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could you do me a quick favor if you're listening to this please hit the follow or subscribe button it helps more than you know and we invite subscribers in
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every month to watch the show in person making moves yeah on a dance floor
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this means so so much to me everything i touched was turned into gold everyone wanted a piece of me and how does an 18
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19 year old deal with that the height of success when it is like whoa there's so much of the
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human part that's being unmet i felt like i was starting to make music the tick boxes when i started to abandon
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myself and i started to do things that just weren't in alignment it was a point where i had dark thoughts i was just
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like i can't live my life like this what people enjoyed for me was music and i realized that from when i came back to
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london i feel like the kid again and trust me the crowd are gonna go off when they
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hear something soon okay so 22 years later if you could whisper
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in the ear of your 14 year old self what would you whisper listen cray
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without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then
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please keep this to yourself [Music]
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craig i've got some lyrics that i wanted to recite to you okay it's another day at school
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and he's just walking out the door got his rucksack on his back and his feet dragging on the floor always late
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but when he's questioned he can't think of what to say hides the bruises from the teachers hoping that they'd go away
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even though his mum and dad they both got problems of their own caught in a catch-22 but he'd still rather be at
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home cries himself to sleep and praise when he wakes up things might have changed but everything's the same
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that's from your record johnny from 2006. yeah that was a uh
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that was a song that had to it was the first time i think kind of opening up and
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and expressing uh experience that i felt that i had maybe on a lesser
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degree to a lot of other people in my school i think at school like in my my secondary school i had a very i had a
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beautiful upbringing i enjoyed life was a playful kid i loved music
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but secondary school all boys school went to belmore and southampton and for
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the majority of it was it was great times but when you come in in your early years and
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you've got the older the older boys in there and they're like yo you got two pound and you know i haven't
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got two pounds and push you up again you got two pound on you like and then it's not a case of like if you got the money he's like let me check in your pockets
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let me try and pull out the pockets a minute so as a lesser degree of the bullying i was
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like i was experiencing it physically in the corridors so i kind of so when i was starting to write that
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song i was drawing from i had to go to how did it feel when that was happening and it only happened with one one one
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guy in one period in the school so i understood what bullying was i mean that was i was i was felt helpless i
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couldn't he was two years older stronger could rough me up if we really wanted to
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but then also i was seeing other people who were getting a real i was getting a psychological element but there was a
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deeper side of that psychology of when they say tell the teacher they'll deal with it
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this is the thing with bullying is that i agree that it needs to be spoken to someone you can confide in
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but sometimes that kind of very rushing you've told the teacher they rush in they it's all out in the open
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i was seeing kids who would then have the kid waiting outside of school for them or it might be that they they're
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being bullied by someone from a different school even so they'd be coming out to the school gates thinking okay well i'm on my way
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home no it's about to start when you get on the bus to go home so the whole world is now outside of
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school you've finished at 3 p.m and now it's it's beginning for you so it was i
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felt deeply that i needed to write on that um and like i said my mom and dad had their
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own things going on um in their lives and and i spoke to my mom i wrote the song
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while i was in southampton i've got like a studio when i was down there and i played it to her because i wanted her to
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also know that mum you've always been supportive to me like if i needed to speak to you if i needed to say things but
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with bullying there is an element where you want to say something to the closest person in your life be it your family so
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your mother or your father um and i wanted to really portray that in the song properly but i wanted to
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have that comment with my mum to let her know i knew that you would have always if i needed to speak to you would have been there because i do say your
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problems of your own and i've tried to tell you so many times you're not listening and that is the case and a lot
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of the cases of bullying that even family aren't listening so who do you turn to so um
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music has been that that song in particular i think i was a journey my grandma had passed away at the same time
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um it was a i just needed to get things off my chest that i felt like this is past a romantic
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love song i need to help people in in a way that wasn't trying to preach
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it was just let me tell stories anecdotes and i do it through music so and you were bullied for your weight
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back then as well right yeah the well the weight one was it's funny because like
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you like to tell the story differently when you're in a slightly different place and position you you'll tell it like nah well you know i was
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and i like i like everything about this is what your podcast for me has always and i wanted to tell you off the bat
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what i love about you is that you're bringing out so much so much depth in people and you already know how much
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love i got for you anyway appreciate it the being overweight thing now i see it as actually in hindsight it
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actually it brought out so many things wonderful things that had to kind of that have been repressed for a long
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period of time but at the time the social standard was you need to look a certain way um
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the the captain of school football team tended to be the one that the girls were interested in you were the you were the
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slightly overweight one that they cry on your shoulder tell you all your problems have this real you have a real empathic
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uh relationship you'd be like what this is connection this is real relationship but we didn't want to take any further than that
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well he's the one look at the way he scored the goal so then you've already got this early
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um imprint of what society expects of you and you start trying to conform to
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that so there are periods where i'd look in walking down the high street and i look in the in the in the glass the
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reflection in the glass and i just looking like you're just feeling sorry for yourself feeling like the jeans ain't fitting
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quite right and the jacket's not and you're getting bigger sizes and then you're just
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feeling like i'm doing all the fit i'm doing i could run i had some i had some legs on me you know and probably boys
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that's going to be like bro you weren't if you weren't right faster runner which part do you run it but i'll tell the
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story i'm on the mic um so i can move but i was just carrying a lot of weight
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um but not unhealthy i think there was a point that when it became unhealthy is when i realized that my weight had i was
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like 15 and i think my weight had was starting to get to i was 14 and my weight got to 14 and a half stone so i
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was starting to get over my age in weight you know and i was like maybe i need to slightly reign this
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in a little bit health wise but i ask these questions because and i always start with childhood on this podcast and i i've i've reflected on
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this over and over again and thought maybe i should start somewhere else but i know from my own experiences that my
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own like childhood traumas or the things that made me feel a bit invalid or insecure or felt feel shame when i was
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younger ended up being like the biggest drivers in my life so when i sit here i'm trying
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to find out why you know you got really into fitness and why you became you know who you
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became i always start with like what were the things when you were a kid that made you feel shame invalid like you
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didn't fit in and and those tend to be the pathway to people's you know people's greatness in a weird way 100
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like it all you're you're you've got this this period where your heart's open you want
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to you're experiencing life you're a child like you said you're a child you're a puppy you just you don't know and then all of a sudden you get that oh
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is that oh that oh i can't do that oh that's the way to go and you're you're you're getting all that you're
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imprinting all these patterns that only later you start to realize in in your not even saying teenage years i
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think it's still in adolescent years at that point but when maybe in your 20s start to unpack things just if you if
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you're conscious you're starting to recognize that this doesn't seem to line up with my truth and then into the 30s
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for me it was like well i have to unpack all this stuff that was like the overweight thing
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because you're exactly right that it started then and listen i could i could eat sweets
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like cadbury's boost bars were getting eaten like crazy i'd go to the the news agents before i went to school to
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get on the bus i'd be also selling chocolate as well so i had like a little yeah yeah i was
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early days entrepreneur early days yeah you'd find the the chocolate that was like had about two weeks left before it
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was out date and you'd i'd work that in my in my lessons like listen i knew i had like from nine till
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11 before there was a there was a tuck shot break so i could just set the tone as to how much i want to sell it for
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well you want a mars bar for yeah it's a pound fifty but we're gonna pound fifty okay brother wait till 11 then you can
