Craig David

A lot has been said about the rise and fall and rise again of Craig David in the past couple of years. He made a very successful comeback in 2016 and with his summer long TS5 parties at Ibiza Rocks now in it's third year it doesn't look like he's going away anytime soon.

He isn't the first music act to stage a successful comeback, but the main difference between Craig David and most other comebacks is that it's his new music making the headlines, not his old music.

If you watch Needle Time on Vintage TV regularly you'll get the idea of how many musicians careers go. The person being interviewed is often a musician from yesteryear who is still making new music. Typically they make it big for a period of time, then nobodies interested anymore, they get dropped from their label and they wonder what they're going to do next. A few years later they're back in demand but they no longer have the pressure to deliver new music as it's the old hits people want to hear. However they make new music anyway for their own amusement. Throughout the show clips of their hits or songs that inspired them are played, then often at the end a new song of theirs is played which more often than not is terrible.

Back to Craig David though, his story is a little bit different. He broke through as featured vocalist on "Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)" by Artful Dodger. At this point though many people thought he was Artful Dodger and were confused when he was nowhere to be seen on their next hit "Movin Too Fast". It was one of the tunes at the end off 1999 which lead to the explosion of UK Garage in the mainstream in 2000.

He scored a number one with his debut solo hit "Fill Me In" which was also a UK Garage number. Next up he was back with Artful Dodger as featured vocalist on "Woman Trouble" though it was predominantly fellow vocalist Robbie Craig singing on the track. Then he was back at number one with his second solo record "Seven Days". Although the single edit was R&B as opposed to UK Garage there was a UK Garage mix of it doing the rounds at the time.

He had two further hits from his debut album "Born to Do It" which was a number one album. By this point it was early 2001 and he pretty much disappeared in the UK for a while, but this was because he was now concentrating on the American market.

At the end of 2002 UK Garage had been and gone from the mainstream, but the new single from Craig David "What's Your Flava?" was R&B, as was pretty much everything he released for years to come. In my opinion all the hits from his second album were poor except for "Rise & Fall".

In 2005 he was back again with his third album which did go platinum and spawned two top five hits, "All the Way" and "Don't Love You No More (I'm Sorry)". I actually have no recollection of these songs existing and have had to YouTube them, they are pretty forgettable to be fair.

Then in 2007 he had the last hit I remember of his before the comeback, "Hot Stuff (Let's Dance)" which I absolutely hated and still do. Beyond this he only had one Top 40 hit prior to his comeback, the number 39 single "6 of 1 Thing".

What came after this was a Greatest Hits album with two new singles which weren't hits and a soul covers album which completely flopped.

My assessment of his career to date by this point was that he was great at UK Garage but pretty average at R&B bar one or two tunes. When I heard of his comeback in 2016 I wasn't particularly interested partly because of my general lack of interest in modern music and partly because this was a man who hadn't made a decent record since 2002.

However I thought I'd give comeback single "When the Bassline Drops" a listen a couple of months later to see what all the fuss was about. Straight away it became apparent why it was a success, he had gone back to making UK Garage, the type of music which made him big in the first place.

That's not to say going back to your original sound is key to a successful comeback. When Take That made a successful comeback the music they made sounded nothing like their music from the first time round for example. Most musicians do like to experiment, some do it successfully, some alienate their fans because it's too different or not to their liking. Craig David most likely fits in the latter category so going back to UK Garage is probably the best thing he could have done.

Here is the tune in question: