S8, E10: David Gray, musician

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life Because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors. Hello, listeners. I am crumpled up on my little chair in the kitchen. It is raining cats and dogs outside. This morning, my weather app claimed it to be snow.

0:56I'm actually deeming it sleet. It was nothing as glamorous as snow. It was just movable slush, really. It does feel like a sign of things to come. But you know what? Perfect excuse to put the heating on. Oh, I love a toasty radiator, mate. Tell you what, I'm going to make a cup of tea. scrap that I'm gonna make two in seven minutes I've got a bona fide famous man coming over to talk with me now his work has genuinely touched the hearts of millions including me it's david gray david's album white ladder sold over three million copies in the uk it topped the charts worldwide it wallpapered the noughties it was the background to a million people's bedsit years their new millennium romances and their breakups and those melancholy student Sundays, mine included.

2:04He's released nine, soon to be ten further albums. But he's intriguing for not being interested in playing the celebrity game. You're more likely to spot him bird watching than at the Brit Awards. In today's world, where as a celebrity you cannot hide, no one ever knows what David Gray is up to. So I'd call that enigmatic. Enigmatic and probably soaked to the bone when he arrives on my doorstep. Right, he's gonna need a brew to warm him up and I hope to loosen his tongue. Do you think he takes sugar? Maybe just milk? I'll have to guess.

3:02David Gray, welcome to Comfort Eaton. Oh, thank you. I am absolutely fascinated by people's first band names, right? And this is a food podcast. So can you say in a loud and proud voice what your first band was called? We were called the Prawns. We were chased off the stage. What were you playing? We managed to blag a gig. There was like some kind of hundred centenary celebrations. Sulver Harbor had been built. And there was like an event on the foreshore by the car park where they'd made a marquee. And they had a disco. And we'd managed to persuade them to let us play a few songs. But they weren't pleased by our song choices or our total lack of musicianship.

3:50What do the prawns open with? Who Do You Love? Which I did a song I didn't even know, but we were doing a cover of it anyway. so we did Wild Thing we definitely did Purple Haze because the guitarist had pretensions to be like a sort of that's not an easy song to play don't worry we didn't get anywhere close to Jimmy's original I've been thinking about other band names that are food related we're going to decide which one's the best one is it Meatloaf, The Red Hot Chili Peppers Bananarama well I like Bananarama it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it with fun boy three i was in detention when i first heard that song yeah you know someone gave me their sony walkman i thought this is cool there's like terry hall's back you know kind of thing um and with these girls and everything so i choose banana because i like banana bread and and like meatloaf or what is that anyway uh i think it's kind of american thing red hot chili peppers i mean i don't mind a bit of spice but i don't think spices sit that easily in the grey body so i'm only off the banana rama

5:03david every time i invite a celebrity guest at my house i ask them to bring their comfort food with them this is the snack that you eat when you get in from say playing jules holland you kick off your socks you lie down on the sofa and you have the snack that makes you happy. I do not know what is under this tea towel, but I am very hungry. Reveal your snack, please, David Gray. Oh, here we are. Oh, yes, yes. So there you go. Tell me exactly what it is we can see on this plate. We can see a collapsed stonehenge of fish fingers on a grassy knoll of mashed potato with a moat of baked beans surrounding it very elegantly.

5:47It's girdled by beans. It's looking very appetizing. why have you chosen this tell me about when you first began loving this snack as you start to learn how to make food because it becomes essential that you do uh it's like quite an easy thing to accomplish obviously baked beans out of a tin anyone can sort of boil some peel and boil some spuds and then mash them together with a bit of milk and butter and salt and pepper and then you've got the fish finger the humble fish finger you know that props up so much of our lives when we if we would only but let it uh so i think that's that's that's how that's how it is so if yeah if no one else is around i don't have to satisfy anyone else's sort of culinary uh leanings and i'm sort of if i go away i've got a house up on the coast and i'm sort of up there that this probably something i'd default to like oh yeah i know what i can do if you're by yourself and people say i wonder what dad's up to This is what he's up to.

