The Craig David phenomenon is a funny one. On the one hand, he’s a shining beacon of authenticity in a sea of schlock pop created by middle-aged men. His first track (Bo Selecta!) started in clubs, went to pirate radio, became an ”anthem” and only then got on to mainstream radio playlists — this is the holy grail for ”keeping it real”, music-wise.
There was no big marketing push, none of the feverish cash outlay to get his face known and, above all, no svengali telling him what to wear and what not to say. Just David, the vocalist, and Mark Hill, the producer, both of whom had (up to a point) a classical training — David learned classical guitar and Hill used to play percussion for the Welsh Philharmonic. The ”two-step” style, so called because of its two-to-the-floor beat, as distinct from garage’s four-to-the-floor, was gathering pace. The song was a great one; and everyone went out and bought it — 700 000 copies in its first year.
This is how music used to happen in the good old days. Plus, unlike other great hopes of the organically grown United Kingdom garage scene (to choose an example at random, Sweet Female Attitude), David wasn’t a one-hit wonder. He was a multi-hit machine.
Yet, on the other hand, when he launched his solo career, with Fill Me In and Seven Days (both UK number ones), it was pretty cheesy. Seven Days, especially, sounds like the kind of smooth-talking R&B you could introduce to your parents without having to make it wash its mouth out (well, the people in the song met on Monday and were making love by Wednesday, but I think modern parents can handle that).
So, you have this pioneer of a new sound, who comes from nowhere, battles the odds and finally makes it, to the unconfined joy of a generation, and he sounds a lot like everyone else. Can he last?
This enrages a usually very sweet-natured David, and he deals with it at length on the unintentionally amusing title track of his second album, Slicker Than Your Average: ”They told me that I’d only last one song/ That’s foolish man — what’s it like now? Seven million albums?” Self-justifying songs never completely work, in my view. But I don’t think the criticism levelled at him is justified, either.
First, he has a better, stronger voice than just about any other chart-topper you could name. Second, his sound is still distinctive; it’s just not underground any more. And third, his mind is alive: this sounds snotty, but the inhabitants of pop, from the heady heights of Posh to the semi-obsolete B*Witched, all seem, when you speak to them, as if they’re wearing brain-blinkers. They talk the same talk: it’s all about the music, the money isn’t the issue, the private life is private, the family is totally supportive, the fans are really great, they’re really, really lucky. It’s not the parsimony with information that’s the problem (who needs to tell a journalist anything to prove their intellect?), but the fact that the vocabulary is blandly identical.
David is different. If you look at past interviews, he’s always got a new word (you can tell, because he uses it all the time) and he’s always trying to make up words, rather than settle for a boring one — when I meet him, he concocts the word ”bravish”, then says, ”Forget that, forget that, it’s not a word. I just mean some people ooze macho confidence. Not me, though.”
He hasn’t got the hermetic seal of fame — new things get through to him and new things come out. That’s the kind of quality that will keep a career going after the pecs have dropped. He says as much. ”Sure, be yourself. If you’re not yourself, who are you? But take advice, listen to people. If you’re not listening, you’re lost. You’re a sheep among wolves.”
Having said all that, this is a notoriously charming man. He is regularly called the nicest man in music; people who arrive to meet him with a raft of notions about how arrogant he is take it all back in minutes. It’s like a kind of witchcraft — he can say anything, it can be hubristic to the point of madness, but it takes on a rueful, almost (but never quite) self-effacing charm in the delivery. That’s not just a long way of saying, ”He’s very good-looking.” Although he is.
David grew up on a council estate with his half-Jewish mother, and visiting his West Indian father on weekends (he says he’s pleased with the breadth of his gene pool). His parents split up when he was eight, but he is dubious about what it was like before that. ”I try to think of memories of us being together and going out as a family — a point at which I could have said, ‘We are a family.’ But all I can see is me living with my mum, and with my dad on a Sunday. That’s all I can see.”
By the time he was 13, he’d been asked to sing on a Kick Racism Out of Football single, conceived by the Refugee Council — ”It never did get played at half-time, which was frustrating, but it got a lot of press in the Southampton Echo.”
