He's buzzing. It sounded very, very loud. "Did it?

Great, " he says, leading me into a dressing room. What follows is an enjoyable if incredibly intense conversation about just about every aspect of the 38-year-old musician's life and career to date.

But first the future. He has three new band members and is hurtling through the process of recording his sixth studio album.

Where do the songs come from?

He begins to tell me about one tune, titled 'Breathe', which hasn't been recorded yet. The answer is a story I am certainly not expecting.

"It's about the ludicrous hypocrisy that sustains our moral structures. How we bring the shutters down, " he enthuses.

Engaging but often retreating into a crouched position, when Gray starts talking, he talks. A lot. "I had this idea about how your conscience comes to call. I was playing with this tune, just singing gobbledegook and the doorbell rang." A group of exiled Iranian intellectuals were standing in front of him. They were campaigning for dissidents and human rights abuses in Iran and Gray knew them from passing them on the street so he offered them some money. They said they wanted to talk so he let them in to his house, where his wife and two young girls live. After a few hours of discussion they began showing him pictures of corpses.

"It was getting really heavy, " he says, "and I started to think 'this is my house. What am I doing?'" So he offered them a donation.

He reckons one of them knew who he was. It came down to the crunch: they wanted money.

Gray wrote a cheque "for quite a lot of money and thought they would be pleased with it. I was generous, " he says believably. He perhaps expected gushing gratitude. They said that the cost of a life was four times what he had written his cheque for. "In the end I wrote a cheque for four times the original amount."

So the Iranians left the house with the money and Gray had bought a life. "The entire equation shredded my defence mechanism. I was looking at myself. What kind of slimy shit was that? It was offering a crumb. I thought of the Bible and of the story of the rich man passing through the eye of a needle and Jesus saying give. How much?

Ninety percent?

I gave a paltry sum of my stockpile. How I looked at it was 4through a prism and everything refracted into a million forms of hypocrisy. Every minute of every day if we stopped to think it would just destroy us. Our human condition is to protect ourself with lies. We claim to love the truth but we cherish lies more: the right ones. We just have to pick them. Our moral code over the past 500 years has been like refining sugar.

Beheading? Putting people in stocks? We don't do that anymore. . ."

The next morning when he returned to the song he was "bursting with self loathing", he laughs out loud. "But a real zest, a drive, an anger and a rage."

The story sums up the David Gray I met last Friday, not the Grey David impression many have of the man who still holds the title of having the biggest selling album ever in Ireland. I tell him I don't want to talk about White Ladder and why he has refused to play his hit single 'Babylon' for the past few years but he brings it up anyway. He maybe needs to explain how he made friends with it again.

"Before I made White Ladder I knew what I was most convinced by. I could see a lot of my faults and my strengths and basically decided to play to them and worked on it. I used to be more frivolous. I kind of thought I wasn't going to blame the world for what didn't happen. I realised I need to start with a better attitude and if it didn't work out I could accept it."

When he finished White Ladder in 1999 he felt he had cracked it.

"It was oozing character, " he says. "You know I'm never going to be a cool thing. I don't cut that pose and I have never quite made it to cool but my strength is not that. It's the heart-on-sleeve thing and that record has 'Please Forgive Me'. It has character. It was the first time I thought my record didn't sound like anyone else's record. It sounded like mine."

Since he brought it up, it's difficult not to get the feeling that he would love just a bit of "the cool thing" at the expense of White Ladder's ubiquity. Would he? "You know it's just . . . something so successful . . . became an albatross . . . what a load of b****cks. . . you know the funny thing about 'Babylon' is I do actually feel that song again come back to life."

As recently as last year, Gray was quoted saying the song "died for me". Now he has begun to play it acoustically. At this point he starts singing it, mimicking the way he now plays it on acoustic guitar. But back to the question. "I wouldn't [trade success for being cool]. I don't see life in that way. I am what I am. These are the bizarre and wonderful things that have happened to me. Of course to answer the same questions. . . It's very like an albatross. 'Did you ever feel like giving up?' 'It's the biggest selling record in Ireland.'