6:46I kind of go feral. I want to sort of survive on whatever's in the freezer. Yeah. You know, I won't even go to the shops. I kind of just get out of the car when I get there because the house is sort of on a nature reserve. I'll just sort of manage to eat whatever's there. David, you're a rock star. You're supposed to pull up and then unload a Fortnum and Mason's hamper full of kind of swans. You grew up a million miles from showbiz. And you said it was a little bit like a Dylan Thomas poem. Tell me a little bit about your childhood on the south coast of Wales. Yeah, we moved from Manchester, so I was born in Sale.

7:30My dad sort of bought a house in Hale, very different. So a kind of posh suburb, like footballers land. I think you'd probably describe it as now to go to this tiny little fishing village. We lived in a tiny little fishing cottage. it was very idyllic and going to school there welsh was a big part of everything so all on the walls there were welsh words for everything and it was just so sweet they were so lovely when i was about 16 17 18 i was really a part of the community i'm mad on sport i was like playing sport all the time so i was in the football team played tennis did this did that um i sort of blew it then obviously i i had my ambitions i sort of left i moved on and i've never really been being able to graft myself back in there are you a big eater are you eating welsh food lamb stew with lava cakes uh it's it was cowl was the cowl that's the classic welsh lamb cowl now it's a lovely salted pork lamb leeks carrots potatoes cowl was served every march the first roundst David's day that's when you'd have cowl I used to really like it if you were a server uh you got to have an extra portion extra large portion of cow with a big piece of like maybe bread and cheese I heard that men in bread and butter and cows cheese in Welsh so yeah I think you got like a piece of bread maybe a piece of bread and cheese and this this very salty kind of stew I used to love that someone told me that you were you were a very picky child and you ended up developing a penchant for a rabbit my granny and grandfather on my mum's side were they're all from mining stock they all come from the northeast it's like proper poverty I think they foraged a lot like blackberries I make blackberry jam now because they always took me blackberry picking so it's a sort of tribute to them but all that kind of stuff so game and things like that it must have been that my granny had made me rabbit something yeah in a white wine sauce so when I'd get walked back we used to walk to school with the neighbors and we'd come back and sometimes obviously my mom and dad weren't there and i'd go around to their house and mrs ainsworth would want to cook a tea for me and i was just obviously i'd just leave it i wouldn't eat it i didn't trust it i was very sort of untrusting and so she eventually said david you know what can i cook you what's your favorite thing i'm going to cook you something you love what is it and i said rabbit in a white wine sauce these are my pretensions this is what happens when you move to hail rabbits in a white wine sauce I said and lo and behold I got back from school and she'd cooked me rabbit in a white wine sauce I don't remember what happened next but I imagine I ate it yeah but food was very important to me I'll let you in on a secret of my infant life so I was born with a condition called pyloric stenosis where the top of your stomach it seized it just wouldn't open and I couldn't even have a drink of water I was wrongly diagnosed nearly starved to death so the first few weeks of my life i was starving and sort of projectile vomiting more and more spectacularly my dad was very impressed he said i used to hold you at the back door of our house in brooklyn's close and you could actually vomit about halfway down the garden he said it was like remarkable he was like but obviously not a good thing but that was the way he chose to look at it wow this kid's cool look what he does i didn't know they all did this uh so so i was starving to death and then they realized what it was someone came in and said this is what it is you need to be operated and so I've got a huge scar here where they cut me open.

10:58Bloody hell. And it's a real mess as well because I was so tiny. So my first few weeks, they say this is the most important time of your life. I would have been starving to death, essentially. And then they operated on me, and obviously I was in a little tub somewhere and untouchably sort of hurting. So I had this kind of traumatic start to life. Then obviously on the other side of that, I began to eat healthily and everything. The operation was a great success. I never looked back. But I think my approach to food is that I devour it while it's in front of me. I mean, like I've finished before anybody else and I'm often getting brought up on this because it's obviously not good manners.

11:37Oh, you're one of those. My excuse is that I was starving to death. Still, when the food's in front of me, it's got to be eaten. Is that what you say every time your family say you've eaten everything too quickly? You go, it's because there's a baby. I was literally starving. I don't get a chance to get that out. they just basically slagged me and probably like leave the room or something you know

12:01your parents had they had a gift shop but then did they start a clothing business no it's the other way around so I think that they they started a clothing business so my mum was making these quilted garments and they got orders from because they were using liberty fabric they got orders from liberty yeah and they were in the window of liberty I remember driving down to London that they'd come and pick up the actual quilting rolls in the back of our estate car and squidge them in on top of us and then go back to Wales again. And we'd pop in on Liberty's to sort of drop more clothes off. It was really ridiculous, like sort of out of the back of your own car type stuff.