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go you can get it for 35 p whatever it is good pound in the okay cool pound
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that was the leverage was incredible right so i always had an affiliation and one of my favorite movies is willy wonka
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chocolate factory so i think that set the tone anyway i've got a bit of augustus group in me i've got i think we've got all the myriad of characters
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in that movie is me and ultimately charlie like you know i mean um so yeah so it's just i've been unpacking
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it a lot of those things and realizing that my my health streak that i've got went on at sort of in when
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i was in some miami sort of time and even slightly before that was all to do with this childhood thing
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of i've got to the six-pack the captain the school football team it's funny how like those things like you're like whoa
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and it wasn't even and the crazy thing with it is that when i got into the music when i started rewinding blowing up it was people just
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want to hear me sing yeah it was like they didn't care if my stomach was here there six pack one pack two pack and by
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the way everyone everyone has a six-pack underneath so just know that otherwise your stomach's gonna fall out so if
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that's the saving grace for everyone don't worry about the fat content and the fat percent there's a six-pack underneath everyone so walk out on the
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street and feel confident with that that's great it's not telling people that um you talked in those lyrics but
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then also then you talked about your parents and you said there was i know again that's another dynamic because those are the for most people the most
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formative figures in their life of course what was the relationship with your parents and you said they had things going on that that were kind of
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it sounded like distracting them from the things that were going on in your school life yeah i mean
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my mum and dad broke up uh got divorced when i was eight um
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but the beautiful thing is that my my dad always would come pick me up on the weekends on on a sunday and it would
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either be going to like holton's park like um go-karting or i'd be helping him fix a
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kitchen um which i've got i would say to my dad like dad like what i'm going to fix the kitchen like like can we and i
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just remember that the tools and the dry dust i think but i love those times with my dad yeah
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he really made an effort and our drives in his car playing reggae music heavily influenced everything that i was going
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through and for my mom it was like she was working nine to five so my grandma and my mother would pretty
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much raising me my grandma would come pick me up from school when my mum was at work so
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i had a lot of feminine energy in my life which i'm really grateful for because it set
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the tone for how i wrote a lot of my songs even seven days i mean i'm saying making love
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17 years old writing a song who's saying making love on wednesday i mean you listen to the songs now if they're not they're using
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that kind of language but it was that i got there's a respect i had for my from my mother from my grandmother
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and the fact even for my dad i didn't want him i'm cussing out on record like that would just be like yeah we need to
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like speak about this so i just was i thought i got a really good upbringing but at the same time i didn't have a great model of
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family life at home i got a lot of feminine energy and female
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love and tension and care and all the things that you love from your mummy and grandma and then my dad was just like always had my back and i've got you but
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i've never never seen them together so i think again looking at
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childhood imprints and patterns as how they affect you later on relationship with with women was
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something i've always been really close to but i also had never had a model of how do you how do you stay together with
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like the relationship part like i'm a romantic but if you look at your relationships like they haven't really
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worked out too well or you've been guarded and it's a journey of again of
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is this story true there's a point where you've got to be conscious enough to actually ask that question and it tends to knock on the
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door and the intuition's always there sort of saying we can have this convo if you want like we can i'll present you
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with the books i can present you with the click on the right podcast to go to i'll get you to we can unpack this
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someone will inspire you to do that exactly but there's also what i've seen now and i feel i feel
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very i feel open enough to be apologetic for relationships that
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i i didn't my heart was closed off on the basis that not only from the
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family modeling but also your first break heartbreak so for me it was like i
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was so open um and i had that first heartbreak and it just went from a kid who was had his heart open and thought
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this is it and you're into me and it's gonna and then all of a sudden it just crashed and i was like well that feeling and i'd never
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felt anything like that before where i was like i i didn't know who to turn to it was like i felt that after after
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early childhood sweetheart breakup my heart had kind of closed down and i i
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feel sorry for the the the girls and and women in the last days of my life tried to open my
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heart up and that's all they were trying to do there's there was things that went a bit toxic and went but i have to own
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those situations a lot of guys was like yeah well she's the the girl was like this or she was crazy no no forget all
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of that i walked into that and i stepped in with a certain kind of energy and i gave off a certain feeling and
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especially if you're having sexual relationships there's a there's an energy exchange between two
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people and you can play off it's like no but we had an unwritten agreement where it was like no strings attached and you
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can play that game as much as you want get enough karma you'll start to see that there'll be
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some someone who'll be your teacher at some point and i thank everyone in my life that i've had
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relations with i thank you for teaching me in some way i want to go on record with that because i feel like it's something that i've always
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i now get it that i was moving a little bit reckless in the early times with the music and everything going on
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and there were there were people trying to get to my heart and i was just like nope got this thing it's easier to keep it
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arm's length and it just doesn't work like that so two questions on that then what was the evidence or the story that
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your parents your parents relationship taught you or left you with okay for better for
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worse and then that first heartbreak what were the two stories those two incidents told you about relationships so
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having no modeling of what real relationship is it it showed me early from from mum and dad
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as much as i love them with all of my heart that being single is the best way to get through life just
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stay single because i never saw my mother with another partner i never really saw my dad with another partner um and i have sisters and brothers but i
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never i i never and of of my dad's other relationships they had
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um and i love them equally but it's just i never had any clear
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reason to say that relationship works and then it reinforces so the story adds on later on in your life you start to
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see how people are with each other who are in relationships and you get friends who are in relationships and they may be
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cheating on their partner or you're seeing how there's been some scenarios where a girl says she's she's in a relationship
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and thankfully it hasn't been husband already but there's been relationships i'm not going to be there the guys say i
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i've never met anyone who's in something and i'll tell you a story that i was breaking up we're not really in it but you're you're starting it's reinforcing
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the same thing of well stay single then yeah don't get involved in all this because you your
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heart will be protected and life is good and we can keep our arms laying then link that into the the first breakup
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first heartbreak heart was open gave everything relationship i'm all in like i'm gonna as a child i was like
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okay it's hard psychologically you don't really understand what's going on in your in your family your parents but you
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just at school now i'm you see a girl falling a falling for you and
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she's into you and it's all happening and it could have been i think it was only like about a week week and a half yeah the break really it wasn't it was
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this we're talking early early days but when your heart is fully open yeah
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the crushing feeling i had after that set the tone for the rest of my life until now i've
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unpacked the whole thing which which goes hand in hand with some of the songs i've written on albums before where i'm
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talking about breakups the song called thief in the night which is about a girl who like why did you have to end up being with my
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best friend like why did there's moments where i'm looking back thinking when i was writing that song what was i feeling i was being the same heartbreak that i
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had at the same zero understanding of what relationship is and then now i see
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it's all about relationship it's all about opening your heart up again the same feeling that i think we
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both share when you said that you had your moments of the trigger points in your life you had to open up again and
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you met someone who met you a place to help you through that which is even better when you meet someone's conscious
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and gets it says yeah i've got you i know baby steps if we need to but i'm with you yeah i'm at that place now where i'm like
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do you think my heart's open eyes open man it's open in a way that i'm
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i'm down if it if something tried to try to close it down i'm open as much as i was when i first
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had my heart open and i wouldn't have said that maybe in a few years back the journey has kind of rapidly kind of
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entered into a phase where i just know that that's the the truth of the matter and where are you relationship wise
