Interviewjuly2001

Twenty-year-old Craig David is a multiplatinum pop sensation in the U.K. who now has his sights set on conquering the American charts. Prepare for the Two-step revolution.

"It's showtime/ At the Apollo!" You can't help but hear the famous theme song in your head as you stand on that hallowed stage, even if it's the middle of a rainy afternoon, the house lights are bright, and the worn seats are empty. Since the mid-80's, that single phrase has been the harbinger of things to come, a prelude to the music that has changed the life of anyone with even a little bit of soul.

In the theatre's lobby, a young singer wearing a puffy, shiny, knee-length silver jacket and brand-new, perfectly matching Nike sneakers is getting a joyful lesson in the history of American soul music. "See this little guy here-you know who that is?"asks Billy Mitchell, the Apollo's resident historian, pointing to one face in a collage that spans severeal generations of musical treasures. "That's Stevie Wonder-he got his start right here in this place," explains the one-time usher who's spent more than 50 years working the room. His rapt young audience of one nods as Mitchell launches into a note-perfect a cappela of "Superstition." Then he says, "Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Marvin Gaye-my favorite-they all came here to launch their careers." He looks the singer up and down and smiles. "Someday you'll get a chance to try your songs out, too. Yes sir, I can feel it." But the 20-year-old standing in front of him isn't just some amateur looking for a break, he's already a true-blue pop phenomenon. Craig David, England's prodigal soul man, is a crossover dream, a musical sensation that no factory could have mass-produced. At 16, he recorded "Rewind," a dance-floor anthem that jumped from the underground all the way to the pinnacle of Top of the Pops. Just two years later, he became the youngest artist ever to simultaneously hold the No.1 spots on both the U.K. singles and album charts. His debut, Born To Do It, has since gone gold in nine countries and platinum in another 10-selling more than 4 million copies along the way.

And he's still counting. Earlier this year, after an intense bidding war among the likes of Sean Combs's Bad Boy, Columbia, Arista, Virgin and Def Jam, David signed with Atlantic Records. Craig Kallman, the label's executive vice president, was blown away by David's abilities. "When you meet an artist who's so talented, it's worth whatever it takes to get him," he says. "It must be what it felt like to first meet Stevie Wonder. It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing-luckily, it's in ours."

With Craig David mania reaching a boiling point in his home country, he decided to reach a new audience and break America wide open. Atlantic pumped big money into the U.S. version of David's flashy video for the first single "Fill Me In," and he's been on a non-stop tour of radio stations, video channels, and interview sessions. But success this side of the pond is no sure thing; plenty of things are huge in England and an acquired taste stateside-like Robbie Williams or soccer. Complicating the situation even more is this: A British R&B singer making it big in the U.S.A. is virtually unprecedented. We like our soul music homegrown, thank you. "I'm not trying to bring R&B to America," David explains after the Apollo tour. I'm trying to give you a different swerve of a genre of music that I feel needs to have a new beat of life. I'm going to do things slightly different, and, hopefully you'll embrace it, but I'm not going to try and change to fit in here. Because from the time you lost that integrity as an artist, you're going down that track as becoming the norm. So, I'm going to try and stay focused and do my thing."

As the car slowly glides into Harlem's 125th street traffic, David looks back at the Apollo's towering marquee. "All those people on the wall at the Apollo, they broke boundaries, they changed the course of music in general," he says assuredly. "Those are artists that proved they were great songwriters and great musicians. They brought something new to the scene. So I kind of feel that I must stick by my whole philosophy: Carry out what you feel is right, and, naturally, success should come. If it doesn't, then you keep trying, don't change."

If you set out to create the perfect back story for a pop sensation, you'd be hard-pressed to invent a better one than Craig David's. Born and raised in the London suburb of Southampton, David is the mixed-race son of a Grenadian father and half-Jewish British mum. His parents divorced when he was a child, and David lived with his mother, a huge music lover who took him to see his very first concert- Terence Trent D'Arby. (David recently returned to the same hometown venue, this time as a headliner.)

When he was 14, David started hanging out at a local social club, where his dad was on the committee that booked small black music shows. One weekend, he walked up to the DJ, Dj Flash, and said, "I would like to do some emceeing for you." He grabbed the microphone and started rapping. Soon the two were doing the rounds at local pubs and parties, David adding live vocals to the R&B and hip hop set. He soon got tired of his DJ, bought his own set of decks and a vinyl collection gathered during trips to London's legendary record emporiums, and began spinning for himself, harmonizing and rapping into a mike over his own mixes. He also started his own pirate radio station program that catered to the small but dedicated Southampton R&B crowd. "I took a really professional attitude toward it," he remembers. "Where a lot of people were like, 'I just want to shout my name into the radio' and just get props, I thought, Okay, if that's what you want to do. But I want to make a career out of this."

By 1998, David was buying lots of jungle records, honing his rhyme flow to the staccato rhymthms and deep bass lines of the drum'n' bass scene that was captivating the London underground. But a new sound started creeping into his sets-"I was like, wait a minute. This has got a dance backing track, but not four-to-the-floor house. It's like breakbeat, but with a vocalist singing a whole song over it-verses, choruses, and bridges. I thought, This is working."

e American R&B ballads. Messing around in Hill's studio, they recorded "Rewind," pressed up copies under Hill and Devereux's Artful Dodger moniker, and soon, underground DJs from both scenes were picking up on it.

Still, rom the U.K., and leave all the baggage and success behind," he muses. "It's like a Swedish act comes to me-I'm a guy who's sold 4 million albums in Europe and had the whole success in the U.K.-sits next to me and says, 'I've sold 15 million albums in Sweden.' I've never heard of him. I'm like, Great, what are you having for lunch?"

Don't know about that Swedish act, but the betting here is that Craig David's days of lunch-counter anonymity will soon be history.