12:36So like quilted fabric. So you've got like Tarnalorn or Liberty fabric. Just for women? No, they do it for men as well. So you'd have like a quilted waistcoat. So did you spend a lot of time being quilted? I must have had quilted garb. sadly it hasn't survived the you know the years i wish i had it still i think at a certain point they just realized after they've been ripped off a few times people not paying for the stuff in brussels or japan or wherever they were sending this they thought well we'll have our own shop and sell it in our own shop so there's this tiny little property that came up in on the high street and it became the cottage quilting as it was called when the building next door became available they bought that and expanded yeah and then they had gifts in the cottage quilting old cottage quilting bit and there's clothes in the other thing and it's like a while it's the quilting work sort of disappeared and it just became a massive gift shop did your dad end up having a restaurant yeah he had a restaurant the pharmacy uh on the high street in solver and i used to work there what kind of waiter were you i was a failed waiter there was a few cardinal sins waiter sins I delivered one table that the teapot had no water in.

13:50And then half an hour later, I couldn't find the tongs for the scones. And I just, I thought they weren't looking. So I just grabbed a couple and put them on the plate. Have these been touched by human hands? The woman said to me and I said, no. And my dad was like, come on, we're back in the washing up for you. But I was probably only about 13. So I was like working in there like these days. and my kids wouldn't know what that's all about. So you were washing up eventually. I was a washer-upper then and I was happier with that because I could listen to music on the thing and leave me to do my washing up.

14:24If you want your washing up done, I'm still, I've got it. You're either born with that talent, it's a God-given talent. Since you've got here, that's the most happy that I've seen you. When we started to talk about washing up, are you one of those people who gets very possessive about your washing up? Right, I'm going to role play. I'm at your house, we've just eaten food and I go, can I help? Can I help clear up? Look at his face. I'm picking up cloths and tea towels willy-nilly. I'm just using anything. How are you feeling? It would be tense. It would be tense. There'd be a tension in the air.

15:01I'm not rinsing things. My God. I'd be struggling. I would be struggling. I'd be trying not to notice, but I wouldn't be able to sort of build a barrier that was effective after years of therapy. Still, I would be in a compromised position. I can't lie. So you'd just be able to see it on my face. I wouldn't be able to pretend. Surely you have the best dishwasher and you don't have to wash your dishes. I do have a dishwasher, yeah. And obviously I use it, yeah. Do you use it? Do you trust it? No, it doesn't do a very good job. They don't wash like cups properly. You've got to put it on like the absolute max setting.

15:37If you're like tea stains, for example, I never thought I was going to end up here,

15:45You said that your childhood was like being in a Dylan Thomas poem, but Dylan Thomas was actually very, very naughty. I think he was actually a roaring alcoholic. What mischief was teenage David actually up to? Yeah, I got up to quite a lot of mischief. I was naughty. Should I ask the question that I often ask people When they're skirting around this subject Wondering what to admit Have you ever been brought home by the police? Well I've been arrested and locked up They wait until the last bus had gone Because the police station was in Fishguard And then we had to walk the 15 miles home They knew that So that was part of our punishment What had you done?