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single at the moment which is again you have
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especially as as as a guy and i can really kind of speak on my experiences and and we tend to
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our actions have to line up with the way that we we're feeling and and i felt that there was times when i was talking a good talk
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but the way i'm the way i'm acting is no different than what i was acting before so then as a part we have to pull back
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the faders and be like okay well this means that i can't enter into things where it's
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purely well this had changed long term ten years ago for me that the objectifying of women that that
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thing it was something where i had to just check myself and be like what is this patterning that you have of a look and
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how someone's got to be in and that's all part of the same thing that was happening as a kid
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that it was it was very dreamy but without the relationship and now it's flipped i i
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look for a relationship in in i want to have a situation where i can connect with you now regardless of look if we're
00:19:35
not going to a place where we can go there we can laugh life is one of the biggest values of of any relationship
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someone makes me laugh cry uncontrollably you've always got half of my heart already yeah because that's going to save you when the relationship
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has its ups and downs so the down is when you need someone who can bring that because trust me the romantic phase
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as as we all know that's intoxicating yeah when you wake up after the hangover
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and it's real you're still having the same feeling and love starts then that hangover
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right then that's when you're gonna ask yourself am i really in love the romantic thing that's this bit of sweetness
00:20:09
have you had a long-term relationship it would sound so short for so many
00:20:15
people for me it felt long two and a half years was probably my longest relationship and the same as me and even
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then like i don't feel like i opened my heart i really felt that the girl was really trying to get me to to break down
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some walls and i i go on record that as as toxic as things can go with a little bit of time
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and separation you look at it book it back and you say thank you because you taught me so much about how i was moving
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and how i was going on and i'm a better man for that because now i can open my heart like this because a lot of guys don't want to talk like they want to
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keep it cool one of the other things talking about things that kind of invalidated us when
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we were younger or that we were aspiring to i saw this quote i actually saw a picture of the estate you lived on and
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it's um i'm gonna say it's not the estate that i would wish to have lived on i don't want to criticize you know an
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area but it's not it didn't look i saw like a grey apartment apartment block
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and it looked like a quite you know it was a council estate yeah um and you
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the quote you said was you were a kid looking out of your bedroom window at the estate car park imagining jacuzzis
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do you know what i think to correct the quote even more easier yeah because the jacuzzi one like
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it's funny cause i was talking about this only yesterday about like when i was speaking about film me in and i was like yeah i was like jumped in the
00:21:32
jacuzzi i was thinking well which accuser was actually jumping in because last time i checked you were in a two bedroom flat with your mum yet
00:21:38
so the only accused you were jumping was your bath yeah so that's that's put that record and you're in a four by four yeah
00:21:43
okay cool so which driving license did you have at that point because you were only like 15 16 when you were right
00:21:50
there was aspirations aspirations like looking out of that window overlooking that car park what my grandmother brought to
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to the table in terms of like i mean the love that my mom just with my family i'm just very grateful for that upbringing
00:22:02
but my grandma as grandmas do you know make sure you you get the right food in you make sure you wear the
00:22:08
jacket you know i mean it's going to get cold it's going to rain later on and you're like grandma then it rains they just have this wisdom yeah
00:22:14
but she had a beautiful little garden in the house that she lived and it was like five minutes away from where i
00:22:20
lived and i was just like that for me wasn't was enough as an inspiration to say if i could have a house with a
00:22:26
garden in southampton we're good here i mean little did i know that
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how it would cascade from the music into yeah just that that times 10 in terms of
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just like my eyes being open but it was that inspiration for my grandma and i looked at the car park and it was like
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okay it kept me on my camera my grind like council estate working class family
00:22:51
growing up made me have to make ends meet where secondary school wasn't really setting
00:22:56
me up for when i leave here i was like i was already doing my market stall selling of uh chocolates at school
00:23:02
already had that going and i was already doing mixtapes so that was my kind of go-to in the barbers selling mixtapes
00:23:07
for 10 pounds that i'd be doing at home which would buy another piece of equipment that i'd get another speak
00:23:13
another pair of speakers or another mini disc player to record on then i was getting a printer so i could print my
00:23:19
own covers then i i was everything i kind of am doing now weirdly enough
00:23:25
is no different than what i was doing when i was a kid i literally had my whole little factory of making tunes
00:23:30
trying to have a little business going on so i could make ends meet in my own way without having to try and pull money
00:23:36
from my mum because she already had her own things going on and she supported me beyond like i think she was going deeply
00:23:41
into overdrafts just to make my my life feel comfortable you've got the sega mega drive right with the sonic the
00:23:47
hedgehog and there's those games there yes i brought my memories yeah you got that but
00:23:52
when i think back there was wherever my money was get where my mom was getting this money from like she was
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deeply in debt so when you look back you say mom the love i have for you like
00:24:02
nine to five and making me feel like i was getting everything there anyway other kids getting you know what i mean but
00:24:08
and my dad you know i mean like he support he would he would never no one could cross me no one no one could do
00:24:13
anything bad to my dad had me they'd have to cross my dad and that was the kind of and that protection is good to a
00:24:18
certain degree but then when you grow up that's not there to do the things so how where's that part
00:24:24
so you're going to understand i've got so much feminine energy in me and that part but i need the
00:24:31
speaking of truth action now so is the the yang my man the yang yeah
00:24:38
so you talk about music there and one of the things that was really remarkable reading through your story is how early music came into your world and how early
00:24:44
you started like selling mixtapes and i sat here with i sat here with many musicians and it tends tended to happen
00:24:51
a little bit later in life even diplo sat here last week and the diplo it was i don't know he was 25 or something before he really started going in music
00:24:58
but you were you were young i know your dad had an influence on that because he was very into reggae yeah and he was in
00:25:03
a reggae band right yes but where did music show up in your life and then and how did that obsession kind of like take
00:25:08
hold um i mean it was early like i said when i earlier on when i
00:25:14
said like you know high five when you come into the world i feel that and you you lose of the cognitive understanding
00:25:21
as to what's going on and why we're here and but there's something intuitively that's pulling you in certain directions
00:25:26
and as a child you very much honor that you just go in the direction so i was always intrigued by the little hi-fi set
00:25:32
up my mom had it in the flat with a big box of records and i'd just be flicking through them
00:25:38
and i and there was a vinyl in there there was ebony rockers which is my dad's reggae group which more recently
00:25:45
there's a mural now in southampton they've put on on on ogall road huge moral that says about ebony rockers
00:25:52
and i'm thinking wow i'm so proud of my dad i was like yes dad because you are a musician in your heart bass guitar
00:25:58
player the the group were talking about um social issues that were going on
00:26:04
in the 70s 80s and being able to put that on record and talk about injustices that were going on
00:26:10
in their lives at southampton and have it on record but now you're getting recognized for that oh man like i just
00:26:16
love love my dad for that it's like i'm just so happy for him so i was looking at records and i pulled out his record
00:26:21
and i'd be like every new rockers and my mum would say yeah that's your dad's group and i'd be like well my dad's like i really don't i'm talking like five six
00:26:27
years old looking like well my dad's in a group so i know there's definitely there's some lineage there there's dna that's
00:26:34
coming through musically my mum was always into stevie wonder and michael jackson
00:26:39
uh my first ever seven inch i ever bought was uh it was human nature oh really michael
00:26:45
jackson yeah because it was on a seven inch it was in a there was a small little box
00:26:50
next to the 12-inch um it's the first one i bought that's one let me tell it to the right it's the
00:26:56
first one i bought first song i ever bought so that's why and i mean look at the lyric of the song yeah it couldn't
00:27:01
be any more perfect as a song of like being conscious and understanding the world
00:27:07
so yeah so i had a and then there was there was the bit of donny osmond in there because my mom was a big fan of the osmonds which was a big
00:27:14
group back of the day um mixed with the stevies and the michaels and and and then also having my dad's
00:27:20
reggae deep reggie from bearish hammond to sanchez uh terra fabulous budget bantam beanie man
00:27:28
bounty like early like i'm a sound man at heart i think when i'm in the studio people are like you literally are with
00:27:35
your banter but no one's actually see like hearing you do this yeah because i go into this reggae kilimanjaro david rodigan
00:27:43
uh black cat sound system in me so when i see carnival i'm just like it's me sitting up and post it up with a
00:27:50
little bit of rice and chicken a little budweiser by a speaker and i'm good so yeah man that music
00:27:57
started off early and then i just i just felt like it just was gravitating towards it when was the first time you made music in any kind of computer um
00:28:05
the first time i made music was my dad got me a hi-fi system called studio 100. for anyone who knows that it
00:28:12
was like a big box like huge like box with loads of faders on the front he came home one day like he came to the
00:28:18
house said craig i got you the studio 100 like whoa what am i supposed to do with this i have no idea so i had loads of fades loads of
00:28:24
microphones with different colored um foam capsules on the top looked the business with a with a record
00:28:30
deck on top two twin cassette decks and lots of switches that i didn't
00:28:36
understand what's going on but i was excited because i was like wow this is the first time i might be able to record something so i was just fully investing
00:28:42
and when you're a kid you learn all the things you know all the so i started to record i would have said i was
00:28:49
11 11 12 years old when that came through and i you put a tdk cassette tape
00:28:57
there was a d90 was like the basic uh one or you if you're feeling kind of saucy with it you have like a chrome or
00:29:03
a or a metal there's a two pound forty nine in those ones but if you went from normal d9 it was like a little 69b one
00:29:09
i put i buy two of them you record into one tape so i put the first lead line of
00:29:14
something and a lot of my early songs were just sounding like i was literally just lifting the vocals from every other
00:29:20
song that i was listening to and then i didn't quite get the memo of oh we have to change the melody that much for
00:29:26
it to not be sound like i'm singing jodeci freaking you or boys to men why does it sound like you literally just
00:29:31
changed like the the road to street on end of the road you have to do a bit more than that which i kind of you'll learn quickly if
00:29:38
you don't get the memo yeah um but yes i start to bounce the vocals down so you
00:29:43
sing onto one cassette you put that in the bottom tape cassette you then put a fresh one in the top and you let that play and you
00:29:50
record on top so you were dubbing on top of your vocal the quality was diminishing every time you did that yeah
00:29:55
because this is an old school start but i was starting to finish a song i was feeling very