I don't know. It would be so churlish. I can't say that I haven't felt disgruntled in the past but I've obviously crossed a line and am in another phase of my life now what with releasing a greatest hits record and actually feeling all right about it. It does actually sound like a greatest hits record. Who would have thought it? Some of the songs had been giving me nightmares for years. I was prepared for a white knuckle ride. Oh no, start the tape!"

Since childhood, Gray has been a contradiction of shyness and "ludicrous self-confidence" as he calls it. He talks at length and with great detail about growing up in the Welsh countryside. How his parents used to let him watch only three hours of TV a week and how he used to amuse himself imaginatively playing Subbuteo in fantasy world where Man U always ended up beating Liverpool. He recalls in Wales a happy childhood where his mum would take him into Swansea to buy him the latest clobber "as if it was a mecca for ska clothes . . .

she tried to create things for me . . . I was like a child from Deliverance."

He talks of his first brush with girls and how as soon as he had done something once the fear subsided. How he was in "the cheeky gang" in school, how his first band was Madness and how, aged eight, he contracted "the illness" to become a performer when asked to replace someone in a local panto. "Now I have kids of my own I can imagine how cute I was, " he says warmly.

"I felt something out there that night in the darkness of the crowd and the light of the stage and it formalised that I'm up here and this is my own universe and you are all out there. It was power but in a wonderful way . . .

it was definitely a moment."

He talks about the first song he wrote, titled 'World of Lies', trading records. The Cocteau Twins, the Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout. Then Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Tim Buckley. And Dylan, of course.

"The colour, tactile nature of his imagery. I could see it and taste it. There was nothing between you and his imagination. I was enraptured by it. With less there was more."

He talks about Wales with some pathos for the place. "They are such big hearted people but the tragedy of Wales is being so close to England. With Scotland and Ireland there is enough left.

Wales has become embittered. It has a twisted, cynical side. The whole culture has been diluted.

They are wonderfully emotional and when they sing it all comes out: the geography, the landscape.

It's like Irish folk music. There are brambles and vines and moss interwoven into the voices of people in their hearts. There is this sadness creeping in all the time. . . the longing to be in God's green acre."

He has been married to Olivia for 14 years. "Ten years overdue our divorce, " he jokes. They married on tour. He will be 40 soon enough. "Getting on gives you perspective and being a dad bursts your bubble. One of the things about being successful is suddenly everyone does what you tell them to do. With kids that just doesn't happen. Why doesn't all of life work that way?

Thankfully this stops me from being a complete egomaniac, " he laughs.

It must be funny. From art college to making records that nobody bought to becoming a big star. He may not have 'cracked' America but his singles do make it into the Top 40 and he is happy with that. He is funny about his early work. "It depends on which criteria you look at it, " he says.

"Commercially it was backslide, backslide, backslide, and then goodbye, " he says while sipping an entire bowl of tomato soup in one go. Three albums between 1993 and 1999 and nothing. Then boom and backlash in quick succession. Wallpaper, Dido, Habitat, and then a couple of years ago one of the worst comparisons. James Blunt was being touted as the new David Gray. He may not be the biggest man in the world but I'm certainly not going to ask him how he felt about that comparison. Sorry.

But back to the future. "I don't intend to relent. I feel completely obsessive and full of purpose and have an appetite for it as strongly as I ever have. I have come to grips with recording. I'm going back to my gut instincts but added to that I have a lot of knowledge and confidence that I have acquired along the way."

Halfway through making his new album, Gray this weekend will be supporting himself with an acoustic set in Dublin and Kerry and then doing a greatest hits set with the band.

"I've lost the fear; the sort of wanting to be taken seriously thing which was a big issue for me after the ubiquitous record I made. It's just slipped away. Yes, that was important to me a few years ago. But now I don't give a f**k actually, " he laughs. "I just feel the music flooding through me. It is so infectious. I don't know will it be commercially successful." And you get the sense he doesn't care. That much.