Craig David
‘People talked about me in the past tense’
To a certain generation (by which I mean millennials, and include myself), say the words “Craig David” and faces will light up like the Oxford Street Christmas lights – incidentally, the same ones that the singer turned on last week.
David’s story is the ultimate rollercoaster tale of success and failure, of public love and ridicule. From the late Nineties, he was a star of the UK garage and R&B scene. His verbal acrobatics on tracks such as Fill Me In, 7 Days and Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta) secured him eight million record sales and a place in history as his first album, Born to Do It, became the fastest-selling debut of all time by a male solo artist. Self-made, recording tracks from his bedroom in a Southampton housing estate, he was lauded as a teenage musical genius.
But within two years, he was struggling to recreate that success. He was dragged down by merciless spoofing at the hands of rubber-masked comedian Leigh Francis, who lampooned David’s vocal tics and facial hair on the television sketch show, Bo’ Selecta! The singer’s stock dropped and sales diminished.
Today, David puts a positive gloss on the episode, saying: “Your real character comes out when things seem to be not necessarily going to plan.” In the past, though, he has said he felt “hurt and humiliated” by the show. David soldiered on, but four years ago sold his Hampstead home and retreated to the palm-fringed beaches of Miami.
Now, though, he has had the last laugh. After a clip of him singing over a Justin Bieber song on Radio 1 Xtra went viral, he has returned to Britain with a number one album and an arena tour booked for next year. During his hiatus, having wisely decided to reject reality television opportunities, the 35-year-old managed to maintain an element of mystery, and his unexpected reemergence is attracting attention for all the right reasons. This month, he won best male act at the Mobos (Music of Black Origin awards), 16 years after he took home the prize for best newcomer.
A further cap comes tonight when he will perform the BBC Children in Need single for the first time, a heartfelt ballad called All We Needed taken from his new album, Following My Intuition. Of the song, he says it is “the most vulnerable I’ve been on a record for many, many years”.
The charity approached him more than a month ago to say it was looking for a song to front the campaign. The track, about losing someone and running out of time for love, was written by David alongside songwriter Rachel Furner, and reminds him of losing his grandmother.
“It was more than just a song. It represented so many things – [the need to] slow down and enjoy the things around you, rather than getting back into the hamster wheel. We need to stop thinking the grass is greener on the other side and be happy with the love we have.”
We meet in a recording studio in north London, where he is taking a break from rehearsals. Dressed in blue jeans, black boots, a white T-shirt, grey hoodie and black jacket, he looks relaxed, but pristine and polished. His facial hair is still precisely groomed and his teeth are LA-white. He is polite, earnest, amenable and well-oiled, offering verbose answers that end in philosophical musings on happiness and how he has learnt to find it. He says “100 per cent” a lot. When I ask about relationships, he answers that he is “just flowing right now” – which I take to mean he is single.
He describes the moment he realised he needed to return to the professional music scene. He’d been meeting up-and-coming writers and producers, and they would tell him how great he was when visiting studios.
“But they were talking in the past tense,” says David. “So I walked into the booth and they played the track and then literally I gave everything, like I was a 17-year-old kid again. Then I heard the little talkback button being pressed and I’d just hear some guy go: ‘Oooooooo, you still got it, bruv. You still got it…’ When that kept happening over the course of a year, all of a sudden you get your vibe back.”
While in Miami, to keep his hand in the music scene, he began a series of club nights – minor house parties that he threw in his rented hotel apartment – but which have since become fixtures on the party scenes in Ibiza, London and New Zealand. (He ended up buying the Miami Mondrian South Beach suite for a reported £2.5 million.)
During his time in the States, David did not escape the British public’s gaze completely. When he embarked upon an obsessive fitness regime, his biceps swelling to the size of cars, the photographs of his transformed shape and gaunt face caused alarm among his fans.
Sometimes training for almost three hours a day, he also carefully controlled his food and calorie intake. “In hindsight, I had taken it too far,” he says today. “As someone who has experienced taking it to its extremes, you need to ask why you are doing it.”
Why was he doing it? Was it a reaction to falling out of favour?
“Usually, psychologically, it will be because of something from before. Things spin out because it is something you are trying to counteract. Having been overweight up to the age of about 13 or 14, my mind was like, right, you got to go to the other side.”
Was he bullied for his weight when he was younger?
“No.” His eyes flash. “It was great, actually, at school, because I had banter for days. You can bring all that nonsense my way. Trust me. I will bounce that right back. You find your personality real quick in school.”
He realised he needed to restore some balance to his diet and lifestyle when a series of tests showed he had a body fat percentage of 4.7; the average man ranges from 18 to 24 per cent. Below 3 per cent and the body’s organs begin to shut down.
“It was obvious from my face I was losing too much [weight]. I looked so much older. You can see in the pictures I wasn’t looking too good. I also realised I needed to [work out] who I was doing it for and where I was going with it. I wanted to spend time socialising with my friends. I am not competing to be an athlete. I make music.”
His return to these shores just over a year and a half ago has therefore gone hand-in-hand with once more embracing carbohydrates.
“It was so good to come back the UK, and I think I am going to have a nice pizza now,” he laughs. He still goes to the gym – something he describes as routine as “brushing your teeth” – but not so obsessively. He is lean and muscular, but healthy and happy. “When I go on stage, there’s no way I can do the kind of show I do and not be fit for it. I can’t. I want to give everything. I just want to ride this until the wheels come off.”
‘Your real character comes out when things are not going to plan’