00:30:01
very proud of myself that i could actually write a song how old i would have been like yeah like them 12
00:30:07
years old 11 12 years old but yeah that kind of led into a world very nourished with r b reggae
00:30:16
but also the the pop soul element tension derby was the first show i ever went to at the guildhall in
00:30:22
southampton it blew my mind i saw this guy's front row i just saw him like he was moving like
00:30:28
prince with marvin gabe he had the voice like a stevie wonder with michael jackson the hard line according to album
00:30:34
was like it was like seven eight million albums there's a huge record for him with the the breakout song sign your
00:30:39
name across my heart again look at the the the messages sign your name across my heart yeah
00:30:45
i'm like finally we're getting the message now i need to let someone sign it fully you know i mean and
00:30:52
capitals hold that but changed my life i was like if i can i'd love to do what that guy does
00:30:57
from 11 12 where you're messing around with those cassettes to i think when i've heard you kind of kind
00:31:03
of recount it your first break was winning that songwriting contest with damage wasn't it yes was that would you consider that to be your first kind of
00:31:09
like break opportunity you know what it's like
00:31:14
it gave me it gave me the first taste of of um reinforcing that i could actually
00:31:21
do this like i thought it was a bright break like i was gonna we've done it here yeah i've written the song i'm
00:31:26
ready it's on the back of it's on the b side of wonderful tonight there at clapton cover which was the lead single
00:31:31
i'm telling everyone it went to number two in the charts i'm telling all my friends it's because of obviously by
00:31:36
song i'm ready not the classic wonderful tonight that they've covered right um
00:31:42
but i thought it was off the back and i actually sang vocals on that did bvs on the song they let me come up to london
00:31:47
met the guys i was just like wow this is like a dream come true but i didn't off the back of it was like okay i was
00:31:53
in the shops for a few weeks but nothing it went quiet after that how old were you when you won that
00:31:58
songwriting competition for the boy band damage how i would have said i was 14 uh
00:32:04
so you're 2015. you start messing around with music at about 11ish you said right and then at 14 you win the songwriting
00:32:10
competition for the boy band damage um and that's what like three years of just continuing to mess around and
00:32:17
develop and practice and just play around with music right between that time yeah yeah it was it was um
00:32:22
and again the support of my mum and dad in in ways that now i'm just like so thankful for of by bringing that studio
00:32:29
100 piece of equipment that for me to record you know my first record deck all those
00:32:34
things now i was the kid looking through the music store like i wish i could have that we showed you that one if i could
00:32:40
get that one equalizer it would i could mix it i was just that i'm nerdy with it and they would always somehow have a 10
00:32:46
pound and a 20 pound ready for me to help me out and i had my my chocolate thing going also something really interesting about you
00:32:52
saying nerdy with it because the guests that i sat here with specifically the musicians
00:32:59
it always seems to be the case that when they were younger or just before you know maybe in the 10 years before they
00:33:04
blew up or whatever they were just like really nerdy with music there wasn't really an intention of being the
00:33:11
greatest or getting the number one albums they were just like obsessed even wretch 32 when he sat here is the same thing he was just clearly just nerdy
00:33:17
with it very very young age and i think that's that's really important to point out because the pathway to getting to
00:33:23
where you got to in your life right isn't that doesn't appear to be um or at least the starting point
00:33:29
doesn't appear to be this obsession with becoming a superstar it's this kind of nerdy fascination because you spent
00:33:35
three years between 11 and 14 just messing around with cassettes on some piece of hardware that your dad bought yeah yeah of course it's it it did feel
00:33:43
that my obsession with music like when i when i look back and it's
00:33:48
different now because i have this i have the same kid in me that wants to do the same thing that i may have done in those
00:33:54
periods of time especially when i start collecting vinyl like i knew every producer i knew where the snare was on
00:34:01
this track was taken from a changing faces song over there and this record over here uses the kick drum from there
00:34:07
the bass is using i was in it like i had everything in alphabetical order with the plastic um
00:34:14
sleeves that they all went in room was getting to the point where i couldn't fit in my room for records so i was
00:34:20
really living it to the point where i'd swap shop with records i'd be like like the other djs would say
00:34:25
if i got to london get records bring them back those days djs were the go-to like he wasn't like you go on
00:34:33
new music friday and you get a thousand songs to kind of to look through it was like if the dj played in the club
00:34:40
you better go speak to the dj find out where he got it from because he he's got there's 10 copies maybe and there's a promo that's not going to come out for
00:34:46
six months literally songs were like you had time because it was physical where are you going to go you can't copy
00:34:52
this unless you've got a lathe and you're going to start to print acetates in your house so you have to wait so i
00:34:58
when you went out to london especially because this was like the hub for where everything was being made and printed up
00:35:03
i come back sometimes from that to slammed him with some record dj's almost where you get that quick where are you
00:35:09
i said yeah you know i gotta swap you a faith evans i just can't and a jade for the tune
00:35:16
that you got and i said maybe give me a little 10 pound extra for that you could you could it was all
00:35:22
wise but i just it was such a fun time because things were slower and i love it now but it's just there's a lot to get into there's a lot of music
00:35:29
being released just to to keep up with the flex of it i had a few words to say about one of my
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00:35:40
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00:36:13
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00:36:20
because i'm trying to drop my calorie intake and i'm trying to be a little bit more healthy with my diet so this is
00:36:25
where heel fits in my life thank you hill for making a product that i actually like the salted caramel is my favorite i've got the banana one here
00:36:30
which is the one my girlfriend likes but for me salted caramel is the one
00:36:36
between 14 and 18 then what happens then for you i'd gone from
00:36:42
the songwriting competition uh a moment where it was like okay this is the the this is the thing but then it
00:36:48
can carry on where okay this wasn't necessarily the big breakthrough heavily into the into collecting records
00:36:54
i started to dj early on i was mc at first for uh another dj called dj flash who i
00:37:00
respect so much because he brought a lot into my life to to be able to be a chaperone for me really he
00:37:06
knew my dad um and he was 10 years older than me and i at
00:37:12
14 i looked a little older as well so i couldn't kind of get i could style it to get into clubs with him and he'd let me
00:37:18
be his mc so i'd be called mcfade and i was just like you know i mean their fade was chris and i just thought that was
00:37:23
the honor that's crazy and then he give me like a he gave me a little slot uh to
00:37:29
play maybe a little 15 minutes at the end of his dj set so in southampton he was playing most of the kind of big
00:37:36
clubs there and he introduced me to the cajun zoo in bournemouth um we do a couple shows in in portsmouth so i was
00:37:43
like his i was his mc and also his box boy as well because trust me the back was getting like
00:37:48
smashed picking up those heavy boxes yeah it's different when you're wearing the chain with the mp3 on it it's different when you're picking up those
00:37:54
boxes right your your squat game's got to be really on the point your glutes will be you'll be fired up
00:38:00
but i'd always do this thing with him and i'd be like a flashback i was trying to find like a girl he had
00:38:05
his eyes on and he'd be watching all through the night i'd be like i think she she keeps looking at you man you need to go you need to go and speak to
00:38:11
her he goes yeah but i just don't worry i've got you i'll let me you go speak to her because she's gonna go and it's all
00:38:17
gonna okay cool handle the four i under the fort don't you worry so i play like a little half
00:38:22
an hour i think yeah he's skirting around should i go and speak to her and he's just standing next to her he goes over for the for the move she blows him
00:38:29
out completely because you're never looking at him at all for the whole thing right i've got a 30 minute dj setting then he's come back like great
00:38:34
it's like she didn't even i guess i know she was looking at you all the time i'm not sure you've got to find your ways yeah but i
00:38:40
learn from between that 14 to to really to 16
00:38:46
was a period of dj and intensely then i started to go off and do my own dj in sets with m.c alistar who is part of the
00:38:53
artful dodger he does mc sets now um and then there was kind of he was moving
00:38:58
i was at college i'd gone from secondary school now i was at college a city college i was doing an mvq level two in
00:39:04
electronics it was like the closest thing i could get to music because there wasn't like
00:39:09
uh production courses that they do now which would have been great back then it was like
00:39:14
how do you forge a trumpet out of metal and how was how do you make a guitar from
00:39:20
scratch with wood and i'm like you know i just want to know how timberland makes that or rodney jerkins makes the the
00:39:26
vocal sound so good could someone show me that and then there wasn't a course so i thought let me do electronics because at
00:39:31
least that gets me closer to circuit boards richer sounds was around the corner i had some wicked equipment in there i
00:39:37
thought even if i got a job working there would be great i'd be near detonate decks i'd be near twin
00:39:42
tape cassette decks maybe i'm getting a discount so that was my road i was going down djing emceeing there
00:39:48
never thought it would necessarily mean meeting mark hill and pete devrow from the
00:39:53
artful dodger which is where it it really then transcended tell me about that so
00:39:59
in one club it was called old orientals um 10 minutes around the corner from where
00:40:05
my i was living with my mum was djing downstairs uh r b hip hop set
00:40:11
upstairs was house and garage night um mark hill and pete devro who the
00:40:17
original artful dodger were playing upstairs now these are early doors for garage music so you're here in like
00:40:23
it's a london thing was playing um scott garcia which was like a classic garage stream from them days and
00:40:29
it was even like the the lessons in love i was coming through robbie craig and there were just tunes
00:40:35
put in place and i always pop my head up and be like it wasn't packed up there but i was like this is this is a vibe
00:40:41
it's got like it's like they're layering r b stuff now it fell over this skippy
00:40:47
what do you call it is it i know what two step was it was like it's a speed garage it was with like some eclectic
00:40:53
thing that's not house but it feels uk and then all of a sudden we got into conversation and i was talking about all
00:40:59
these songs that i've been recording at home where i didn't have a producer or someone who could create the music for
00:41:05
me i was using instrumentals and stuff to just sing over like you'd hear a freestyle
00:41:11
and then literally that i mean this is where it's so divine like the serendipity of it was so beautiful mark hill
00:41:17
who ended up producing the whole reborn to do it album said i've been looking for someone who writes songs like i do
00:41:23
music like i've got the music things like that but i need somebody who writes songs you can sing and i was like oh this is a perfect marriage and he says
00:41:29
i've got studios like five minutes from here at a place called ocean village and i was like you can't even make this up
00:41:35
like it was the club like my my flat the old orientals place that we met the
00:41:42
studio was literally within a 10-minute walk it was like all perfectly planned and then from that the next thing i did
00:41:48
was record a song called uh what you're gonna do which was the first release from artful dodger
00:41:55
and i remember it being printed up on a on vinyl they did their own thing boxed it all up i felt sweet when you're on a
00:42:01
vinyl i made it at that point and they got up in a van and they took it up to london they go into the record
00:42:06
stores and they say look we got them to take two boxes here at this record store and uh so in derby street and soho
00:42:13
records there in brixton we've got some was like and something started to build my man i can't
00:42:20
i was like just happy to be on a record but then all of a sudden i was getting people saying who they've been coming back down
00:42:25
from london saying i'm hearing your training played on pirate radio stations you know i'm like what i'm hearing like
00:42:30
he's going off dropped the funk drop the bass hit it and i'm like what you've and i like but then random people saying
00:42:37
i i was coming back from london it's getting played like i went to a club it went off the dj spanned it like four
00:42:43
times back to back something was bubbling the next thing you know
00:42:48
i got a call from public demand who was a label that were that got invested in
00:42:54
that in that record they'd done a licensing deal for that song they said you want to come up to london start doing some some pas and put some
00:43:00
performances for this song and so i'd love to so i called up my mate clinton and his yellow fiesta i
00:43:06
remember clearly got a jamaican flag in the back yeah just like he had it proudly there he had like the sub speaker in the boot going crazy the
00:43:13
thing was tuned up like he was coming going to not know carnival yeah the sound system was way more than the car right
00:43:18
it sounded chris so he got up there to slip him like 50 pounds to to get me up there get me
00:43:23
back and literally i go up i was getting like two 250 300 pound for for a pa
00:43:28
which was good money i'm like wow this is real money now from selling chocolates to this kind of money
00:43:34
i can buy this record i can buy that and i go to the colosseum in vauxhall um the
00:43:40
end and i started twice as nice was the the big name at the time
00:43:46
and i got them seeing what you're going to do and i'd go on stage and i was this young 15 year old kid i was 16 at the
00:43:52
time walked out and they the dj even more like any dj could play because the
00:43:57
artful dodger we had this sort of agreement that if dodger were with me performing we're doing a set together we
00:44:02
took half the amount for the for the fee and if i was going off doing a performance then i would just take the
00:44:08
money and if they did a dj set somewhere they'd take it so we just had a nice little agreement going on so i'd go up there and the dj would you
00:44:14
say you're ready ready okay yeah i'm ready ready and he'd be like drop the phone drop the bass here that's
00:44:20
for the first time walking out seeing it go off i was just like this is mad and before i even got to sing the guys
00:44:26
they're spinning up and everyone's going which is where led to beau selecta with rewind why i
00:44:34
was saying that in the song it's like bro that was the phrase it's a cultural
00:44:39
reference for that music and i think that that's where it kind of just it just
00:44:44
it just was exponential after that it just went from what you're going to do then rewind was starting to go do its thing
00:44:50
and people were just losing their minds to that song like i remember my first person from pa of that song
00:44:56
i wasn't sure if the crowd were feeling it because it goes into this this bass line in the chorus which is very it feels like a half-time rmb record see so
00:45:03
it's like dum dude
00:45:08
so it's like rewind when across they bought the letter re-eat wine you just
00:45:14
got the baseline doom dynamics half time you could just be slow jam
00:45:19
and i saw people literally they were standing like and it wasn't like we're not feeding it but it's like we don't know what to do here yeah like because
00:45:25
the verse has been making moves yeah on a dance floor you got the garage things cool and then it goes
00:45:34
and people like and then when it and that was this usb in the end people were like you know that tune that
00:45:40
does that half time i don't know what a baseline thing but it goes slowed and it set the tone for the whole thing
00:45:45
that song right there still it's like my baby because i felt it when i walked home with my sony
00:45:51
walkman with my headphones on on my jack screens just like walking back like just listening to it thinking i don't need
00:45:57
there's some songs where i don't need any feedback i don't need to tell me what they think about it how they feel i know in my soul
00:46:05
this here is the one and it wasn't the one from it's going to go off in a club it's just
00:46:10
going to go off when i go back to my flat i had a huge sub speaker that was probably bigger than me yeah that i had
00:46:15
in the corner bigger than most of my room i had to squeeze my bed out almost to get in
00:46:21
when i pressed play on that and it came through that speaker i was like this i'm good i got the
00:46:28
the full uh feeling that i needed so from then i was like if this is the same for anyone else
00:46:34
and they feel like this then it's gone clear and they end up being gone and that is a timeless timeless record i mean i
00:46:41
listened to it before you came in here so i was listening to it and i was like [ __ ] it this could have come out last week you know what i mean it feels like that do you see what i mean like i
00:46:47
played that i was like this could be this would be a hit now i appreciate you know what i mean though hundreds yeah is that is that
00:46:54
it was a cultural record it was it feels very timeless like i did a show the
00:47:00
other day yes last night and i dropped it in the millennials are getting crazy for it the day ones are there going like okay
00:47:06
it's just like it's it's one of those ones yeah yeah you know what i mean yeah
00:47:12
so that leads you up to the to the point where you start to release your first solo single fill me in yeah talk to me
00:47:18
about that and that whole process because that went straight to number one um from what you've said i know it changed
00:47:23
your life right from going doing these pas and clubs to doing i think you did wembley three nights in a row or
00:47:28
something yeah crazy crazy in in the space of a couple of months as well yeah it went like from like zero to 100 that
00:47:36
literally that's why it was kind of like behind the scenes funnily enough even
00:47:41
though i said zero to 100 there was a lot of learning curve that i was learning so doing the djing doing performances in
00:47:47
front of a a club a club pa or even before that when i was doing my djing stuff as an mc
00:47:53
when the the vinyl skipping and the crowd are looking at you like yo what and you've got to improvise quickly so
00:47:59
man's going into some kind of emcee like you know something amazing if someone hold the mic i hope they're trying to find another of vinyl to put
00:48:05
on because this one's going to keep skipping my hope let's hope there's one right but like this jump around in my adidas crate and everyone says whoa and
00:48:12
then i get it to mix somehow perfectly yeah and i'm sweating it because i'm thinking i nearly mashed the whole thing up and
00:48:18
after people come up saying craig i was sick when you did that thing how did you do that why are you sweating so much
00:48:25
it's not even hot and it could just blast and i was like if only you knew but it teed me up for performances going
00:48:30
forward so when we got to film in i can just remember something happening when i was doing
00:48:36
there was a club called sound i think it was on leicester square and at this time now rewind have been
00:48:43
released it gone to number two people didn't really know who i was they knew the name
00:48:48
which was you know i mean you can get that was always the using the name was always like a it's like a tag the dj tag
00:48:53
thing like you you put your name dj khaled would do it it'd be like i'd be like craig david so you knew who was on the record just
00:49:00
in case you you're confused yeah and then that then became
00:49:05
sort of my intrinsic trademark thing that i did throughout that one to do album um so just be like craig david
00:49:11
it's another one like all that all that kind of stuff um but yeah i remember doing this a performance i had an interview in
00:49:18
capital fm and i had to get across leicester square to go and do this performance of it and sound which
00:49:24
capital were doing like radio performances from there i knew something had really changed when
00:49:30
the security there was a security guard and he had to put me up i went there with them just being calm i went into
00:49:36
the capital did the interview the security guard had to put me up on his shoulders to get me across leicester
00:49:42
square to sound because there were fans going crazy like
00:49:49
real i could for for a moment in that period of time the the justin bieber thing the
00:49:56
even before the drakes i mean it's like it was that fever pitch where it was just like whoa bts flexor it was like madness like
00:50:03
pandemonium i just like whoa ripping pulling like it was whoa i was thinking something's changed
00:50:09
and i went and did the performance and then filming was was was building up to be my first number one
00:50:14
and it was my first solo single that went to number one and it was it was a song that was released the same
00:50:21
day as as destiny's child saying my name so to have a number one in the charts with a group that i've grown up with
00:50:27
posters on my wall and like thinking this is crazy saying simone is one of my favorite r b songs all time
00:50:34
so just for fill me in to do what it did i knew something had changed i just knew
00:50:39
well it was quite obvious and i was on this wave it was euphoric there was
00:50:45
nothing i can i can put my finger on it was like it was it was everything but more it went from
00:50:51
everything i touched was turned into gold because i everyone wanted a piece of me and i
00:50:57
was doing acoustic performances which was to give a different feel for fulfillment which i think was a really
00:51:04
clever move from at the time my record label um
00:51:09
was was half owned uh by my now manager uh colin lester uh telstar and capital
00:51:15
were involved and it was just like we want to find ways that just didn't
00:51:21
exclude me from other radio stations and made it feel like it wasn't just this this radio thing so we did performances like on ray on uh
00:51:27
tf5 fridays and on uh jules holland which were acoustic and all of a sudden i went from the rise and garage
00:51:34
quote start wow it's actually a song here he's writing songs and then the next songs i think kind of
00:51:40
reinforced that it wasn't just just garage and then from seven days and then to get to walking away because walking
00:51:46
away it gone clear at that point really had gone clear like we were i was in france nearly every other week
00:51:53
in paris doing uh radio interviews and i'd been in doing a whole of scandinavia then i'd be in
00:51:58
germany then we'd be getting a flight over to america and it just started the whole how old were you through this period so you start i mean fill me in
00:52:04
was when you were 18. yeah so yeah so within the album drop the same year so 2001 was when i went over to the states
00:52:12
so it would have been like 19 like how does how does an 18 19 year old deal with that because
00:52:17
you know with all the attention comes a lot of negative stuff it's like unavoidable it comes with the territory
00:52:23
even with the like the fame and people clambering on you and stuff it changes your psychology takes
00:52:30
a shift or you find out who you really are right they say that a lot like you find out your demons right because now you've got the money you've got the
00:52:36
power you've got this admiration so talk to me about like the the other side of that
00:52:41
that meteoric rise i'd say channeling in of how i or
00:52:47
chewing into how i was at that time i say the it was euphoric there was that
00:52:53
i was like wow everything's new you're doing new places and going to the best restaurants and your
00:53:00
eyes are wide open you want to play into this country and i went i was at the house of blues in in
00:53:05
america doing we had three nights there and the first night and i i tell this because it kind of
00:53:11
just to give context to how bizarre it was so remember i've come from your flash i
00:53:17
think that girl actually over there let me do a little mix view over here get a little half an hour in a set jump fast forward a few years later
00:53:23
house of blues three nights in a row first night missy elliott is has come to to watch
00:53:29
the show i'm looking up thinking this is crazy like i can't stand the rain and i don't just
00:53:34
miss the yellow it's the hot next night i'm there i look up in the same balcony jennifer lopez is there
00:53:41
i'm like wow and i want to sound like i'm name dropping but i want it to be to give context but yeah it's just these these
00:53:46
facts yeah the the the following night sorry how am i missing this it was it
00:53:53
was missy and beyonce [ __ ] off then it was jennifer lopez then on
00:53:58
the last night i look out into the crowd and there's a lot of kind of attention on one in particular gentleman that's in
00:54:04
the crowd who's singing i couldn't quite work out cause the lights were too too dark so i got the front house to turn the lights up and i
00:54:11
look in the crowd and i'm singing walking away and i look over and i see stevie wonder you see you're looking
00:54:16
walking away and i'm just like i mean what do you say at that point i didn't know i felt emotional i felt
00:54:23
because it was stevie wonder from the record collection from my mom's stuff beyonce i've got destiny's child on my
00:54:28
wall had jennifer lopez on my wall missy ellie i don't even listening to before i come out it was just like
00:54:34
you can't make this up it was almost like yes you view behind the scenes and bam
00:54:39
here it is and then i got to meet him at the end and he'd come with quincy jones who we all know is the producer of
00:54:46
all the huge hits for michael jackson and then quincy said you know like
00:54:52
nj you know what he said he said it even more like like coded he's like yeah
00:54:58
um it's like m he said it's like m's got your album like it's just like vibe and i said m
00:55:04
yeah you know mj and michael michael's got like he's got the army loves born to do he's been listening to gave it to his friends i was like let's stop this
00:55:10
if we can if this is this is the thing we've arrived we're good i've got my fix
00:55:16
there's not much more i could ask for but it was literally the start of an incredible rollercoaster ride which
00:55:24
left the later years i think which we get into it hops back to that and i can i can see
00:55:30
where the cracks are starting because when to answer your question about the other side of it it was so euphoric and
00:55:36
i was so swept up on it it was like getting on a surfboard and actually being on the wave and you you're doing i don't know i never use this word but
00:55:42
like the most gnarliest like you're the gnarly waves gnarly you know me you're the a rip rip curl that's going crazy you're
00:55:49
through the middle of the eye of it you're on it you're not coming off but then there was a point
00:55:54
when the next album slicker than your average dropped which was only like a year or so later 2002.
00:56:02
had great success with watch your flavor and and songs were hitting but there was this
00:56:07
born to do it had now done seven million albums six times platinum oh six times platinum
00:56:13
it's still still crazy and when you said about the wembley arena three times sold out i'm standing outside the sign i got
00:56:19
