The three openers of this heavyweight retrospective – ‘Babylon’, ‘You’re The World To Me’, ‘Sail Away’ – hit you sweetly, unexpectedly between the eyes, such is the devotional aspect of David Gray‘s vocal delivery. This was a man, you tell yourself, who was a star of the 1990s, who flew high and fast and made his name in the mainstream. Yet from the remove of some 20 years you come to realise that he was no impostor and that his songs have endured because he wrote in dogged pursuit of an emotional truth. His success, lest we fool ourselves, was borne of the public recognising music of a higher quality; perhaps something the public is not so adept at anymore. But here it is: The Best Of David Gray, the Deluxe Edition a 31-song tribute to a young songwriter firing on all cylinders. (A 1-disc/16-song version is also available.)

“We just streamed a track called ‘Smoke Without Fire’,” David Gray told me recently, “and it’s had 2 million streams, which is inspiring and encouraging.” The appetite for his work is still present, therefore, an appetite that can only grow when songs like ‘The One I love’, ‘Alibi’ and ‘Be Mine’ are heard once again. They’re songs of love; love that has been curdled, lost, buried then refound. The Gray voice on ‘Flame Turns Blue’ is the everyman voice of a millennial Britain. It scrapes and cries and cuts. “I went looking for someone I left behind,” he sings not unlike Dylan, and you stop and look at your shoes and listen.

The songs are melodic and inventive, some rushing headlong, others like ‘The Other Side’ the painful, all-too-familiar sound of a drowning urban soul. ‘Snow In Vegas’, being a duet, makes you realise he’s best all alone with his piano and Martin, undiluted and given space, drenched in his own peculiar melancholia. Stand-out tracks include ‘This Year’s Love’ with its line “This year’s love, it better last”. Has 21st century human relations ever been better summed up? But a hangdog balladeer he is not. Rather, Gray is a musical prospector looking for his own humanity amongst the grit. But for me, ‘L’s Song’ is the track to quietly hit its mark, the guitar singing along with him. He remains to this day a writer who can say an awful lot within the confines of a 4-minute song. If only there were a few more like him in these darkened days.

The Very Best Of David Gray is released on 28th October via iht Records.

Jason Holmes
@JasonAHolmes