16:33Well, that was a big night out. I was at Liverpool Art College at the time. I got back, I had a big transit van. So I came back and there was a gig on. Then we went to the rugby club and I left my keys in the rugby club. Then we went on to a party and I was like, oh no, I've left the keys in the rugby club. so this was about one o 'clock in the morning i thought well you know let's go down to the rugby club maybe there's still be someone there was one two o 'clock in the morning something nobody there anyway i managed to get a window open oh lord god no my mate was with me he was like are you sure about this i said i know where i was sitting they're just over there and then i said look i can see them and i ran across the dance floor the alarm went off because i obviously triggered the alarm and the biggest mistake i made was that i didn't pick the keys up we went back out the window and we just ran like the the merry fools that we definitely were at that moment in time and we hid and it was like a yes and we just hid like out in the fields and then we saw the cops come and we saw this stuff and all this kerfuffle and then at about sort of nine o 'clock in the morning i kind of woke up i thought oh my god i'm gonna go back i'm gonna go back in i'm gonna say um excuse me i think i left my car keys here last night sound like a good plan to you and the policeman was and i walked in and he looked and i had a i had to say my outfit at the time because i kind of come to london and i was getting trendy i was i was starting to get dressed i had a vivian westwood cap sleeve t-shirt which said too fast to live too young to die and i had this massive blundstone boots on and these sort of uh kind of massive black jeans and I sort of bowled in there and sort of said yeah you know I think I was here last night I think I left my keys oh there they are can I pick my keys up and the policeman said hang on a second he said can I just see the sole of your shoes and I said oh yeah yeah sure he's like oh because that corresponds with this great big footprint that's over yeah it was like either the engine but sort of police of police thing and I was like yeah okay I said it's fair cop it was me i came through the window i wanted to get my keys because i wanted to go home it was pouring with rain in the middle of the night all right he said oh you can come with me then so you can come so they locked us up this is quite a nice story and they did a kind of good cop bad cop thing they're trying to break down the the local drug dealers credentials uh in the area and they sort of quizzed us relentlessly all day long and then just left us in the cell and then about seven o 'clock at night did you get anything to eat in the cell there's no comfort food in a prison cell It's like, you clearly haven't been arrested for a long time because now there is a little menu that they bring you.

19:11You'd probably deliveroo it now, wouldn't you? Excuse me, I'm just going to order some food again. You mind popping it through the bars? That's what my kids would be doing in the same situation. In this small town, you're a huge talent. The prawns were chased off stage. But as a front man, I have to ask, were you the local heartthrob? I don't know about that, but I didn't do, I fared pretty well, I'd say. things very different in those days it's mystery to me how it all works now yeah i used to wear i used to dress up a bit and so first of all i was into sort of madness and the specials and all that and i used to do like the nutty which we called it like sort of madness dancing used to used to get punched quite a lot for being different but i had a couple of people who like my madness dancing and they so kind of tough couple of local tough nuts who'd kind of stand up for me you know small places they got a very defensive attitude to to stuff happening yeah it poses deep questions about is there a better life out there?

20:06Is there more stuff going on? So for me, there was no argument. There's nothing going on here. Like, I'm off. I don't want to be a big fish in a small pond. I'm gone.

20:26Nine albums ago in the late 90s, you're living in London. And fame, it doesn't come completely easily. how do you make ends meet then I had like a couple of record deals they hadn't worked out so I put a few records out I think the saving grace of the whole thing was that from record one I developed this sort of cult following in Ireland which was so passionate and so uplifting that I just kept going back and that kind of made me think I wasn't being mad there was something that there that was worth pursuing by the time we were making White Ladder I'd sort of been through it and I'd kind And I've come out the other side of three albums, no success, been dropped a couple of times by record labels.

21:06And traditionally, it's over at that stage. When we made the demos for White Ladder, my manager, Rob Holden, was shopping them around and people just, oh, yeah, whatever. You know, in your heart, these songs on White Ladder are good. They are good. There's no getting away from that. But you're not getting the thing that you want. There's something about you that couldn't knock you down. Yes, you have to have some kind of innate confidence and audacity to want to do the thing. So I've always had that. I don't think it was given it by my parents or anything. I think it's just the way I am. It's true.

21:39Without that, I wouldn't have made it. How did you survive? I mean, was this money that you got from Ireland? Well, my wife got a job. She retrained as a solicitor. So she was suddenly the breadwinner. But yeah, we made the record. No one was interested in me. Basically, then we decided to put it out ourselves and obviously start in Ireland where we thought we might sell a few. But you recorded it in 97, 98. You were in a flat in Stoke New England. Yeah. Two up, two down. Right. So you've gone into that process. Cutting down White Ladder. I want to know, are you eating anything? What do you eat during this time?

