By Steven S. Drachman
About a year ago, I was standing in a little music club near Haarlem, in the Netherlands; various musicians performed that night to celebrate a friend’s sixtieth birthday. It was near the end of the evening, and I am ashamed to admit I was talking to someone about something or other and paying no attention to the performer on stage. This was, of course, very wrong. I was being a huge jerk.
Suddenly, though, a voice singing one of the most insistently catchy tunes I’d ever heard burrowed insistently into my brain and pulled me away from my stupid conversation until I had to pay attention.
The song was “Supersonic Morning,” and the remarkable voice, which belonged to Ray Gibson, was friendly without being cloyingly warm, uncannily smooth without being slick. A voice born to sing a hook-laden song like this, a catchy, psychedelic space-pop anthem set in a utopia called Gugu, where John and George are still in the band, Elvis still writes songs, no one ever has to die, and Gibson himself performs a concert from an asteroid stage for a Sgt. Pepper-esque audience made up of “talking whalebirds and clapping shiny hands.” Anyway, nonsense or not, it’s vivid.
I guess hearing Gibson sing “Supersonic Morning” was probably like the first time I heard “Come on Eileen” or “Take on Me” or even Pachelbel’s Canon; and maybe almost like the first time I heard David Bowie sing “Space Oddity” (which was on Dick Clark’s Live Wednesday in 1978, for the record).
What the song has in common with those irresistible melodies is that it makes perfect emotional and musical sense the very first time you hear it; and, also like those songs, but unlike most very catchy tunes, you can listen to it over and over again, and it never becomes cloying. Once you hear it, you will feel as though you’ve known it forever, as though it has existed since the beginning of the Universe, and when it gets stuck in your head (and it will), you won’t mind.
What I experienced in 2025 in the Netherlands was what an audience in a Prague bar must have felt back in 2007, which is when and where Gibson’s musical career unexpectedly began.
Gibson is from Grimsby, in the North of England. “It’s not the end of the world,” he says, “but you can see it from there. It’s been in gradual decline since I was born in ’76.” In 1999 he followed a girlfriend to the Czech Republic, where he worked in human resources. Pretty quickly, he spoke fluent Czech. Then one day, eight years later, he was sitting in a bar with his father, listening to a version of karaoke in which bar patrons sang with a live band, and his life changed.
“It was a band that had a list of a hundred tracks that they could all play,” he told me. “You could pick one. My dad was visiting me in Prague, and I was moaning, like, ‘Oh Jesus, she can’t sing. No, he can’t sing.’ So he said the right thing: ‘Okay then, clever clogs. You go up and sing a song, if you know what it’s supposed to sound like.’ ”
He was more than thirty years old; he wasn’t a musician; he’d had no ambitions of becoming a musician. He’d been working in HR in a Prague office for almost a decade. But he sang in the car and the shower. “I had my 10,000 hours,” he says, and so he accepted his father’s dare. He chose “Imagine.”
“It silenced the room,” he says. (Just the way he would silence me, years later!) He worried that he’d bombed. “I thought, Oh, I’ll not come back here. Then someone said, ‘No, no, they really liked it. They’re just a bit shocked.’ I thought, okay, that’s interesting. Maybe I should find a band.”
So Gibson always knew he could sing, but now he had to learn to write songs and play guitar. He formed a band called The Roads, quickly earned a record deal, and became a success in the Czech Republic. Within a year after that transformative karaoke night, he quit his HR job to be a full-time rock star.
Now Gibson’s career anthology, 50 has been released to mark his fiftieth birthday, a retrospective spanning a late-blooming pop-with-cellos-and-French-horns career, from his Prague breakthrough with The Roads to the cosmic singalong of “Supersonic Morning,” which closes out the album.
I spoke to him recently about “Supersonic Morning,” 50 and his career. This interview has been edited and rearranged for brevity and clarity.
Oblivioni: Did you try to make “Supersonic Morning” incredibly catchy?
Ray Gibson: That was with producer Tom Krimi in Berlin. We thought, yeah, this is one of the most catchy songs. Let’s just load it full of hooks and see what happens. I rode that as a single for quite a while, and it tends to be the last song in a set. It’s a crowd-pleaser.
Oblivioni: It’s like “Come On Eileen” or “Take On Me” or something like that. It’s immediate. As I said, even if you’re not listening, it just comes into your unconscious and then into your conscious and makes you stop whatever else you’re doing. Do you like it still?
Ray Gibson: I still love it. I am completely relaxed when I play that song, because by the time I get to that song in my set, I’ve hit all of the difficult notes in other songs, and this one I can just scream out. I don’t need to save my voice for anything coming after. There are some difficult vocal lines in my live set, in songs like “Keeper at the Sea,” which you’ve not heard yet, and “Megaman” is quite difficult to sing and play together. But by the time it gets to “Supersonic Morning,” it’s just fun. Even though there are some long notes, I don’t need to save myself for anything. I really like the release of that one.
Oblivioni: So what’s it like turning 50?
Ray Gibson: It’s good. There’s no pretending, right? You are where you are. I think it’s really cool. Turning forty was like, ‘Oh no, I’m losing that three.’ But turning fifty felt more like an achievement and a celebration. I really enjoyed having a big party and singing some songs with my friends and then collating that album as a bit of a best-of: this is where I’m up to. And there’s more to come. I’ve got new stuff I haven’t put out. So it’s a great feeling, and I’m finding my voice, still.
Oblivioni: You started in the music business very late. Your career took off very quickly, didn’t it?
Ray Gibson: Oh, it was rapid, yeah. Because I’d been singing for ages. I’d been singing in the car, in the shower. I was a good singer, and I had my 10,000 hours. I used to sit with Motown stuff from being eight or nine years old. I used to sing along to everything, and I purposefully used to sit with records and try to imitate them. I imitated all of the female vocals as well as the male vocals, which is why I’ve got that falsetto you can hear in some ways.
Oblivioni: Yes, yes.
Ray Gibson: So that’s where the range came from, because I thought, well, I love that song too. Why can’t I sing Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin? If I like it, just use a different register. I kept that going. I move between registers in the same song.
Oblivioni: Why did you leave the Czech Republic, if you were so popular there?
Ray Gibson: There was one night we played a show, and I think we played maybe twenty-five tracks. After we paid the sound engineer and all the costs were taken off the door money and distributed to the band, I worked out I got the equivalent of €25 a song that I sang. I thought, no, this is no good. At the same time, we’d been on tour with a British band living in Berlin, and they were living off their gigs. So I thought, we’re going to have to move. I went to Berlin to check it out, and then I came back and said, “Guys, I’m moving to Berlin. You can come and visit. I’ll book the shows. I’m going to live there and network, and you just come over for the gigs.” They said, “No, no, no, we’re coming with you.” So then we had a band apartment from March 2009 in Berlin, which was a wild experience. That’s where we did a lot of our songwriting. We rehearsed four or five hours a day, and when we were not rehearsing, we were playing live. So we were a proper working band.
Oblivioni: Are you still remembered and known in the Czech Republic?
Ray Gibson: Yeah, yeah. In fact, I met my wife in a Berlin bar in September 2009, but we didn’t get together properly until July 2010. When she said she was meeting me to one of her friends, she said, “Oh, he’s a singer, by the way, but he’s in Prague at the minute,” and she was coming to Prague to visit me there. Her friend said, “Oh, I lived in Prague, and if you’re there, you must see if The Roads are playing, because they’re amazing live.” And she said, “You’re joking. That’s my boyfriend. He’s the lead singer.” So that was kind of amusing. Then she was a bit starstruck. And we’ve got two kids now.
Oblivioni: That’s great. Do you think that helped?
Ray Gibson: Doesn’t hurt.
Oblivioni: Did you ever sing in Czech?
Ray Gibson: No, that was awful. There are too many consonants.
Oblivioni: So it’s not a good singing language?
Ray Gibson: No, no, no. It’s too closed. There are too many closed sounds. The word for Thursday is an extreme example. Some people can write good lyrics in Czech, but it’s not easy.
Oblivioni: If you could choose three of your songs that you would want people to listen to, what would you choose?
Ray Gibson: I would say “IP Police” and “The Sword,” which is one of the best songs from The Roads that we did, and then “Grief,” which would be the third. It’s not a hit or anything, but it’s just an unusual construction and very honest.
Oblivioni: The video for “IP Police” is really great.