in my mom's house like there's a picture of i'm like you just can't make it up it's it was so
00:56:25
beautiful and i'm so grateful for those times but i started to see from the slick in
00:56:31
your average time where the record label would already start to quota i was going to do 10 11 million
00:56:37
obviously slicker than your average because now the trajectory is going to be has to go higher than this
00:56:42
so then when the album ended up coming out they ended up selling 3.5 million albums
00:56:48
and 3.5 million albums yet at the time i remember
00:56:55
that there was this feeling in the company of ah hmm right only 3.5 and i'm i'm i'm
00:57:04
impressionable i'm a young kid i don't know i've just got into this the music business and you're telling me that
00:57:10
that's not a good thing because the last time i checked the feeling i'm getting is i just saw 3.5 million albums give
00:57:16
3.5 million to any artist now like we were good
00:57:21
so i'd already started to buy into there was some it was there was a trajectory was starting to go in a
00:57:27
different place that that i wouldn't even know about figures i didn't really care about albums cells i
00:57:33
was just like i'm just happy to be here and i'm making music and i'm doing what i love my dream but that was the first learning curve of
00:57:40
the the defining of defining of product and defining of you being a commodity that has to
00:57:46
achieve something now that you've set it up here whereas i thought it got fun when you started to do i thought it got
00:57:52
more playful no no they got more serious and there's more cooks in the kitchen and everyone's got an opinion of the song you should be releasing
00:57:59
beyond expectation the curse of all happiness and joy and you must know this
00:58:05
you're just trying to equate what you're self worth through so many other people's
00:58:10
expectation of you like you said so i'm trying to say okay cool well
00:58:15
we're here i'm a songwriter i'd always i'd always had a really great rapport with my manager colin esther who's been
00:58:21
with me like for i've got i love the conversations that we we've had over the years and and him even saying early doors
00:58:28
that i can't guarantee you success i but i'll do everything in my power to
00:58:33
to to protect you and keep you safe so you can do your thing and having those kind of confidence in in in the people
00:58:39
that you're working with is is paramount when you do start to get these the feedback trickling through because i
00:58:45
never was like oh yeah what are today's midweeks i wasn't really too interested in like finding out all the stats
00:58:51
because what happens is and you can get this now and i say this to any aspiring artist who's putting music out now and you're
00:58:56
having success is literally just enjoy it fully be immersed in it because if you start to
00:59:03
check for what's going on next week your moment when you're supposed to have the number one and you're enjoying life
00:59:08
you're already gonna be able to see by tuesday wednesday that your numbers already showing that you're already number three now you slipped off and
00:59:14
they're number one so your moment of glory was actually there was the curve and at the point where you got the thing
00:59:19
which is the beautiful metal number one or you really know you're already kind
00:59:24
of on the decline so it's that i had to ride that for a few more albums if i'm
00:59:29
being honest to i was making songs and they were connecting but if it was a
00:59:34
number four in the charts it wasn't number one like it was before i haven't got the same
00:59:40
amount of time that i had to make those songs i've got haven't got enough life really
00:59:45
all this sort of those first albums there is seminal because it's all your life up until that point right
00:59:51
and then after that the expectation is we need it on a deadline and we need it this time and you've got hit this in the midst of the fact you're doing a hundred
00:59:58
interviews and you're doing you're flying all over the place but still you've got to conjure up that thing
01:00:03
i don't know any artists that that won't feel that and hats often kudos to anyone who is able
01:00:09
to sustain that but as a human being i know that's a tour order for anyone to be able to
01:00:15
to continuously do and you start to see with any of the artists who we put in
01:00:21
from from the amy winehouses to the michael jacksons to the whitney houstons the height of success when it is like
01:00:27
whoa like otherworldly there's so much of the the human part that's being unmet
01:00:35
that it gets to the point where breaking point and then something happens because it's drug addiction or if it moves into
01:00:42
mental health issues and depression which are all so real that no human can vibrate at
01:00:48
that level for that amount of time and i i'm thankful for those moments that kind
01:00:54
of shaved off a little bit of the it being all go go because i think that it kind of made me have to go back to a lot
01:01:01
of things that were like when my grandmother passed away which on the next down story goes
01:01:06
i was back in my heart again it's like i'm writing a song like johnny about bullying or i'm talking about let her go
01:01:12
a song i wrote from about my grandmother to my mum to say that i know it's crushing you you lost your mom and i've
01:01:17
lost my grandma who's pretty much raised me here's a song and i want you to hear it
01:01:23
and those things that start to get back in my heart because we can get heady and when it starts to get heady you're out
01:01:28
of you're not in sync with this this is the real brains and i've learned that
01:01:33
now it's not this is a is a loyal servant to the heart but if you go from here and then that
01:01:39
you can find the ways to get to a to b but it has to start from here you
01:01:45
know i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast as we all know energy independence and living a little
01:01:52
greener has never been more important for a better future it's a journey i've been on over the last couple of years
01:01:57
that i've shared with you sporadically ever since i sold my range over sport and bought an electric bicycle and
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there's a lot of people out there that listen to this podcast that are looking to make that sustainable switch in the
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things that run their daily life whether it's their home their car their vehicles whatever it might be so when a good
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01:02:46
and you describe that journey as a as a roller coaster so what at what point did that roller coaster start heading down
01:02:52
from that um place you described as euphoria to a place where you um weren't euphoric
01:02:59
talk talk to me about the down part of the roller coaster i'd say when i released
01:03:05
the trust me album in 2009 um it just felt there was
01:03:11
from where i'd started off with very cultural records like rewind and
01:03:17
fill me in which is why we talked earlier how their songs even played now and they still seem to hit
01:03:22
when i when i look at 2009 and the trust me album i
01:03:27
i felt like i was starting to make music that was to please please
01:03:34
people and to tick boxes it was like i was there's a song called top of the hill which is a lovely song
01:03:39
i love the song but if you listen to that song to how it started off it was very far removed the type of music was
01:03:46
becoming very live and it wasn't as it wasn't as synth-based and then so
01:03:51
which i'd drawn all my inspirations from as a kid and that's not to say that you can't experiment but i knew at that
01:03:56
point i was entering into a new space and then by the time i released that album which i was proud of i'm always
01:04:03
proud of the music i put out but it wasn't connecting as well science hill delivered was
01:04:09
an album that i did just after that which was i was out of a deal at the time
01:04:14
um just because i'd run the tenure of my my deal so it was kind of a fresh start i could
01:04:20
look at different record labels universal were excited so we did a deal with universal then i was put out this
01:04:26
album called science hill delivered which was a covers album and i was singing like doc of the bay
01:04:33
and the title song science delivered from stevie but verbatim like the originals it
01:04:38
wasn't some chopped and screwed it wasn't an r b version it wasn't a garage thing it wasn't like your it was like
01:04:44
the same song the same song and i felt like it was time that i
01:04:49
needed to sort of check myself and just be like are you getting the fun out of this like you used to
01:04:54
do you want to continue making music like this and thankfully the the the the world
01:05:00
always the universe always mirrors everything that you're going through so it mirrors your state of play of where you are so i always felt that
01:05:06
i was if the feeling i was getting was being mirrored back i'm not quite feeling this
01:05:11
so the world says cool i'll give you more of you're not quite feeling this in your circumstances that happen around
01:05:16
you whereas when i was the kid growing up making the first album i was feeling everything i was feeling the song on the
01:05:22
way home from the studio i was feeling it on my sub speaker at home i was feeling those rides up in the car to do
01:05:28
the performance it was feeling and now i check in with that deeply
01:05:33
because i know that anytime i'm not feeling it act from that not from the head saying
01:05:40
well i know seo had a big covers album at the time i think that was a good reference point he had a huge covers
01:05:45
albums doing serious numbers and that was the sentiment that universal were presenting like do a covers record
01:05:53
no brainer you can sing these songs motown gonna be good it's a soul thing and then i'll springboard off the back
01:05:59
of that with your own album that was the the play was never really worked out that way
01:06:04
because it didn't really work out as an album it didn't hit the way it did and there was no next album that came from off the back
01:06:11
of that there was a period of time where i was like i was at the scene for a second and what did you do then this is
01:06:16
when you moved to miami yeah so i was in i was in miami from
01:06:22
2010 so it was like about a year after that album and i was there for about five six years for the first two three
01:06:28
years the best time probably of my life being out there anything and everything that you could
01:06:33
possibly think of miami being and what it was representing but the latter period of that period
01:06:39
that time was where something was ringing inside of me of you're in the wrong place
01:06:45
and this is what intuition is very quiet and it and it's it's it's really creeps up and it's it's a night it's like not
01:06:51
even nagging it's like you hear it and you just i don't want to hear it i want to it's all this it looks great over here
01:06:57
you know i mean it looks so aesthetically pleasing for me i mean the car and the department and the parties
01:07:04
and the women and just it was like the parties that were just like every day of the week something going on
01:07:10
music isn't really getting recorded now because the voice is is just destroyed from like shouting in a club
01:07:17
and doing a nonsense so muse is getting pushed to the side all those fancy toys and the vibes
01:07:23
starting to become more important it means like that my balance of of actual supply and
01:07:29
demand of music that got me there was way off i was literally creating hardly anything is there shades of like you
01:07:36
you're going up on this trajectory when you're like a younger man 18 19 etc and then going into this place where you
01:07:42
almost abandoned your like your essence and your roots and then you that kind of culminates and you're making this covers album which is almost
01:07:48
it's quite it's almost a bit of a metaphor because then you were really being someone else like doing cover albums is by definition you're covering
01:07:54
other people's music on their own style and then almost this um this period in miami where you get into
01:08:00
partying is it seems like a bit of a distraction maybe or whatever trying to explore trying to get some other pleasure from another type of life yeah
01:08:07
and then kind of going back to your your roots in a way where you all of that you tasted the [ __ ] yes you'd had the don
01:08:13
perrion you know and you and that wasn't it so now you go back and ask yourself what is it what is it and then it seems
01:08:20
like with ts5 you you created a new kind of expression of who craig david is and who he always was
01:08:28
maybe who you lost sight of over the years because of all these temptations and your own success
01:08:33
ain't that the truth when you start to realize that actually going back to the things that
01:08:39
and it's all back in childhood this is the thing when i tune in it's like the decks and the dj and the mixtapes that
01:08:46
was all i was trying to do when i was doing the ts5 house party i just wanted to feel that again like i'm mixing now
01:08:52
with my little pioneer dj setup and i'm on the microphone being the host of the most this and
01:08:58
i want everyone to feel that feeling that i got into the whole thing for and if someone doesn't know what ts5 is yeah
01:09:03
can you explain just give an overview of exactly what it is yeah so ts5 is like um
01:09:09
it's when i the performance now from the house party that it was um
01:09:15
is i'm able to close the dj when i first started off as we've spoken about before and i was at that point then dj fade so i honed all
01:09:22
my skills on on using vinyl and technics 1210s the ts5 set is the name came from
01:09:28
the apartment in miami and it's a show where i'm able to dj and mix other people's records as
01:09:34
much as drop my ones in and they will come to come out of my my dj booth and sing and do a performance
01:09:42
in a way for me that is it is giving me all the feels i got from when i was a dj
01:09:47
but also i can do the performances and drop some gems in there at the same time like i can play a tlc no scrubs or i can play
01:09:54
saying my name and then go into filming i just love it and taking that to pool parties i did now
01:10:00
betha i think i was trying to set the tone of like this isn't a dj set where i
