David Gray in Dublin: a troubadour drowned out by 13,000 adoring fans

The pioneering singer-songwriter's return to the Irish capital, at the 3Arena, proved an extravagantly exuberant affair

It is not often you hear a band almost drowned out by their audience. The sheer singalong volume as David Gray returned to the stage for the first of three nights at Dublin’s 3Arena was overwhelming, leaving Gray looking dazed at times, grinning with delight, and briefly losing his place in his most famous song, Babylon. “I can’t hear myself up here. I’ve forgotten the words,” he said, laughing. “Something about a bloodstream!”

That only seemed to double the noise. Thirteen-thousand fans clapping and singing along with lusty joy right from the start of the opening number is something to behold, and several times during the set the arena gave itself a rousing round of “Ole! Ole! Ole!” as if they were witnesses to a triumphant sporting event.

The British troubadour essentially launched the contemporary pop singer-songwriter genre (or folktronica as it was briefly known) with his home-recorded album White Ladder back at the tail end of the Nineties. It was self-released in 1998, Ireland was the first audience to adopt it, and by 1999 it was on its way to becoming the country’s best-selling album of all time. Following an article in the Daily Telegraph, White Ladder was picked up for major label licence in 2000 and went on to sell 7 million copies worldwide.

“If I wasn’t for you guys, this would have never got out in the world,” Gray told the exuberant Irish crowd. “You started it! You started it!” he comically shouted like a child pointing the finger of blame.

Indeed, it wasn’t all they started. After Gray’s success, record companies began signing up acoustic-guitar-toting male singer-songwriters such as Damien Rice and James Blunt, leading all the way to the current commercial supremacy of Ed Sheeran. But you can’t hold that against him. Gray’s is a very distinctive take on the genre, lyrically philosophical, emotionally literate, broodingly serious but with expansive choruses. This pandemic-delayed tour was meant to celebrate the 20th anniversary of White Ladder’s ascendancy, and most audience members had been holding on to tickets for more than two years and were evidently ready to party.

The whole gig was an explosion of musical joy, yet on the surface this material might seem an unlikely candidate for a singalong, crackling with a kind of pensive, anxious intensity. Gray and his five-piece band dug deep into songs about how hard it can be to find your place in the world, and how difficult it is to maintain a loving relationship in the face of real-life pressures. Following the album’s running order, the set opened with the naked desperation of Please Forgive Me, closed with the heartsore longing of Soft Cell cover Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, while the chorus of the downbeat centrepiece Night Blindness fretted about “What we gonna do when the money runs out?”, a worry that sadly never gets old.

Seated at a piano or playing a battered acoustic guitar, Gray’s gritty voice and delivery was evocative of the Caledonian soul of Van Morrison in his prime, flowing effortlessly through the music, while the skittery trip-hop drumming of original collaborator Craig McClune (restored to the line-up after nearly 15 years apart) underpinned Gray’s melodies with pulsing tempo and drive. There is a tangible thread of hope for the redemptive power of love throughout these songs, and that is what the crowd latched on to, making sure this plucky troubadour never sang alone.

Gray played as his own support, opening at 8pm with a fine set of songs from later albums that would have been enough to earn him glowing reviews. But when he returned after 20 minutes, dressed in a blazing white suit and joined by the popular McClune to revisit his original triumph, the energy in the venue went up so many notches it was like witnessing a completely different artist. Such was the electrifying intensity of the main set, Gray seemed to have left himself an impossible job when it came to the encores, having already played all of his most popular material. But he carried it off with a glorious mass karaoke blast through classic David Bowie songs before tying it up neatly with a reprise of Please Forgive Me.

With a reputation in some quarters as a dourly sensitive singer-songwriter, you might not expect David Gray to know how to get a party started. But with a devoted audience firmly on his side, he delivered a storming, full-blooded reminder of the power of music to sustain us even during the hardest times.

Touring the UK until mid-July; davidgray.com