22:12And what does the room look like and smell like? We had our daily routine was everyone would turn up about 10.30. We'd have toasted sandwiches. The Kloon drummer would make, he had his Breville. He'd bring his Breville around and we'd have a toasted sandwich every day. Wait, so Breville, for those who do not know this, this is a toasty maker. Yeah. It looks a bit like an old suitcase. So it would be ham and cheese, cheese and ham, cheese and tomato, tomato and cheese. It would just be that kind of thing. So you could have, you know, whatever. Was it like a little Breville or was it a big Breville?

22:53It was a big Breville. It was like a double thing. So you've got the two full slices on either side, which are divided by a diagonal. So you've got two toasties at a time. So that was our lunch. Every day we'd have a toasted sandwich, plentiful cups of tea during the day. I need to go back to this Breville, right? Making Breville's is a very underrated skill, right? To get that perfect, first of all, you need to know that the butter goes on the outside. Clune doesn't use butter. Clune is one of these incredibly precise people and he's a master Breville user. so he had it completely down the other thing to watch out for if you choose tomato from the menu remember it will be thermically hot well I was going to say you could be very careful you could ruin your mouth do you think if I listened back to that album that obviously sold so many copies and so beautiful so moving do you think I'll be able to hear you singing with a singed tongue at some point you probably would it's not going to be on sale away

23:55The story of your success of how you made and distributed White Ladder, it's something of a fairy tale. You self-funded the printing of the album. You personally drove the albums to the airport so they'd make Ireland in time for Christmas. Who would play you in the Netflix version of it? I can suggest a few people. Paul Meskell. I don't know who he is. He's the Irish one that's always in shorts. Paul Muskell just looks like every man that you've ever met in Kilkenny ever. Do you know who James Norton is? Yeah, he could maybe do it. He's too handsome, I think, James Norton. We all have to accept in the biopic of us we're going to be played by people far more attractive than we are.

24:39I like it. I'm going to talk to you about a little bit more just about this part of your life. This album goes out and it becomes one of the best-selling albums of the decade. 2019 don't want to embarrass you 2019 it was ranked as the uk's 10th best-selling album of the 21st century wow yeah that's pretty impressive isn't it it just sold tons of copies and i think people love the story as well as the music right does life change no because it wasn't sudden because um when a record was released in november 98 in ireland although we got great success in ireland during 99 by the end of 99 we were like seven times platinum um but in the uk it was a lot slower it's hard going so what i'm getting from this is by the time everyone loved it you were a bit like about bloody time actually around this ages ago i think what happened in ireland gave us this confidence that there was magic in the music and there was a magic in the air and obviously that magic just went out and spread and people were spreading the word and like it gave us this confidence that if someone just gave us a chance if they just creep the door open a toes width we'd get in and we we'd show them that we could do it even here and it's the hardest country on earth i think the uk to make it in because they've got a very it's got a very cynical kind of hard attitude to things but so as opposed to france they might go but you are an artist oh we respect you i'm sorry france for the accent but you know like we let me help you with your easel sir uh In the UK, no, good luck with that, mate.

26:16You know what I mean? You know, what's that all about? You know, when it happened, it was maybe a bit overwhelming and I sort of wanted to hide from it when it really kicked in. I mean, it doesn't sort of, the thing is you kind of get the success and then it's sort of latent in the success that the money and the sort of weirdness kind of comes down the tracks. You're so busy getting the success. We were touring for three years. It was only really when I got back that life had changed and the way that people look at you has changed. You can't, how do I adjust my stance so that this still works?

26:46Because this is all different now. Even your friends see you differently. Do you think people suddenly thought that you were like a great philosopher of feelings and thoughts and that you would suddenly have the answer to this thing? No, I don't think that. I think they just think of you as the thing that they know you as and they don't know you as the person you actually are. So there's a familiarity that you've given them an awful lot of your feelings in the music. So they sort of know a part of you, but they don't know all of you. When the money started to come in, did you stick with the Breville or did you get a George Foreman grill?

