IVE been revisiting one of my favourite albums this last week – White Ladder by David Gray. Equal to the fact it is a decent album to listen to, I am fascinated by the story of how it came to be and how it slow-ebbed its way to meteoric success.

The story begins in 1996. A relatively, young upcoming singer-songwriter, who particularly enjoyed in Ireland had just released his third album, titled Sell, Sell, Sell.

It was an evolution of the first two albums, which were far more in the folk-rock genre than what would follow in the lengthy career that lay ahead.

Despite being called Sell, Sell, Sell, unfortunately, the music buying public did not Buy, Buy, Buy. Looking in a hard retrospective fashion, it could be argued that it wasn’t his finest work. There were some good tracks, Late Night Radio being a prime example, but it wasn’t a full, coherent album that stood out from the crowd.

The failure of Sell, Sell, Sell led to him losing his record deal – and what do you do if you’re without that, when your back is against the wall and you’re staring at relative career abyss?

You could give up and accept you’ve had a good run. Or you can retreat to a studio in your spare bedroom with your musician friends and create something as spectacular as ‘White Ladder’ and fortunately for the rest of us, that’s what David Gray did.

It was mostly, if not all, recorded in that room and the studio wasn’t exactly Rockfield in that on some of the tracks, you can almost hear the roadworks happening outside in the background.

When the album was released independently in November 1998, it was a slow burner – well received but not setting the world alight.

However, a lifeline was around the corner when ATO Records offered to re-release the album in 2000. With the additional resources of a record label came extra attention and primarily through the success of Babylon the album became the 11th biggest selling album of the 21st century.

Many years later, I learned that the music video to Babylon, featuring a lot of panning cameras and fuel at a price we’d give our right arm for now was directed by Keiran Evans who would later direct many of the excellent Manic Street Preachers music videos.

AS Vincent Vega would say ‘big ups’ are due to our silent sound assassin in the team, Rudy Gibbs-Pearce for an outstanding latest edition of his elusive, mysterious Rudy’s Archive Radio episode.

To cut a long story short, Rudy’s Archive Radio is as much a radio show as it is an artistic statement in the form of sound – as it takes the listener through a specially curated soundscape of music and clips. His latest episode took us to 1971 – and it was a real treat.

In the absence of our (still being built) new radio website, if you google ‘Rudy’s Archive Radio’ you can find it on his soundcloud.