[1] This led to Gray's first musical venture, the co-sponsoring with Heseltine in 1917 of a concert of works by the then completely unknown composer Bernard van Dieren.
Gray subsequently worked as music critic for publications including The Daily Telegraph, The Manchester Guardian, and The Morning Post, and occasionally for the Radio Times and The Listener.
Frank Howes, The Times chief music critic, pointed out that the formula "so far from the usual view being true, the precise opposite is the case" occurs every few pages.
[5] Gray was also a composer,[6] but preferred to promote the music of his friends Constant Lambert, Peter Warlock and Bernard van Dieren above his own.
[13] Scored for six soloists, chorus and orchestra, the music takes the form of a passacaglia with a chromatic descending ground bass to which the themes of each scene act as a counterpoint.
[15] Gray's friend, the artist Michael Ayrton, remembered other works, including an Overture Roma Nobilis and a setting of Canticle of the Sun, but both appear to be lost.
[20] Gray evidently had difficult relationships with women, something that is partly portrayed by Anthony Powell in his A Dance to the Music of Time sequence of novels – in particular the fifth volume Casanova's Chinese Restaurant.
The characters of Maclintick and Gossege are said to form a composite portrait of Gray, though Powell also added echoes of Peter Warlock into the mix.
[21] A hard drinker with a cocaine habit Gray was a slow talker who warmed up and was not regarded as conventional "good company".