Have a rifle through the dusty CD tower or rarely-visited shelf of any Irish home and you will find one or all of the following things: a copy of A Woman’s Heart, Garth Brooks’s No Fences, ABBA Gold, Christy Moore Live at the Point, O by Damien Rice with its unusual fabric case, a cassette single of Put ‘Em Under Pressure and at least two copies of 1998′s White Ladder, that seminal David Gray album that had worked its way into every CD player by the turn of the millennium.
Gray literally carried Dublin into the year 2000, playing an open-air concert in Merrion Square on New Year’s Eve. In the summer of the following year, I spent three months on New York’s Long Island, badgering the barman of the only dive that would serve us underage to put on my White Ladder CD. We were flabbergasted that nobody in America seemed to have heard of the man who to this day holds the record for the bestselling album in Ireland for the aforementioned White Ladder. More than any U2 record, more than The Corrs, more than Adele.
It’s estimated that around the height of its popularity one in 10 adults in the country owned a copy of White Ladder and it was the soundtrack to the teen and tween years of countless Irish millennials. Now, 26 years since White Ladder’s release and 30 years since Gray played his first Irish gig at Whelan’s in Dublin, it feels right that Gen Z are discovering the bobble-headed Welshman and blasting his music across TikTok in a trend called “babyloning”.
As a David Gray early adopter who still goes mildly feral upon hearing the opening chords of This Year’s Love, nothing has brought more joy to my ageing bones than the fresh-faced girlies dancing to Gray’s hit Babylon in their TikTok videos.
Somewhat fittingly it’s an Irish user, Fermanagh’s Danielle Collins, who introduced the song to her peers. “I was hungover as hell,” is how she explains the decision to have a friend make a video of herself dancing on a rain-drenched Enniskillen street soundtracked by Babylon. She coupled the joyous “If you want it, come and get it” chorus with the text “Just got left on delivered but it’s okay because this song exists”.
And she’s right, Babylon does have the power to make you feel a bit less despondent about an unanswered text. Collins carried on “babyloning” in follow-up posts, using the song as a balm for “When work gets a little too hectic and you remember they don’t pay you enough to care” and to claim that every day can be a “Babylon day”.
Collins says it was her dad who introduced her to White Ladder, which makes sense given that the album now slots neatly into the “Dad Rock” genre and is as ubiquitous in Irish nostalgia as a USA biscuit tin and the ESB “Coming Home” ad starring Alan Hughes.
Gray’s success in Ireland, though, has grass roots. He released three albums before White Ladder and none of them enjoyed success in the UK. However, in Ireland, with its relatively small yet highly engaged music scene Gray found an audience and was already a highly respected artist here by the time he recorded White Ladder with his own money in a friend’s spare room. Anyone who liked The Frames and Van Morrison would have quickly been turned on to his music with the pipeline then leading them to Bell X1 and Damien Rice.
When I first saw Collins’s viral video on TikTok my whole body was engulfed in a shiver of delicious nostalgia and bliss. I remember my parents’ delight when I showed an interest in Simon & Garfunkel and The Beatles and the music of their youth. Now, with Gen Z giving Babylon the seal of approval I’ve taken on the stance of proud elder, thrilled that Gray is having a moment in 2024.
With CDs gone the way of the dodo, I’ve been left wondering what nostalgic trinkets from the 2020s will still be lurking in Irish homes in 25 years – that is of course if anything survives the aftershocks of Marie Kondo and her decluttering mania. We’ve all proudly purchased a copy of Prophet Song so those will surely stand the test of time, and I’d be very honoured if there were some Complete Aisling books still knocking around. Perhaps they’ll be bookended by some Sculpted by Aimee make-up, dusty memorabilia from that shambles of a 2024 referendum, and the ever-enduring 2002 iodine tablets, just in case.