This, I’d imagine, was for the singing, rather than the politics — racism has never been something David talks about. He says he never experienced it at school, indeed, doesn’t seem to have encountered it at all, apart from the time some American promoters wanted him to ditch his white guitarist for a black one to appear more urban. ”At school, there would always be banter, people trying to gang up, but for me to talk about the colour thing, I might as well go home and diss my mum. I’m never going to talk about a colour thing, because I’ll always be in the middle of it.”
He met Hill while making the soccer single, but didn’t run into him again until they met at a club five years later. At 14 David won a songwriting competition for the boy-band Damage. It was around this time that he staged a kind of musical coup at a club where his dad was chairman. ”It was a West Indian club where they had reggae and R&B nights. One night, the DJ was so into what he was doing that he wouldn’t look up at the crowd; he wouldn’t make them feel part of it. So I took the mic, and thought, ‘You can’t really tell me not to, cos my dad’s chairman and he’s paying your wages.”’
Can you imagine any of the thousands of beneficiaries of more regular nepotism admitting to it that freely? Anyway, the DJ liked what he did. They began working together, and from that point on David pretty much had a career. None of the clubs ever asked how old he was, because his DJ partner was 24 and they must have thought, ”He’s not going to be hanging around with some 14-year-old kid.”
It is this very early earning curve to which he attributes his failure to get into drugs, crime or even cigarettes. ”I’d have friends around me who would steal, I’d have friends around me who did drugs, who did craziness. But I could always say, ‘You know what, I’m all right.’ I was already earning.”
He was known for ages as the cleanest liver in music, whose major vices were sweets, jewellery and trainers. He didn’t even drink until he discovered Malibu and Coke because he didn’t like the taste of alcohol — though now he has a strategy: ”If I have to slowly drink, over a period of time, then I’ll drink the girl drinks [Malibu or Archers — I was the one who started calling them ‘girl’ drinks. I wouldn’t want you to think he’s a misogynist]. Or, if I want to get there quickly, then let’s do tequila shots. It’s quick, and it does the job.” So, not a Cliff Richard for a new era, after all. Thank God.
If his early life sounds precociously confident and driven, that’s not the full story. He was also fat. I’m thinking this is why people let him hang around, since if he’d been brandishing his current physique, along with self-belief, talent and a dad who paid the wages, all at 14, someone would have had to kill him. ”I never let anyone know I was insecure about it … but I did have a problem being overweight. I always felt people were looking at me in a certain way, as opposed to who I really was. Especially when it came to trying to talk to girls and stuff. And I was very confident of my approach. I wasn’t crass, I was very cool about the whole thing. I really felt that my personality was so much stronger than the guys they were going for just because they had a six-pack.”
I moot the possibility here that this might be the root of his drive — it’s a known fact that the jocks and prom queens at school go on to lead disappointing, empty lives, while the teens who had a problem getting laid go on to rule the world. ”That’s an interesting way of looking at it,” he says, in a pleasant but resistant tone that I don’t fully get. ”I don’t think I … well, the first time I did it I was probably 15, which I guess nowadays is quite late, cos it’s, like, the way people are going on, it’s crazy. But then, I don’t know, I was a fast learner.” Oh, I see, puppy fat is one thing. He did not have a problem getting laid. I suppose if you’re going to call your first album Born to Do It, and you’re only three years out of your teens, admitting to a celibate adolescence is a bridge too far.
So far, we have a real obsessive teen, not going to clubs with his friends, sitting in his room making music, but not (as I suggest) an outsider. ”In fact, interestingly, I was more of an insider.” (He is funny, with his reluctance to cast aspersions on his teenage self. In almost all ways, I’d say he was a very old 22, but when you ask him about life at 15, it’s as if he’s talking about his last birthday.) He had no other passion. Oh, apart from ladies. And trainers. ”I had this thing once when I got some for my birthday, and when the next birthday came round I still hadn’t worn them. I didn’t want to mess them up. I’d always be scrubbing my trainers like crazy. And I got a lot of satisfaction from looking at them, thinking, ‘Wow, look how fresh they look.”’ It’s a perfect miniature portrait of deferred gratification. His mother must have known he’d succeed; either that, or go mad.
