several albums in America - a lot more than, say, Robbie Williams.
For those early years of the 2000s, the likes of White Ladder, Dido's No Angel, Moby's Play, not to mention Travis and Coldplay, were ubiquitous and described by the music weeklys, which I was still reading, as bland, coffee-table music. You would hear the albums at sedate dinner parties, and, generally, though I was never cool, I fancied my taste in music to be cooler than that.
As far as I can tell, Gray remains a pretty lowkey, anonymous figure. I watched a couple of interviews with him after rewatching Babylon and he's pretty endearing, and pretty good at talking about his music in a clear, interesting way.
A few years ago, as an act of supposed self-torture, I listened to White Ladder and James Blunt's Back to Bedlam alongside each other, and found that while Blunt's monster hit was, in its entiretey even worse than the sum of its most famous parts and worse than I could possibly have conceived, White Ladder was a a good album. It held together well, the songs were good, well-sung, well-written, well-arranged, moving, entirely acceptable. Wow, the things you find out ...
The idea of "cool" when it comes to this sort of music is inconsequential now. None of this as survived the modern idea of cool. The idea that once I thought David Gray as way less cool than, I don't know, Tom McRae or Matthew Jay, seems ludicrous. Still, it is surprisingly useful how a couple of modern buzz words can help distinguish between the various whiny WGWG which still provide some of my favourite music - those two words are, wait for it .... cringe and toxic.
Perhaps David Gray's music holds up pretty well because it avoids being excessively cringe or excessively toxic. Blunt - 100% pure cringe. Sheeran, often fairly cringe. Dylan - pretty toxic. Ryan Adams - 100% pure toxic. Coldplay - really, at times, pretty cringe and toxic. Wow, I think I've solved the singer-songwriter conundrum at long last.
The reality is, as much as people moan about it, this kind of music is still incredibly popular. Perhaps the only thing more boring than a boring white guy singing and playing guitar is a boring white guy moaning about a boring white guy singing and playing guitar (though I suspect I am now proving that the only thing more boring than a boring white guy moaning about a boring white guy singing and playing guitar is a boring white guy moaning about a boring white guy moaning about a boring white guy singing and playing guitar). Now none of it is cool. But most of it is impervious to fashion. So, of this most bulletproof of brands, the post-Buckley guitar guy, I boldly state that one of the originators, David Gray, was really not so bad after all, and that is most famous song is a pretty nice song. So there.
