A record that took two and a half years to become a number one

David Gray nearly did not make it past his first weeks. Born in 1968 with a narrowing between his stomach and small intestine, he was misdiagnosed at first and came close to starving. The boy who survived grew up in Wales, where his parents ran a gift shop and a clothing business in Solva, and he later credited that corner of Pembrokeshire with feeding an imagination that made a musical career feel possible.

After art school in Carmarthenshire and then Liverpool, Gray made three albums in the 1990s: A Century Ends, Flesh and Sell, Sell, Sell. They earned him a following among folk-rock listeners but little in the way of sales. A critic once heard his debut single, “Birds Without Wings”, as an anguished, intense troubadour, a male cousin of PJ Harvey. Respect was there; the audience was not.

That changed with White Ladder. Gray put it out on his own label, IHT Records, in November 1998, and it was reissued in 2000 on ATO, the label owned by Dave Matthews. By then he had moved from acoustic folk and guitar-driven alternative rock to the blend of songwriting and electronics that became his trademark. “Babylon” climbed to number five on the UK singles chart in June 2000, and the album reached number one there two years and five months after its first release, staying on the chart for 151 weeks.

In Ireland the effect was even larger: 100,000 copies sold, six weeks at the top, and by one 2012 report the biggest-selling album the country had known. The record also carried “This Year's Love”, “Please Forgive Me” and “Sail Away”. His next album, A New Day at Midnight, drew cooler reviews yet still entered at number one in 2002. Gray's story is a reminder that a song can sit quietly for years before the world is ready to lean in.