27:19I owed it to the Breville industry to always have a Breville at hand, you know, if a white ladder too came along. Was this a point where you went, right, no more fish fingers for me? Did you begin to live like a king? For example, did you go to one of those posh cheese shops and say, all of them, I'll take a wheel, please? I upscaled all my kind of ideas And I slowly got the hang of drinking nicer and nicer wine Like from£10 a bottle to£20 to£50 It's like, oh yes, this is nice So you kind of soon get the hang of it And then lovely food, who's not to love food But you had, I mean this is the little boy that wanted rabbit in white wine sauce Oh my god, he was happy He was happy So surely now White wine sauce with everything, cornflakes any given evening that you can go out you could go to the michelin star restaurants does this become you no because i think that for me the most important thing of all is home i just like people who've got my back i like to know where i am and so you know my favorite food would be home cooked food my food critique would probably be prefer ingredients first chef second yes they say a friend of mine told me that the french food is all about the genius of the chef italian food is all about the genius of god and i think that's a nice way of sort of looking at it and it's obviously a complete disservice to french food because there's all kinds of different aspects to it but what we really mean is the really flouncy nouvelle cuisine kind of stuff so i as much as that can be absolutely mind-blowing and i've had some incredible meals like that my default would be more of like like i say more ingredients first type thing so if you have the best sushi ever it's like how did that happen you know what happened just then when my mouth is like going yes and i'm now running around the room pumping and saying i'll have another bottle of fist pumping i'll have another bottle of uh you know your finest rice wine that's your inner child that is that's the yeah that's what food can do to you it lights you up it's like a religious experience it's it's that powerful was there a point where you were you were probably partying or were the kids too young i mean i've had my moments kind of thing did you ever hang out with the gallagher's no the hang is just not me i like i say i haven't really made the the uh the sort of celebrity circle i just something i could never relate to like people go all right it's like oh and i go all right i don't never met you before like you get the maddest thing sting says hi was one but the driver was driving I was driving sting this morning he says hi and then I was in the same car a couple of weeks ago yeah sting said hi again I said oh is this like a strange conversation I'm having with sting via a driver I said say hi for me too uh you know I did eventually meet sting he was actually really nice I don't know how to belong to it my response was to kind of kind of go like this isn't very real I'm kind of staying within myself a little bit I basically retreated snail into shell time I think so on some kind of deep personal level it just wasn't quite safe and I hadn't quite negotiated with myself what it all meant if you've got thousands of people telling you're special you're selling all these tickets out you're selling all these records and you've got suddenly you've got hundreds of new friends because you're you're a friend to the the record shop you're a friend to the venue you're a friend to this the record company the publisher everybody loves you and all the fans in the street it's like you You start to think you must be a bit special, even if you're trying to keep your feet on the ground.

30:51You've got to kind of work that through. You can't just go, that's not true. That is amazingly sensible of you because for somebody, you know, you'd wanted it for so long. Well, I didn't know if I wanted that. I wanted my music to be loved. It was do or die with White Ladder. If it hadn't happened then, I'd have probably got my paints back out and thought, you know, that didn't work out. I'm going in a different direction now.

31:221500 shows at least over the last 30 years how do you feel when you when it's it's still you packing that suitcase and going out though do you do you feel excited by that yeah i feel excited about the shows thing is i've missed like massive amounts of my children's lives you know left my wife in the lurch more times than can be even counted uh throughout 30 odd years and i'm about to do it again and i i've the slightly dread feeling about that because our kids have now grown up and gone so she must be good at holding the thought that she is yeah but i don't think she's going to enjoy that very much so that's something i'll be keeping my eye on but it's that thing about what happens in a show is that that music is like a battery that has taken on a lot of positive charge and it's like the whole massive swathe of music that's out there all my music every all the music all the good stuff it's a charge of sort of the earth's people in their joys and their grief in their melancholy whatever it is it's like to tap into that and and get that electricity out into the crowd that is going to be my job and then the privilege of doing that and feeling when that connection gets really really really gets made well i'm addicted to it i can't i can't do without it there must have been difficult times where you thought i'm not doing this anymore i remember writing in my my diary i don't forget how boring this can be and i by that i didn't mean the shows i meant the sort of sensory deprivation that touring is none of this weirdly sort of you don't have many choices in a way you've got to be in the next town by the next day you're going to be eating whatever that venue has provided for you to eat and there you are that's the end of it i compartmentalize i just focus entirely on the show and the music so it's It's like if the show doesn't come off, it makes, my heart is very heavy.

