Friday night I'm going nowhere - all the lights are changing green to red

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

19/08/01 : White Ladder - David Gray


Well, it's had a few mentions over the years but we've finally got there. This is another one we own (four for the year) and I remember really liking it but I've not listened to it in years, so it will be nice to revisit it.

It's a good mix of piano and interesting rhythms, with his nicely mournful voice working well over them. I particularly liked "Babylon", "Nightblindness" and "This Year's Love" and he also does a good job with his cover of "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye", slightly reducing the drama levels that Marc Almond gives absolutely everything. But all the tracks are decent - this is a proper "dinner party" album with nothing to frighten the horses, but not being bland in its inoffensiveness. A very pleasant revisit indeed - and I like the album cover as well.

We're at #1 in the chart this week on his 68th week on a 148 week run, with this and the 66th week being the only weeks he spent at the top, but he had 21 weeks in the top five. The rest of the top five were Atomic Kitten, Prince, Destiny's Child and Eva Cassidy with the highest new entry being a Ray Charles best-of (#13) - to my surprise, Ray was still with us back then, dying in '04 at the age of 73. 

Wikipedia tells me it's his fourth album (not his debut that I assumed at the time) and was originally released in '98, when it did absolutely nothing - it was then released in '00 when it didn't do a helluva lot more at first, but it got there in the end, mostly because of "Babylon".  And, somewhat surprisingly for such a popular album, that's about it for items of interest - the only other things I've got is that the original release had a secret track 0, which you could only access by rewinding from the beginning and "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye" contains additional lyrics from two Van Morrison songs. Critically, the reviews were average to decent but I don't think anyone saw how well it would do commercially, selling over three million copies here, getting to #1 in Ireland for six weeks (it's the second best selling album ever over there) and although it only got to #35 in the US, it still sold 2.5 million copies over there. David has made the claim that this paved the way for a whole load of emotional male singer-songwriter types in touch with their feelings, which may well be true - but I'm not sure I'd want to draw people's attention to it.

Given its popularity, it's probably not such a surprise that discogs.com has this as a fifty pence album but the white vinyl double album reissue from '20 is going to set you back £95 - which seems excessively chunky money to me. I enjoyed this revisit though - it's not an album that comes to mind often but it was well worth the trip.

26/08/01 - Pleasant enough, but mystifyingly popular

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