Credit: Found On Internet

Back in 2001, a young Shokrates, then just a silly teenage critic for some misbegotten rag, was loose at the Carling Weekend: Reading. After one too many puffs on the “special” cigarettes of Shokrate’s shadier friends, we sought out some shelter from the blazing sun to both lie and calm down. So we stumbled into the then-Comedy Tent, to catch Ross Noble being handed a mobile phone with Craig David’s phone number on. Cue a legendary grilling of the young urban star via mobile, the telling of which would later become a staple of the young Geordie’s routine.

Then of course there’s those Bo Selector! sketches. What started as a smirk-raising poke at Craig David, rapidly developed into Leigh Francis’ signature piece. To the increasing grate of the audience that realised there was only one joke. And there I was left wondering – does Craig David see the funny side? It was beginning to seem like the giant paper mache’d chin-parody was going to eclipse its source material

Which is why David’s new album, ‘Trust Me’, is as far removed from he the “MMMM – Craig David!” of that parody as possible. Opening with great fanfare to the David Bowie-sampling ‘Hot Stuff’, David has made a forgettable waste of such a noteworthy track from the Thin White Duke’s back catalogue. Much mocked as they were, the smug wit of stuff like ‘Seven Days’ was positively Wilde’ean compared to the stilted cack passed off as lyrics here: “You’re so hot that you’ve come straight out of the kitchen”. Sweet Jesus, no.

Of course, there are the obligatory collaborations – young London singer, Rita Ora, adds a different-but-still-blandly-beige tone to the so-by-the-numbers-it-could-be-a-calculator R’n’B mawkishness that is ‘Awkward’. Meanwhile, David’s recent collaborator of choice, Kano, adds some irrelevant vocals onto ‘This Is The Girl’. With an over-heavy synth line that over-balances the track, it’s compounded by the fact that this is the album closer, leaving the whole record with the impression of being musically lopsided. David is desperately trying to show just how on the edge and ‘urban’ he still is. While he might’ve rose to fame on the back of the commercial face of UK Garage, Artful Dodger’s ‘Re-Rewind’, he did come up through the grassroots. But that now seems so far away from anything underground he might as well be in orbit, as this latest partnership sounds misguided.