You might reasonably expect the crowd at a David Gray show to know the words to the hits from his huge-selling album, White Ladder, but what rapidly becomes clear is that they know all the words to every single one of that record's songs.
Not only that, songs from Life in Slow Motion, Gray's newly-released album, receive a roar of recognition after only a few notes. So fervent are the audience that at one point Gray yells "More taxes!" just to see if they'll cheer absolutely anything he says. Gray's populism makes it easy for a certain kind of music snob to take potshots; it isn't hard to see him as ushering in the ubiquitous squawk of the likes of James Blunt. It is hard, however, to see Blunt introducing a song as "a hymn to the lack of a god", as Gray does with Ain't No Love.
Similarly This Year's Love, superficially a beery, smeary end-of-the-night waltz, is actually a lacerating meditation on the fruitlessness of emanding an assurance that love won't end badly. The almost triumphant surge of its climax is undermined, shot through with doubt, as the song dies away.
Potent ambivalence set to irrefutable tunes is Gray's strongest suit. It shouldn't be forgotten that the escapist tendencies of some of the best loved White Ladder songs were fuelled by despair and frustration after Gray had made three previous albums that were largely ignored; their follow-up grew out of the long shadow of his father's death. The delirious mantra of Babylon - "let go of your heart, let go of your head and feel it now"- is neither simple hedonism nor blind surrender, it's the cry of someone seeking refuge from a world full of trouble. There ought to be a way to bottle the song's wonderful, wild euphoria.
Gray's antecedents aren't sappy MOR-balladeers, but Van Morrison, Springsteen and the Waterboys' Mike Scott: creators of big, visionary, complex music. Certainly, he seems like an ordinary bloke. Something, however, transforms him, not least the way he throws a melody. Frequently, he seems entirely caught up in the redemptive, freeing act of singing, lost in the music. His capacity to move and uplift isn't blandly feelgood, it comes from a uniting sense of how we might transcend suffering.
· At Manchester Apollo tonight (box office: 0870 401 8000), and touring.
