The boy who can't go wrong

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Earlier this year - around the time his first solo single made its chart debut at number one - Craig David appeared on the Dreem Teem's Sunday-morning show on Radio 1. The three stalwarts of the thriving UK garage scene were asking its most famous ambassador about the things in life he found difficult. They probably expected to hear lurid tales of paparazzi going through his rubbish, or gangs of voracious teenage girls tearing his designer clothes to pieces.

'I hate Sunday afternoons,' Craig admitted, 'when my mum's made dinner and I have to do all the washing-up.'

After a shocked hiatus, one of the DJs asked the question on everybody's mind: 'Do you still live with your mum, Craig?' Slightly embarrassed, Craig still managed to turn the situation to his advantage. He was 18 at the time (he's 19 now): where else would he live but with his mother?

The gap that ought to exist - but doesn't always - between David's tender years and the relentless urbanity of his music, has been one of the most beguiling features of his rapid rise to fame. Last year he was almost unknown and now he's the biggest new star in British music. He's also the youngest male solo artist ever to have a single debut at number one. Yet when he sings 'bottle of red wine, ready to pour', he does so with such an infectious delight in the trappings of adult sophistication, that it's somehow possible for women to love him, without him being hated by men.

At Craig David's West London PR HQ, the leader of his small army of representatives spreads a blanket over the chair her charge is about to sit upon, so no particle of dust should besmirch his sparkling white tracksuit. To those who find themselves falling short of Craig David's high standards of personal presentation, it is gratifying to note that his almost supernatural aura of sweet-smelling suavity is partly a collective effort. He acknowledges the PR woman's gesture with impeccable good manners. Has he got used to people doing that kind of thing for him yet?

'It's like having an out-of-body experience,' he says, smiling, the Hampshire burr slightly more to the fore in his speaking voice than you'd expect from his singing. 'It's hard to believe the same Craig David who was in his bedroom in Southampton writing "Fill Me In" a few months ago is now performing it to 100,000 people at the Party in the Park'. Talking about oneself in the third person is usually seen as the first sign of celebrity megalomania, but in Craig David's case, the ability to look at what's happened to him over the past nine months from outside is probably his best chance of keeping a grip on it.

It started with a boink. Hard at work in the studio with the Artful Dodger production team, rebuilding a song he'd written called 'Last Night' to make 'Re-Rewind' (the Christmas 1999 dancefloor smash that introduced him to the nation), they came across a strange 'boink' noise on a sound-effects CD.

Craig remembers pop history in the making: 'There was a place in the song where I sang "Craig David all over your?" and left out the word "body" and the 'boink' just kind of found itself there. We got to the end of the record and thought, "It's in there now, let's just leave it". When the song hung around in the charts for a really long time, people started to get obsessed with the boink: people thought "What is that noise, is he censoring something out?"'

The rapidly growing Davidian mystique was enhanced by his non-appearance in the video (even his excuse was impeccably aspirational: on the day of the shoot he was in Italy watching AC Milan play Chelsea). When his new record company put out a solo single, 'a building record' to see if people would remember him, it went straight to the top of the charts.

Not only was 'Fill Me In' a perfect piece of songwriting - a seductively complex saga of the girl next door's parents interrogating her as to what exactly she and Craig had been up to - but its author looked equally at home miming it in front of screaming teenagers on CD:UK or singing live with an acoustic guitar in the grown-up company of Jools Holland's Later. An impeccably stylish video treatment, mixing urban grit (council blocks not hugely dissimilar to the one Craig's mum brought him up in) with metropolitan swank (natty clothes and environmentally ruinous four-wheel-drive vehicle) was just the icing on the cake. 'We didn't want the video to be too street,' David explains. 'We wanted it to be something everyone could relate to, that would show people what my background was.'

Most people probably think of Southampton as rough and ready, full of drunken sailors getting in fights: not the sort of environment you'd expect Britain's answer to super-smooth American R&B stars like Usher and R Kelly to have grown up in. David laughs: 'It's quite vital in its own way, though... There used to be parties called Riverboat Shuffles that were really cool - we'd head off out to sea and come back at three or four in the morning.'

Craig David's own musical upbringing was a heady cocktail of reggae - his Grenadian father had been bass player with a group called The Ebony Rockers who were briefly signed to EMI - and his mum's beloved Terence Trent D'Arby (she also liked The Osmonds: a less obvious influence). 'Coming from a mixed-race family was great,' Craig remembers. 'One minute I'd be going to my dad's side and having chicken and rice, the next I'd be at mum's parents - my nan was married to a Jewish guy - doing something completely different.'

Presumably there must have been a downside to it, too? 'Oh, definitely,' Craig says gravely. 'Sometimes you can't really stand your ground.' What does he mean by that, exactly? 'In certain situations you can't really express an opinion, because you're neither on one side nor the other. I tend to fall more onto the black side: if you've got any colour in you, that's automatically what happens.' If this hints at vulnerability, Craig is singularly self-assured. 'I know where I'm going in life and I'm proud to be who I am,' he adds firmly.

Those people who criticise Craig for leaving his UK garage roots behind are being a little unfair. What could be more true to the spirit of the Krug-swilling UK garage set than for him to become an international megastar? Ecstatic reactions to his debut album, 'Born To Do It', and frenzied US music industry interest from Puff Daddy downwards suggest it's only a matter of time.

Hopefully he won't lose too much of his innocence in the process. The unrepentant braggadocio of his last number-one single 'Seven Days' - 'Met this girl on Monday, took her for a drink on Tuesday, we were making love by Wednesday...' - certainly came as something of a shock to the more sheltered sections of his rapidly coalescing fanbase.

'People say, "Do you define yourself as a ladies' man, for things to be happening so quickly?' But in the second verse I explain I don't believe in one-night stands: I'm the type of person who wants to stay with the girl,' he says reassuringly. The video - in which Craig lives the same day over and over, Groundhog Day-style, until he gets the details right and his courtship can proceed - was meant to capture 'that feeling you have when you don't get the girl, when you wake up the next morning thinking about what you'll do if you meet her again'.

It seems unlikely that this is a feeling Craig David would be having very much at the moment. 'Things have changed a lot in that department,' he laughs modestly, 'but it's kind of a catch-22. Trying to ask a girl out for a date when all this hadn't come about may have been a bit harder, in that you might have got turned down, but at least if she liked you, you knew it was for you, not for your music'.

You might say Craig David was the sort of pop star a teenage girl could take home to meet her parents... if she didn't have good cause to worry about her mother making a move.

Craig David's 'Born To Do It' (Wildstar) is out now

 

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