Craig David’s return has been one of the more unlikely pop comebacks of 2016. It’s been 16 years since he emerged as the shy but chart-strafing face of the hip-hop and house-influenced UK garage scene, hitting No 1 with his 7.5m-selling debut album, Born to Do It, when he was just 19.
David’salbums since have experienced diminishing commercial returns, arguably not helped by his decision to relocate to Miami to live the lifestyle of a cartoon international playboy. It seemed something of a time-warp two weeks ago when his latest album, Following My Intuition, debuted at No 1.
Despite a punishing, social media-documented fitness routine that has left him as buff as an Olympian and earned him a cult following on Instagram, David looks surprisingly unchanged when his arrival triggers the screams of the three-quarters-female audience. With no band, he prowls the stage on the balls of his feet, singing and rapping over a laptop and a performance controller.
It’s an audacious strategy as the self-effacing singer has never exactly been a human firework. It also gives the night the feel of an extended PA, even as he proves his honeyed tones remain intact by rattling through turn-of-the-millennium breakthrough hits Re-Rewind and Fill Me In.
Likable as he is, David was always too slight and eager to please to pass muster as a carnal lover man, and his ballads still tend towards the slickly sentimental: new song Change My Love could be Westlife beneath its R&B sheen. As he trills snippets of Whitney Houston, TLC and Destiny’s Child, among other 1990s pop-soul nuggets, then oozes through Justin Bieber’s Love Yourself, he comes worryingly near to resembling a 2016 take on Jive Bunny.
But when he unleashes his “inner junglist” and spits tongue-tying raps over frantic drum-and-bass beats, or duets with grime MC Big Narstie on When the Bassline Drops, you recall that Craig David was once, in his mild-mannered way, a musical risk-taker. On the closer, Fill Me In-sampling 16, he recaps his career to date as if he can hardly believe it has happened. He’s not the only one.
