At this point, he began to make the most compelling music in his entire oeuvre, exhibiting his work on online platforms, such as YouTube and SoundCloud, having left ‘the business’ behind him. On finding their ideal home, they created a beautiful music room (he hated the term ‘studio’) and reinvented himself as the deliberately gender-ambiguous Mary Cigarettes. In the late 1990s, Gregory moved to leafy Hertfordshire to be with his partner Thomas. The ‘made it’, ‘signed-to-a-record-label’ phase is only the beginning of the story. And in the future it would give him a cushion from crude financial pressures, allowing him to continue as a musician. Despite the absence of a hit in the Anglo-American firmament, he had signed with four of five major record companies and received the related financial advances from them. And, as the cliche goes, he was actually ‘big in Japan’. While an out-and-out hit eluded him, the last two albums particularly attracted favourable reviews in Rolling Stone, were very popular on College Radio in the US, as well as achieving commercial success in Southern Europe. He regarded the second of these as his first album proper, revealing an acute critical ear, especially when it came to judging the value of his own work. Think of Swans (CBS, 1986), Strong at Broken Places (Atco/Polygram, 1990) and Euroflake in Silverlake (EMI, 1995). Gray went on to release three studio albums on major labels as a solo artist. Perfect Crime played as support band to U2 on their War tour, and the only artists from Ireland to join the star-studded line-up that performed at U2’s first ‘homecoming’ concert in Dublin’s Phoenix Park Racecourse to 25000 people after ‘conquering’ the world in the summer of 1983. While first single, ‘Brave’, didn’t bother the charts, it possessed a sonic signature that was radically different from other Northern Irish groups at the time. They released two singles on MCA records before disbanding. Born Paul Lerwill in Coleraine on May 1959, Gray was the lead singer and songwriter of Perfect Crime, an early 80s post-punk band from Northern Ireland’s North Antrim coast. Mary Cigarettes was the nom de musique of Gregory Gray. This ‘liminality’ would permeate his work throughout his long career. In that article, he talks about coming out, but also of not being quarantined to being ‘a gay artist’. Hot Press, Ireland’s NME, acknowledged his place in history in 1996, with a double centre-page feature, aptly titled, ‘The Greatest Irish Rock Story Never Told’.

He was also, significantly, the first Irish popular music artist to ‘come out’ as gay, and the first to carry aspects of a queer sensibility into his songs and performance.

His version of ‘home’, like Wilde before him, was riven with dissonance: a place that made me, that I can’t escape from, but simultaneously need to escape from the conundrum, ‘I am of this, but need to be more’. Mary Cigarettes was in thrall to this homeland, but in an unsentimental and critical way.

Those familiar with Oscar Wilde’s ‘gutter and the stars’ epithet, will detect the reference to the seminal Irish and gay writer. As he put it on ‘Three Minute Requiem’ the closing track on his last studio album, ‘I left my home, so I could be myself’. Not out of pomposity, but because he disliked ‘best of’ lists, was suspicious of ‘heroes’, and perhaps especially, of having his magnificent body of work reduced to its national provenance, where an ‘accident of birth’ is taken to define you. He would have felt uneasy about this compliment, however. Sadly last week, the 59 year-old Northern Irish singer-songwriter AKA Gregory Gray passed away after a short illness at his Hertfordshire home. So sang Mary Cigarettes, fittingly described as ‘one of the great unsung heroes of Irish rock and pop’, on his track ‘Rocket Science’.

Oscar wilde gay pioneer