33:16I feel very sort of dissatisfied. It has to happen. I have to connect. It's always on you, as Springsteen says. If that show doesn't work, you can blame the PA, the crowd, but it's always on you. The show has to connect. You have to make that connection. That's what you're there for. Jesus Christ, every single person here relies on me. Yeah, well, I did. I'm going to go into a kind of therapy phase of my life. I realized in about 2009, 2010, you know, the backside fell out of the music industry. It became kind of meaningless on a commercial level in terms of selling things. You know, when U2's album got put in everyone's record collections by iTunes, that pretty much signaled the end of having a record collection.

33:58So the only way to really keep everything going, as in like pay for everything, was to get out on the road. And we toured multiple times on each album, like four times on Draw the Line, three times on Foundly. And it nearly sort of broke my relationship. And I think I was paying for my band, all the paraphernalia that was still existent from the previous system when you used to actually sell records. So I had to sort of, and I took it on as a responsibility, the thing that you're sort of picking up on. I loaded it all onto my own shoulders and I was kind of, what happened was I sort of squeezed myself, the person that isn't the singer songwriter, that isn't the person on stage, that isn't the dad or that isn't the, you know, the husband, the mortgage payer or whatever, just the person that's me, that he was the person that got lost in it all.

34:43And I think I'd sort of compartmentalized everything and I was trying to fulfill my obligations in so many different ways. And I just realized I was really becoming quite unhappy. And touring can do that to you. It's like you're just constantly in a weird place. Like you can be somewhere like, I remember being in Australia and feeling just like so far away. I'm feeling so, it was like Easter Monday or something and everyone, all these families are like on the beach. I felt that emotional distance. and I thought, oh, you know, I wish I could be home. Fast forward 48 hours, you've just had one of the best gigs of the last two years and you're like drinking champagne and acting like a right loon.

35:21So you get those are the two worlds of touring. You're getting to do a very heightened thing.

35:34All the way through all of this though, you've talked about this constant in your life, your wife, Olivia. you've been together for three decades she even knew you before the stinky room and the brevels and stoke newington she knew you and you were literally just a weirdo who was telling everybody you were going to be famous how did you meet yeah well funnily enough there's a food food plays a part in this on the day that john major was um elected yeah as tory prime minister 1992 april the ninth I met my wife for the first time I decided to throw a banquet sort of meal I called it the the death of the British imagination the fact that the Tories have been voted back in anyway my my party piece was chickpea curry this is coming over from my student days got lots of booze in everyone got drunk and that's when I first met my wife so um you know um and we're still together yes it's been a long time so that was 1992 I was going to ask because to any rock stars listening to this or anyone that's going to go into this business how on earth do you stay married for 30 years it's down to my wife's patience first of all let's just get that on the table and what i love about her is a sense of humor a sense of very perceptive um yeah taking the piss out of my songwriting my rhyming schemes my voice which sounded like some kind of wild scottish kind of heathen i surround myself with people who basically take the mick out of me all the time so i think they don't realize that you're just like a massive deal do you not tell them you said you don't know who i am they don't care you now have uh two grown-up daughters they are 19 and 22 and a house yeah in norfolk that's my big luxury what do you get from norfolk it's a wild place it sounds like i'm down uh on the the marshes my house is down towards a nature reserve nature reserve on both sides and then out across the marsh you're on the beach basically in sort of 10 minute i love nature so much i'm like i'm not a twitcher i don't sort of chase birds around in some sort of obsessive sort of train spottery way but it's not that i'm not taking score all the time i always notice if a bird should fly past that window i identify it immediately i love that i'm not a twitcher i'm not i'm twitching someone who gets like oh my god there's a what there's a There's a blue flank red tail in Ipswich.

37:58I've got to get there. They twitch. You do bird watch though. Oh, yeah. Because once you've got the binoculars and you actually see into the birds' lives and behaviours through that little portal, it's totally transformative. You're kind of happiest when you're covered in mud. I'm happiest diving into the sea. I sea swim from about end of April. This season was end of April till end of October, which is late for me. I've got a friend down in Norfolk and we go swimming together. It's a sort of bromance. We're a two-person swimming club. So there was a massive high tide and full moon. I was down there with some friends.