David Gray to showcase new album in Big Top

“Whenever I think of the Galway Arts Festival, I think of the time I stayed in the Warwick Hotel and this crazy old guy kept trying to force-feed me hard-boiled eggs.”The exhibitions and performances enjoyed in the city during the Arts Festival annually instil in people a variety of enduring memories but that recalled by David Gray is far from typical.“He was sort of like Missus Doyle from Father Ted. You’d have to eat around four of the bloody things and he’d still be pressing you to eat more.”Being egged on to indulge at breakfast time may have sent his cholesterol high during that visit, but it is expectations that will be high in Galway next month, when he treats his legion of fans to a preview of a number of songs from his forthcoming album at the Festival Big Top on July 21.He plans to include five or six songs in his set from Draw The Line, which is scheduled for release in September. The new album is bound to be subjected to the difficult comparison with his phenomenally successful 1999 release, White Ladder, which sold six million copies.Gray admits that the extent of its success has been a mixed blessing insofar as it has been extremely hard to follow. “You can’t really complain about the problems posed by such things,” he says. “It’s tough at the top, as they say. “There was something very...