Official Chart Pop Gem #13: Craig David – 7 Days

An eye-popping page from Craig David's secret diary from 2000 is our latest Pop Gem.

We love to shine the spotlight on some of those pop classics from the archives that got us on the dance floor back in the day, but may no longer get the recognition they deserve. The Official Chart Pop Gem celebrates those tunes you know you love – you’d maybe just forgotten.

This week, a lightning-speed guide to dating by a young solo star who was Slicker Than Your Average.

Craig David – 7 Days

Cast your mind back to the year 2000, the dawn of the new millennium, before Saturday nights were your best place to find a new popstar and minidisc players were still the most cutting-edge bit of tech for listening to your favourite tunes. A young guy from Southampton was having a stellar year.

Craig David shot to fame in 1999 when he was all over our ‘boing’ (it was never quite made clear what that meant) as a featured artist on Artful Dodger’s Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta), a Number 2 smash on the Official Singles Chart at the very end of 1999. The appetite for speed garage had never been bigger, and though he appeared on one more of Artful Dodger’s hits, Woman Trouble, it was time for Craig to strike out on his own.

His first single Fill Me In went straight in at Number 1 and sold over 520,000 copies, but it’s his follow-up, the effortlessly slick, sexy 7 Days that has got our attention today.

The track takes us through what we imagine wouldn’t be a typical week in the life of young Craig as he went about his daily business in Southampton. On his way to meet some friends, he encounters a very pretty girl, who asks Craig for the time. Our hero checks his watch – not a Mickey Mouse timepiece, we’re imagining here, and tells her it’s 3:15 (pm, we assume). This chance meeting on a Monday leads to drinks the following night and by Wednesday, well, we’ll leave Craig to fill in the blanks.

7 Days is Craig David’s third biggest selling single, notching up almost 450,000 copies, and it spent a week at Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart in August 2000. Craig’s top seller was Re-Rewind with Artful Dodger, which has sold over 570,000 copies. 7 Days was taken from his massive-selling debut album Born To Do it, the fifth-biggest selling album of 2000. To date, it has sold over 1.8 million copies.

Craig David has scored 13 Top 10 hits on the Official Singles Chart, last appearing in the Top 40 in February 2008 with 6 of 1 Thing.

But today’s Pop Gem belongs to him. Go on Craig, tell us what you were up to that week…

Craig David - 7 Days (Video) on MUZU.TV.

Got a suggestion for the next Official Chart Pop Gem? Oh, go on, you must have! Drop us an email with your favourite and what you remember about it to popgem@officialcharts.com

Check out the full Official Chart Artist Archive for Craig David.