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Pete Paphides, visits David Gray in his home studio, once owned by the Eurythmics's Dave Stewart, to talk about his long, slow road to success, his greatest hits album, and the downside of fame.

“I tapped on the door but it didn’t open an inch. I’m very proud of that first single, all that stuff that was done at the beginning has a real sense of identity about it. I was doing all that I could do which was singing my heart out and playing the guitar in my primitive fashion. That’s what I was at the time. I like it. It’s a frank account of what I was all about – all my emotions and ideas are to the fore. But of course it didn’t sell.”

You wish writing could be like moments of inspiration all the time, where you get goosebumps and an hour later you’ve finished it. But most of the time it’s like being a garage mechanic and you’ve got bits of car all over the room and you’re trying to fit them together and you’re up to your elbows in grease. And so it was with Babylon, which was many different bits of diff songs and ideas fitted together in the end that made a coherent whole. But I was so busy working on the gluing process I really didn’t see the emotion of the song at all, I was just trying to make something work from start to finish. Someone heard it – it must have been my manager, Rob came around one day and said’ what have you done today. ‘we’ve done this one.’ He went really quiet and he was really excited about it afterwards. I was like wow, I didn’t even have an inkling that it might be an important thing.

“Basically my record publishing contract came to an end and rather than sign a new deal in these uncertain digital times, I decided that a greatest hits might be a compromise. Then suddenly it might be an appropriate one because I was going to make wholesale changes to the band and the way I that was doing things, so it’s like the end of an era in a way. It can signal the end of your creative ambitions but quite the opposite in this case. It’s a gathering together of things. I thought, hang on, my first single came out in 1992, I think I’m entitled to put things together.”

“I don’t know how it’s going to sound exactly. But I’ve thrown out the safety net of working to a click or being enslaved to technology. I’ve gone back to almost how I started at the very beginning which which is working free with a band, recording live in a room – old school. If you can’t play it you don’t get it. You’re the World To Me would be an excellent example. I’ve probably done 100 takes of that song in order to capture it. The fact that it sounds so happy – that is relief, that’s the exuberance, that’s where the joy comes from – hurray!"

“I think I suffered from taking the whole thing far too seriously in the wake of all the success and all the attention - positive and negative that you receive as a result of that. I started to think too much about it and worry about it. I’ve reclaimed a bit of my life in the last year and taken a bit more time out since coming off the road. I think I was working to hard and there was no sort of balance to it.”

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