01:10:06
can get away with playing some songs doing a few shots of tequila with my mates and get paid for
01:10:12
it and go home i just can't like i get that can work in certain and i have no judgment it's do your
01:10:18
thing but for me as a performer mixing the tunes is like it's so easy now like with vinyl was like that was a
01:10:25
mission but like now so i can mix the tunes that's nothing but to come out of the booth perform do an mc thing and hit
01:10:31
the marker back inside to get to the next song that's for me i i pride myself on it's giving me a whole new lease of life for
01:10:37
festivals so that's really what ts5 is and it's become a phenomenal brand phenomenal brand for for music putting
01:10:44
and it's it's funny because it's such an it's it's quite rare that you have someone that has that kind of skill stack
01:10:49
of all those different pieces that can do that i think that's probably why it's been such a such a hit is because you
01:10:54
rarely see someone who can drop their own records who can sing who can perform but then who can also dj it's like a
01:11:01
really interesting new thing totally yeah i i felt i felt it and i got a little touch of it in the party when i
01:11:07
was in in my house prize i mean i didn't even start to put see this is
01:11:12
it's beautiful when you look back at the puzzle pieces when the picture starts to become a little bit more clearer as you
01:11:18
put okay that puzzle that piece there meant you needed that piece to happen for this one to happen
01:11:24
so when i was performing in my house i wasn't actually performing in my own songs at all because i just felt like i don't want to start dropping my own
01:11:29
songs in the middle of the thing and then i have people come over and be like drop that film me in drop rewind
01:11:36
one girl came over said drop seven days and i was like nah she goes please is my favorite song and i
01:11:42
was like and i literally was like maybe i might do a verse just one one and it started
01:11:48
me the idea of putting a couple of my songs in and then we started to record the set i'll start to record the set and
01:11:53
put on soundcloud so people could listen to it after because people were like oh where can i get i'd love to listen to it back to that set or we did sang a happy
01:11:59
birthday to someone and it was a moment that they wanted to hear again no one caught it and i was like well let me
01:12:04
capture this now and that was actually where it flipped back into mixtape land
01:12:09
that i then got my manager took it into kiss kiss originally were like we can air this put it out as a show and then
01:12:17
it went on to capital capital aired it as well and capital extra so all of a sudden it was like it's gone from a
01:12:22
house party to a thing and then we did a couple of early shows one uh two shows in hackney
01:12:27
to see if this house party would translate into an actual thing and when i saw people it going off in the same
01:12:33
way i thought wow this isn't just a miami thing you know it's not just in my house it's actually people connecting with it and since then i guess
01:12:40
glastonbury was probably the one of the pinnacle of it because you're there in front of a crowd who are there
01:12:45
for a murray at a different artist and you're there performing a band set
01:12:50
and then go into a dj set and to see it going off i was like this is my people
01:12:55
from miami who were early doors when we first did that party which was like nine of us just messing about
01:13:00
having a couple shots with playing off itunes it's a glaston route to glastonbury that was that was crazy so
01:13:05
it just it's always there the pieces are always there but time sometimes you just need to have time and
01:13:11
patience in this it's so interesting looking at your story as like an outsider and watching that journey of
01:13:16
you being this like huge mega star then the the downside of the roller coaster as you describe it and then watching you
01:13:22
over the last like five six seven eight years come back out with as almost like this
01:13:29
completely new character but with a proposition that's as resonant as what you used to do a very
01:13:35
very different proposition but you like okay from my like not really paying attention to what's going on in the world because i'm not really that into
01:13:41
pop culture you know i used to listen to my walkman and then there was a gap and then you're
01:13:47
back in again where everyone's talking about craig david again but for a completely different proposition but it appears to be a completely different proposition
01:13:54
that's not common or easy the question i actually have for you is because it's a roller coaster your mind goes on the
01:14:01
roller coaster as well and this kind of brings me into the topic of mental health yeah
01:14:06
be honest with me what was the mental health journey throughout that whole period of time
01:14:11
do you know where i sit in there was a long period of time
01:14:17
i i guess that those um those words of of of man are poor
01:14:24
or you just just just just just just roll
01:14:29
with it just roll with it just man is the most amount of nonsense
01:14:34
that i've ever had because it's that in of itself is what it's what's caused the crazy suicide rates that we see
01:14:41
especially in men and the way in which it's spiraling out of control because it's like keep it inside repress it put
01:14:46
it under the carpet don't talk about it that's what we do that very alpha
01:14:51
way and thankfully and this goes back to my parents my grandma and my my mom in particular
01:14:58
it was all about open conversation and then and speaking and have have open conversation and be able to get it out
01:15:03
and have a convo and i think that there was periods where i just i rode through it and i think miami was
01:15:10
kind of just was it was a break from a lot of things and me being out there and being a different climate a different
01:15:16
culture enjoying those things but that still wasn't fulfilling what i was really looking for
01:15:22
what i really wanted was connection and relationship in a way that i'd
01:15:27
experienced almost in those kind of early doors before the first album and at the when
01:15:32
it hit so the roller coaster ride is you find character in your lows 100 you
01:15:39
you ask the questions the real question do you really want to do this are you really about this and i am a musician
01:15:44
through and through um and i love it but the the
01:15:49
depression is real mental health in the in the multitude of myriad of different ways
01:15:55
that that can come about is real and it's that and it's something that
01:16:01
you can only half the battle i've always spoken about that you is talking to it's being able to express that to someone
01:16:07
you can confide in and even if it's not something you can provide it in a phone line that you can pick up and just speak to someone you don't know maybe in some
01:16:13
ways that can be even better you can just go i've got my chest and they're giving you they're hearing you they see you
01:16:19
but that's only half the battle the rest is then a journey of they call it in more spiritual circles dark knight the
01:16:24
soul of going through into a place where you're going to uncover everything that was put under that carpet
01:16:31
having to bring it to the light and having to bring it up and work through it to find
01:16:37
a place where you pull the carpet up and all the dust goes up everywhere and then you start to see where it lands you start saying okay this was a story that
01:16:43
i was telling myself the things i was defining myself of myself self-worth through how i looked and the approval of
01:16:50
others this is authority figures feeling like they had something over me the power i had when i was the
01:16:57
entrepreneur selling chocolates and and making the songs that's really you who i've always been but i had
01:17:03
abandoned you used that earlier abandoning yourself when that starts to happen
01:17:08
it could spiral out of control and i had injuries and and physical injuries through all the training and stuff that
01:17:13
i did as well that spiraled me into different depths of depression where i was just like whoa i've never experienced this
01:17:20
when things happen that you've never they cumulatively build up but then
01:17:26
there's something that breaks it just snaps it and at that point it just feels like whoa and you're trying to
01:17:31
you're free fall that's the feeling i feel with depression i've experienced that i know how it is and i haven't really been as vocal i guess as
01:17:38
today about like that and i feel it's necessary because it's i don't want to be that one who's telling a story i want to be so
01:17:45
authentic and i want to open up like you said you spoke about things that you needed to get off your chest and let people know the other side of all this
01:17:51
because in that is where all the beauty and empathy really is and people can connect and
01:17:56
they say oh what so you went through that ah so it isn't this thing that only me and
01:18:02
all of a sudden we're all connected and i'm thinking yes and then i'm i'm inspired by people who kind of wear the
01:18:08
heart on their sleeves now so yeah i feel like it was a culmination of a
01:18:14
lot of those things building up to being in the wrong place being away from my family missing being able to just make
01:18:20
music in the way i did coming back to the uk and then as soon as i did that and i felt i felt
01:18:25
my first huge hug when i walked in and saw big nasty corrupted fm uh mr jam uh storms using
01:18:34
the building shola amma and i did this this one extra performance which was really i was going to rock up and
01:18:41
vibe fill me in and i ended up singing it over where are you now that the justin bieber diplo
01:18:46
skrillex instrumental there was this moment of love i felt big
01:18:52
nasty gave me a hug first when i came in wearing his heart and sleep booty man's my tune oh my god great booty man is my
01:18:58
song and i'm like whoa like really wearing his heart sleeve and then sing this song i sing fill me
01:19:04
in as a remix vibe over this instrumental and it went so viral
01:19:09
that i'm looking on my phone i'm seeing justin bieber like saying like whoa that's amazing that you need to check it
01:19:14
45 minutes into the show then i'm seeing skrillex on my timeline i'm seeing diplo on the timeline i'm just thinking
01:19:21
something's happened here but it was more than just
01:19:26
it needed me to play my part and get back home and get and go through that miami phase of what that was all about
01:19:33
i i i find that really interesting that that's the fit so is was that that miami phase the first
01:19:39
phase in your life where you encountered what you believed to be like depressive symptoms where you felt fell into a depression in the in the latter stages
01:19:45
of mommy yeah because i got injured out there my back went like in like in my
01:19:51
lower back and i never felt a pain like that in my life like i felt aches and pains of of
01:19:57
training incidents and different things i've had like anyone who's had like a blowout in the back
01:20:02
but this one in particular was just like it was a feeling that just wouldn't give up so i was my movement patterns was
01:20:10
went from you know you're 100 you're doing the last kind of leg leg press and now it's all these it's dead lifts and i've
01:20:18
got respect for deadlift amazing move but when your if your back goes on one of those
01:20:24
i promise you will there's a feeling that you have which is like putting your hands in like 240 volts in the wall that it's just it's
01:20:31
different it's like it's a nerve pain which is not like an ache or like all feels a bit sore like you've got doms
01:20:37
from doing too many kind of like some glute work so when it went i was like
01:20:44
i've never felt anything quite like this and it made me have to check myself in a whole different way for the fact that every
01:20:50
movement i did felt like i was getting that same spasm so it wasn't just like one spasm it wasn't like okay we've locked up we're good
01:20:57
at that point you know where you're at i've had those before we all had i think in our lives we have a sporadic moment we have a thing
01:21:03
this was now it's happening now it's happening now it's happening now like it was continuous nerve
01:21:09
spasm i was like it was a spiral for me it was it was a point where i had dark thoughts i was
01:21:15
just like i can't live my life like this so i understood really at that point the first time
01:21:20
depression hit me and i couldn't reframe it as being positive i couldn't say this is put a positive spin on it there was
01:21:25
nothing so i'd had the mental thing so i was getting i kind of signed up for
01:21:31
for a good uh for to to be someone who you have to experience certain things to be able to
01:21:36
speak on it and i get that now so it's like okay we've you come here to to to
01:21:41
on mission to do this you're gonna have to feel pain physically you're gonna have to feel heartbreak you're gonna have to feel
01:21:49
anxiety and abandonment of of your body you're gonna have to feel all these things
01:21:54
and then i hope that you get to a point where you get the memo which i've now fully understood the memo i don't need
01:22:01
to be doing deadlifts and i don't need to be training like the way i trained before i can stay healthy and more
01:22:06
importantly what people enjoyed from me was music that it never had changed and
01:22:11
i realized that from when i came back to london it was like people just want to hear music and they were cool they were just
01:22:17
happy and this version of me and i love all the other versions because it all
01:22:22
played a part this isn't a judgment thing like oh yeah well we always tend to be like yeah an album comes out you're like yeah it's no good
01:22:28
anymore this is the one night they all played a part to me sitting here today with you and being able to
01:22:33
break down things and unpack things and as a as a as a man now to be open enough to
01:22:40
say i know what depression feels like i speak differently on things now and the more i can open up and speak on
01:22:46
the pain that i felt and that back thing ran for years it was like a couple years two three years i was like
01:22:53
and even i mean today i'll put my hands up i'm still working out like jeremy we do we do surgery do we not do we like