Ray Gibson: Yeah, that was fun. Deliberately AI-augmented, because of the song’s theme. That was a lot of fun. I worked with a team in Israel to build that, the Dor Brothers. We did some live footage, got some stock footage, edited it all together, and then gave it that AI spin on top. It fits. I don’t think it will age much because of the story of the song. I’m happy with that. That’s an unusual song structure as well. It’s not chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight or anything. It’s pretty different.
Oblivioni: Talk about choosing something to get people to protest! You used AI in the making of the video, and you did it in Israel.
Ray Gibson: Well, yeah, this was a couple years ago, but yeah. The title, by the way, is deliberately a nod to Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” because the arpeggiated riff at the beginning is very Radiohead. So it’s a deliberate nod to them. I don’t hide my influences.
Oblivioni: Your music sounds like it’s an influence on top of an influence on top of another one, every fifteen seconds. I can’t really unpack it.
Ray Gibson: We are all just the sum of everything we listen to in the end, right?
Oblivioni: So do you try to do it?
Ray Gibson: I’m not trying to sound like anyone or anything in particular, but things just come out that way because of your influences. Very occasionally, I’ll be working on a song, and I don’t have the next little bit, and sometimes I’ll think, Oh, what would Bowie sing? That can get me unstuck. I can hear him. I can kind of channel it a bit. I won’t go and listen to records to try and do it, but just from my imagination I say, Well, if he was here, what would he say next? That does sometimes get you out of a jam.
Oblivioni: What about David Bowie in his early ‘sixties music? Because I kind of heard a little bit of the influence of “Memory of a Free Festival,” weirdly.
Ray Gibson: Yeah, I get quoted as being a bit folky, which is interesting. I guess I am. I don’t listen to a lot of folk music, but there’s definitely something going on there. There’s a storytelling vibe and a looking-for-the-truth theme. So I get why I get compared to folk singers.
Oblivioni: Let’s talk about “The Sword,” which you mentioned as one of your top three. That begins with a sample from Obama. You chose to quote Obama going to war, not talking about people getting along. Why?
Ray Gibson: The Commander-in-Chief is responsible for more drone strikes and everything than anyone else. That’s the whole thing with the job. I think he’s a decent person, but the job makes you a monster, right? Because you’re the world’s policeman. So you’re in charge of this strike and that strike and taking people down. That’s his speech from West Point around that time. I just thought that teed up the story. The hypocrisy: defending freedom, preemptive attacks.
Oblivioni: Then in “Megaman,” you sample Jiddu Krishnamurti, saying, “You have to be a light to yourself.”
Ray Gibson: Yeah. You drive to work alone behind the march / Your brother’s gone to war to fuel the cars. That was written in 2010, probably. Couldn’t be more relevant today, fighting over oil. The voices really lift everything. Krishnamurti at the beginning, then the Dalai Lama and Bruce Lee. They’re all Asian voices, which is interesting. I gravitate toward Eastern philosophy and truth, actually. My wife is half-Indonesian, by the way. I don’t know how that came about, that kind of Asian tilt, but there’s something going on there.
Oblivioni: We should mention your art before I go. Tell me how that came about and how that’s going.
Ray Gibson: When I wrap up everything else, Friday afternoons and usually into Saturday, I’m drawing and painting. I work a lot with chalk pastel, which are the same pigments you have in oil paints, just without the oil. So it’s dry, and I can move it around with my fingers. Some songs have an image in my head when I’m writing, and then I paint the image. There’s “Melting Blocks,” where you can see the robot on the left, so it’s a hint that it’s an AI factory, and we’re going to heat up the planet with all of the energy that AI consumes. “Red Ribbon” is a song [and a painting], and the painting has soldiers ghosted in the background. I’m working on some word art at the moment as well. You might see a poem called “We Are Dead, You Were With Nothing.”
Oblivioni: Yes.
Ray Gibson: I literally woke up with that poem in my head one Saturday morning, and with very little tweaking, just finished it. I thought, well, this is not a song. What can I do with it? So I decided to have it engraved in brushed aluminum, as a letter to the future. Somebody will pick that up and say, “Okay, we have permission to live and do what we want. Someone in the past has said it’s our time.”
^^^
Read more about Ray Gibson on his website. Listen to Ray Gibson on Spotify.
Steven S. Drachman is a writer.