22 MusicWeek 15.11.13 PROFILE CRAIG DAVID & COLIN LESTER
BORN TO DO IT… ONCE AGAIN
Craig David remains thick as thieves with his manager, Colin Lester, 15 years after their working relationship began. As David’s career enjoys a new lease of life, the duo speak candidly about fighting more fires than most in the music industry – and surviving a TV comedian’s attempts to ‘destroy our brand’
TALENT n BY TIM INGHAM
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When things are going wrong, the only thing you can do as an artist is write your way out. The bottom line is, it’s all about your music:
you have to keep remembering that you’re only ever three minutes away from changing your life.” Craig David knows how it feels to switch from a
hot property to a figure of fun. As the noughties dawned, his long-term global
superstardom seemed inevitable. David’s debut album Born To Do It, released in August 2000, sold an astonishing seven million copies worldwide, including more than a million in the US. His first two singles, Fill Me In and Seven Days, capped a trio of UK No.1s, following his 1999 smash with Artful Dodger, Re-Rewind. Signed to Wildstar Records by Colin Lester,
David’s unique melding of two-step garage beats and swirling R&B melodies sent the music industry, typically, scrabbling for facsimiles. A teenage pop prodigy, he clocked up three Ivor Novello and eight MOBO Award wins - not to mention 12 BRIT Award and two Grammy nominations - thanks to songs dreamt up as a 16-year-old within the walls of his mum’s modest Southampton flat. But in 2002, as he turned 21, British telly
presented a stupefied caricature of David to the nation - one loudly lampooning his tendency for musical self-reference and contorting his innate mannerisms. David won’t acknowledge if he ever felt bullied by Channel 4’s Bo Selecta! - brainchild of Leigh Francis, now better known as Keith Lemon. But Lester, with whom David has shared a professional partnership for 15 years, will never be able to forget the sabotage it unleashed. “I thought it was going to go away, eventually,
and that we had to ignore it,” he says. “But it did completely the opposite, it just grew and grew. I was watching a brand, our brand, being destroyed. “We can all accept criticism of creative work, but
to be publicly ridiculed for it is incredibly difficult to deal with. Protecting Craig was my top priority, but it was impossible. It was an express train - the only way to stop it was to shut up completely.” By the time second LP Slicker Than Your
Average arrived in 2002, Bo Selecta!’s odious influence had gained traction. The record sold 3.5 million copies – a figure that remains a distant fantasy for young artists today – but David’s star was undeniably twinkling a little less brightly. With one nagging catchphrase and a bizarre
motif from sixties Brit movie Kes, Bo Selecta! had diluted the one ingredient even more vital to David’s prosperity than his music: his cool. Surreal satire quickly mutated into publicly-parroted punishment; destructive, gleefully-enacted mass retribution for David’s supposed crimes of ubiquity and self-regard. In the studio, an understandable bombardment
of doubt began to plague his work. David diffidently bounced between labels like he did genres, and by the time his Greatest Hits whimpered into the UK chart at No.48 in 2008, he appeared officially washed-up. “Bo Selecta! came at a time when there was no
real YouTube channels - I had no response,” says David. “Each week, that show would go at me and go at me. People ask if I met him now, what would I do. In the balanced way I am today, I haven’t got the time to entertain the negative energy of it.
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