Craig David rides wave to regain groove

Craig David has new teenage fans and lured back the misty-eyed mid-lifers who loved him before. Photo / AP

Utter Craig David's name in the company of thirtysomethings, and you'll conjure fond - possibly amused - nostalgia. The pop star sold 7.5 million copies of his 2000 debut album, Born to Do It, and songs such as Fill Me In, 7 Days and Re-Rewind defined a generation's adolescence. But as quickly as David became a superstar, he became a laughing stock, courtesy of comedian Leigh Francis. Francis named his surreal, celebrity-skewing sketch show, Bo Selecta, after one of David's lyrics and his rubber-faced, incontinent pastiche of the star became its most famous character.

Now in its third act, David's career has reached a remarkable - and unexpected - pinnacle. Over the past two years he has engineered one of pop's most astonishing comebacks. In 2016, Following My Intuition, his first album in six years, went straight to number one; he sold out an arena tour and, six months ago, he became the unlikely hit of Glastonbury 2017: 100,000 people gathered to watch him deliver an infectious, joyful, bombastic set of peppy R&B and dance music on the Pyramid Stage. Perhaps most surprisingly, he never stopped recording: David's seventh album, The Time is Now, was released this month.

It's a rebound that could well explain the sunny spirituality that has come to define the new, millennial-friendly David. He is engaging - not to mention tactile - company - although the meaning of his words has to be unravelled from the cod-philosophy that cossets them.

To David, everything happens for a reason. Many things are "amazing". "Feeling" motivates him more than figures, he says. He has a rich seam of anecdotes about passionate fans. They've convinced him, he says, that "there's a bigger play to all of this. This is not about how many records you sell any more." I ask his publicist of nine years what he's like on a bad day - she says she's never seen one.

He's now 36, but there's something of the eternal child about him. David has maintained his positivity in spite of bleak misfortune. After Bo Selecta cast him into the wilderness of pop culture parody, his music became increasingly irrelevant. In 2010, still pumped up on earnings from Born to Do It but without a record deal, he bought a plush Floridian bachelor pad and decked it out in white leather. It failed to fill the artistic void, however: "In that break, I questioned a lot of things," he says. "I thought Miami was supposed to be living the dream. Why was I not feeling completed?"

His productivity was destroyed by months oscillating between the club and the hangover. He became disturbingly fanatical about bodybuilding; photos show a man short on smiles but big on muscle. He stopped when "gaunt and drained".

Cover image of The Time Is Now. Photo / AP

It took his Ferrari breaking down in the rain, outside a fancy eatery, for a fittingly extravagant epiphany to arrive in 2014. "I remembered playing an arcade game where you drive around in a Ferrari on streets with palm trees. I looked at the yellow badge with the horse on it and I became super emotional," he says, with utmost earnestness. "I owned the car I dreamed of as a kid, and had a flashback to my music career and everything that had gone on."

David touches my arm. "I realised at that point that if I couldn't be grateful for what I had, I would never be grateful in my life."

He looks deep into my eyes. "I just got it. And from that moment everything just fell into place."

David moved the party from the club to his house, playing an infectious - and eclectic - combination of floor-fillers at what became known as TS5 parties. It was no dalliance: he went about it with a scientific perfectionism, adjusting elements by trial and error to create the perfect club night. Such serious emphasis on sheer musical fun paved the way for his Glastonbury performance.

"TS5 became the go-to place in Miami," he says. "It encapsulated everything I wanted people to feel like." DJing in his house gave him the opportunity to perform. With it, he says, came "a whole new lease of life".

At the same time as his self-imposed exile in Miami, the UK was learning to re-appreciate garage, the genre that made him famous. Then, in 2015, David appeared as a guest on a BBC Radio 1Xtra set, and the footage of him singing Fill Me In and rapping over a Justin Bieber sample went viral. His talent - rapid freestyle verses and a smooth glissando - was intact. No longer a hilarious pop culture footnote, he found himself a credible figurehead in one of the UK's most exuberant subcultures.

"I had to accept that I was a brand-new artist, who had to work hard and prove myself ... I started working with up-and-coming guys like [DJ producer] Sigala. All of a sudden I was part of a new wave, rather than just being back."

David has managed to find a new audience among today's teenagers while also luring back those misty-eyed mid-lifers who loved him in the early 2000s.

He maintains he would tell his younger self to "do exactly as you are doing because you have no idea of the journey you're about to go on", but later says he would treat the press less kindly if starting out. "Now I don't feed into it. I can't entertain it, and I won't allow it to become part of my world."

Instagram has allowed him to dictate his own narrative. Nobody is denied a selfie, and he gets a kick out of replying to fans who share their enjoyment of his music online, saying he "[loves] the full circle of it".

Instead of maintaining the glossy image that saw him mocked as a teenager, he now prefers to make someone's week by sending them a tweet; he has chosen kindness over cool.Telegraph Group