Now he has 200 pairs of box-fresh trainers. He’s not acquisitive — he doesn’t own a flat or a car. He just really likes trainers. Indeed, his last home was the council flat he shared with his mum, until Seven Days was released in August 2000. He gives the impression that he rather misses that flat; he talks fondly of the neighbours, anyway. ”It was great. I was really into the reggae sound, so the people round me knew I liked music. But it was OK, because the guy upstairs was deaf, the guy downstairs liked his music as well, and the people next door were mad — they were attending a psychiatric clinic, so they liked it because it stimulated them.”
Since then, he has bought his mum a house in Southampton: ”I like buying people little things, not flooding them with money, trying to win them. Getting my mum a house was a really great feeling.” Yeah, but hardly a ”little thing” — it cost £1-million.
He’s been living in hotels for three years, which sounds hideous. ”Oh, I don’t know — there are perks. You get room service 24/7.”
”Yeah, but you could just have a fridge,” I say. ”And fill it with your favourite food.”
”Yes! It would be amazing. I went to a supermarket about two months ago. It was just the biggest rush.”
His career is treating him pretty well in most ways, not so well in others. He shows the occasional over-awareness of life’s essential pointlessness that smart, rich people sometimes get: ”If I go to Italy, I won’t stay in the hotel, I’ll try to have a look around. Otherwise, what am I living for? I’m living to make money.”
His friends from home don’t really call anymore. ”I think the problem they find is that it’s hard to call me, even though I’ve still got the phone I always had, way back in the day. They can call me whenever, I’m still the same Craig — as much as you may see me on TV, it’s still me, nothing’s really changed; I still remember going out clubbing and getting drunk and riding around Southampton in the back of the car, doing stupidness. So I kind of phone them, and it’s cool, but then they don’t really want to phone me back.”
But that probably makes this sound sadder than it was meant — he talks all the time about how his friends are older than him, so clearly he has plenty; they just didn’t happen to go to school with him. And then there are the girls.
David and girls is a thorny subject. When his career first went nuclear, he was linked to the Irish pop singer Samantha Mumba, who was coming up at around the same time. He denied this because, well, it wasn’t true.
Then everyone called him gay, which is just proof of what someone once said — that if you’re thin, single and don’t smell, everyone calls you gay. This he handles with an ”I love gay people, but …” kind of annoyance. Which is to say, he is keen not to be homophobic, but also quite annoyed. More recently, he’s been linked with Sofia Vergara, the American model called ”Sofia Viagra” by some wags.
”OK, she lives in LA [pause]. She’s a lovely girl [pause]. I was doing a lot of travelling [really, anyone would think I’d asked him if he’d killed her]. Oh, I’m really sitting on the fence. She’s cool. She’s very relaxed. She doesn’t really like being out and everyone knowing her. And I met her once in Miami, and we gelled, we hang together, we had some fun. But it wasn’t a relationship. But I’m not saying we didn’t … actually … do … anything.” So there you go — I remembered halfway through why I never normally ask questions like that.
On balance, there are many more upsides to international fame than there are downsides. He has Puff Daddy’s number on his mobile (OK, it’s a small point, but a cool one). George Bush asked him to play at the White House, which, regardless of political perspective, would have been quite an anecdote, if it had come off. ”I don’t know why that didn’t happen. I was doing something, I guess, and he was having a war.” Sting broke off from making his own album to do a duet with him. Oh, and besides the trainers, he buys an awful lot of jewellery. When I met him, he was wearing a pendant (featuring some kind of currency, in all probability a dollar) hanging from a chain that, if it were real diamonds, would easily buy him a flat with a fridge but no room service.
”The jewellery thing definitely comes from me listening to hip-hop and watching the videos when I was a kid. That really rubbed off, the cliché of the jewels. But every now and then I think, ‘What am I trying to do? Who am I trying to impress?’ Now, I don’t know which side of the fine line between cool and prat I’m on.”
And really, I don’t know either. Read what he says, and you think ”prat”, but to listen to him say it, and you think ”cool”. The answer must be that it’s not a line, it’s a journey. He’s on a journey from prat to cool, with a soundtrack of which he is rightly proud. — Â