01:23:00
i'm it's it's dialed down incredibly but it was a defining moment it's pivotal to
01:23:05
me and it just was like whoa and like i said depression
01:23:11
you'll have dark thoughts dark thoughts you'll have you start having thoughts so you're like if this pain can
01:23:17
continuously goes on like this then i i can't
01:23:23
it sounds crazy for me to say because that gives me the nicest guy and you're so positive and you're like how could it but i was like i just can't live like i
01:23:30
can't live like this so you start not thinking about ways that you would say
01:23:36
um lose um take your life or to to dip out but if you start having thoughts of
01:23:42
something has to happen like this this pain is intolerable i can't even style it out there's nothing for it and i
01:23:48
think that that when it started to dial down and we've done it from injections and all different kinds of things conservatively
01:23:55
and strengthening the the multifidus and the paraspinals and the glutes i know my body so well now it got
01:24:01
me back into my body more importantly i start to understand the mechanics of how my body works
01:24:07
whenever we listen to things you know we get a little ache in a pain or you get a little thing telltale sign that's 10 years ago you've got a blow out and then
01:24:13
it blows out again and you didn't listen you keep going all that does it just amps up the sound till you get the one
01:24:18
you got the memo now okay cool now you've got the mem that's how the universe works so i'm really intriguing
01:24:24
my body when it starts telling me stuff i'm like i need to check for this early because i don't want that five-year thing and the
01:24:29
thing's going to let me know the hard way it's dialed down thank god but all part of the plan
01:24:37
because it's put me in a place where i can physically go out there and do my shows like i love i can go out there and
01:24:42
perform like i love i don't need to be putting the extra work in in a gym to
01:24:47
satisfy anything that's i can go swimming i can move my body and i and i
01:24:52
can the things i can dial it up and we can get whatever would you we'll be looking for but who is it for it's not for
01:24:58
anyone anymore i don't need that but you are back you're back in the uk now back at the uk back in the uk
01:25:05
um and you said this you said this quote you said to a lot of people i'm at my destination i've arrived i'm back
01:25:10
but no i'm still on my journey and i'm not taking my foot off the gas
01:25:16
now that that phrase foot on the gas right it kind of sounds it has hints of a
01:25:22
former craig yeah when you even set foot off the gas here
01:25:28
i don't know what day i was saying that or what i was going to do yeah when you said it to me then i knew exactly as you were gonna say like
01:25:34
what's this one on the gas thing because that would suggest that your head strong run into it yeah yeah yeah i
01:25:41
i i get the sentiment but then also the phrase the terminology is a little bit it's this is troubling right yeah yeah
01:25:47
it's like we're not didn't take the foot off the gas just relax for the save your petrol just just calm
01:25:53
yourself stay sometimes staying still weirdly enough is actually the one i recognize when i stay still and the
01:25:59
world moves it's like wow pandemic yeah that i've got to say had for for
01:26:05
everything and the pain it caused and the people who lost their lives and families that were
01:26:11
that were suffering so deeply and still are um when you look at just how it was a pause
01:26:17
on the whole world and it just had people recognizing that one they had to
01:26:22
relinquish control because they got to a point well i can't control this so okay break open the monopoly board let's
01:26:28
let's let's have a game then all of a sudden back into kid back into the child again
01:26:33
the child was seen play started to happen and as much as like we we we all like to
01:26:39
say that we need to be the thing of doing doing doing but sometimes doing nothing
01:26:44
don't don't don't think that the world isn't working for you behind the scenes here when you're doing nothing like
01:26:50
having a good night's sleep resting trust me for the working out in the gym and all those kind of things the rest
01:26:55
was the actual thing whereas growth happened so why would that be no different for the way that we are when let me let me
01:27:01
sleep on this let me slow down and man it's it's a blessing to see someone
01:27:08
as inspired and conscious as you putting it out there and allowing people like myself to come through speak our truth
01:27:14
have people have a platform to speak and feel open and not feel like they're boxed in having to kind of got the media
01:27:20
training here have to be there open out because that's what we need we've done that the old patriarchal system is
01:27:25
crashing down yeah it's not working anymore no one wants to divide and conquer and fight it ain't
01:27:31
gonna work we want love we want a heart-based relationship so that failed us right we tried that and it failed
01:27:37
failed to felt deeply man yeah just really did and as we look forward you've got this album coming out which i'm really excited about called 22
01:27:44
and it's coming out on the 24th of june this year yeah talk to me you know throughout this it's been 22 years as
01:27:50
well since you your first first album yeah so 22 years later
01:27:57
your album 22 comes out what can i expect from this what what is the inspiration what is the the art the
01:28:03
creativity the pain what is the what is what is it okay so we know born to do it was
01:28:09
was my baby it broke out everything for me it was the moment where everything i built up into that point
01:28:14
it was me getting the the golden ticket let's say it's the golden ticket we're entering into the
01:28:20
the chocolate factory now excited but not the ending right then i had to go through life a little and now i'm
01:28:26
landing at this place in my life where and during the pandemic gave me a lot of time to write a lot of songs about
01:28:32
studio at home so i just i was writing a lot of songs and i had no rush it felt like how i was when i made my first
01:28:38
album if i wanted to do a verse today call if not i'm going to go downstairs to the kitchen and maybe i'll throw on a
01:28:43
movie and maybe i'll come back up i was grateful that i had that the privilege to be able to do that and to
01:28:49
make home uh as productive as if i wanted it to be or as relaxed as i wanted to be
01:28:54
it feels like it has all the it has all the feels it feels like has all the feels of
01:29:00
my first album want to do it i feel like the kid again and i keep using the word feel because i think that's the most important that's my that's the only
01:29:06
thing i can really gauge thing how am i feeling i've got a big sub speaker in my in my new in my in my home in in in
01:29:13
london again same thing literally i got to i literally just patted the same thing with a couple of blue lights to
01:29:18
make you just look a little bit like oh it's a 2.0 version of the same but same big speaker i can play it loud i've had
01:29:26
people come over and i've said you you need to understand what bases like really because they think they know what basically or the sonar system and it's
01:29:32
all cool got a little couple subs listen to this and you get that
01:29:38
it's different so i feel like i've got the rmb on there i've got the the garage on there i've
01:29:44
got songs that i feel that weave a beautiful journey of where i'm at now i feel i'm
01:29:49
speaking on things that it's coming from a place where i can still have the lingo and the languaging
01:29:55
that doesn't set you off as being like oh you were like in the 2000s and you're well no one says that anymore no one's
01:30:02
saying tipsy in the in the club anymore no one's even really saying getting wavy anymore that's sort of like a bit a couple years back johnny's what's the
01:30:07
news so working with young artists working with young fresh songwriters they'll give me languaging
01:30:14
that allows me to get my messaging across but in a way that it can get the most broadest kind of reach
01:30:21
i just feel like we've yeah i don't want to guess it because it feels like every artist does that right
01:30:27
yeah it's just it feels really true to where i'm at right now and i've got i listen to it
01:30:33
and i'm excited to listen back to this album and as i have done since really the following tuition album since
01:30:38
i came back 2016 did that one time is now and this one but this one feels like
01:30:43
with that i'm a journeyman that's the the cover album cover is me on a journey
01:30:48
and i feel like that journeyman of just 22 years in now and as i said to the willy wonka element i feel like charlie
01:30:56
who's now going through the test he got a little caught up which if you clock it it was his grandpa who kind of
01:31:01
got him to take that fizzy uh fizzy um lifting drink and he started to go up into the thing it wasn't really charlie
01:31:07
he was calm he was actually being the good one across it was his granddad that kind of going right to get to the end
01:31:13
where the everlasting gobstopper part where he has a choice to sell himself out go sell it for 50 000 pounds i think
01:31:21
to the the competitor chocolate maker of slugworth or does he go back and put it
01:31:26
back on willy wonka's desk and do the right thing knowing he's going away with nothing i feel like i'm at that place where i'm
01:31:33
in i've created an album and i'm willing to i'm willing to trade in all of the
01:31:40
things that i'd up into this point this pretence that maybe i had behind the scene that people didn't win i i've
01:31:45
there's always getting 80 of me but there was a 20 and that's enough or 10 of me that's not it's enough it's like
01:31:52
the uh the princess and the p trust me it's underneath there and it will keep getting you it's like the thorn in the
01:31:57
foot it's like it doesn't have to be big it's not some big drama but it's getting you right
01:32:02
i want to pull the thorn out i want to find the p all right i want to i want to say i want to sleep on my knight in my
01:32:07
mattress where i'm not feeling slightly uncomfortable because i know there's something underneath there's there's a needle in the haystack and i don't want
01:32:13
i know it's in there yeah we gotta find it i'm at that stage where i'm dropping this album that i feel i've put the
01:32:19
blasting gobstopper back and i have no idea if willy wonka's gonna turn around and say charlie you did it i knew you would do
01:32:26
it i had to test you i had to test you he's like what what the chocolate no
01:32:31
more than the chocolate what is it got the whole chocolate factory you've got the whole chocolate magic and his family
01:32:36
can move in and everyone can be part of it and that's how i'm feeling now everyone can be part of this this is
01:32:41
this is different now so i'm excited man oh i'm excited and you know i'm i was excited before but hearing your
01:32:47
description of it and feeling your energy about where this is coming from and it's coming from that place of like your intuition your wisdom and your
01:32:54
maturity and over those 22 years all of that unbelievable twisting journey that
01:32:59
you've been on to create a record now um [Music] which inc like which sort of collects
01:33:05
all of that wisdom and all of that emotion and truth and pain and experience is really something to be um
01:33:12
excited about as a as a craig david fan so thank you for for giving us another project i i've not heard it yet they
01:33:18
wouldn't they wouldn't let me hear it but i but i can't i can't wait
01:33:23
because i always feel like these these moments have always more than you've done you you've done your your moment
01:33:30
together but i just feel there's a friendship building here anyway i'll play the album we'll get some food
01:33:36
and we'll vibe so it's calm you'll be well ahead of the game no do you know from the minute you walked in the door i felt like i'd known you a long time and
01:33:41
that's a credit to you because i meet a lot of people here right so sometimes people come in and maybe they're a little bit colder and like that you know
01:33:48
there's a lot of things going on in their lives which i'm unaware of so i've got to have empathy for that but the minute you walked in through the door it
01:33:53
was like you were my brother and it's like we're known each other that's that's a honestly it's a credit to you so
01:33:59
thank you thank you so much for your time we have a closing tradition on this podcast
01:34:04
which is the previous guest writes and the next guest a question nice so okay
01:34:09
and i don't get to see what it is until open the book nice nice so the preview and this is a very good one in fact very fitting the previous guest wrote if you
01:34:16
could whisper in the ear of your 14 year old self what would you whisper
01:34:21
that's good that's good that's good
01:34:27
listen craig my nose might freak you out because you're hearing a voice in your ear right now but
01:34:33
trust me i'm i'm a little older version of you and everything you're about to do right now
01:34:40
is going to change your life in the most beautiful way and i want you just to enjoy every moment and know that there
01:34:46
will be times that will be quite hard but know that i'm here know that i'm always there holding your
01:34:52
hand along the way and i promise you that once you get through them the feeling you will have will be like
01:34:58
the euphoria you are just about to experience in a couple years time so get ready and trust me
01:35:04
the crowd are gonna go off when they hear something soon okay love to you my man
01:35:10
amen it was like a prayer thank you so much okay
01:35:15
honestly it's a huge honor and your vulnerability and openness you don't know you won't ever get to see the impact it has i probably will i'll get
01:35:21
the comments and the messages and you will as well but the impact of you being being self-aware enough and man enough to be
01:35:28
vulnerable i think is is really something which i i applaud you for because you just don't really you know
01:35:34
the impact you're going to have on a lot of young men specifically is is profound and uh yeah long-lasting
01:35:40
so thank you thank you and fearless mutual man very genuine i appreciate thank you
01:35:46
[Music]
01:36:08
you
