‘My world was closing in’: Craig David reveals how severe pain from back injury sent him ‘to a dark place’

Craig David has opened up about how a back injury left him in such chronic pain that he fell into a depression.

The “7 Days” singer revealed he “could not move” due to the issue, which involved a degenerative disc in his spine between the lumbar spine and sacral spine in the lower back.

David, 41, said he was thrown “into a spiral” of depression because the pain was so severe that he “could not move”.

“My world was closing in,” he told The Timesin an interview published on Sunday (9 October). “I needed to get rid of the pain and I went to a dark place where I thought, ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it’.

“I never got to the point where I was thinking of ways to end this but I thought life wasn’t worth living and I would be happier if I wasn’t here any more.

“There’d be no pain, no possibility of Bo’Selecta! coming back to take me down again,” he added, referring to the early 2000s Channel 4 programme fronted by Leigh Francis.

Francis’ series involved him putting on celebrity caricature masks, including of a highly-exaggerated mask of David, as well as David Beckham, Sir Elton John and former Spice Girl Melanie Brown (Mel B).

Elsewhere in the interview, David addressed the impressions and said they “felt like a vendetta”. In a separate interview with BBC Breakfast on Tuesday (4 October), the singer said: “I have experienced depression and experienced being bullied at school, being bullied and ridiculed on national TV.”

As the series became more popular, people began associating David with the caricature more closely in public.

“People would shout at me on the street and I felt the same feeling I had when I was bullied at school,” he told the newspaper. “Leigh Francis had normalised bullying by making it comedy.

“When he put blackface on, that was being racist.”

Francis apologised for his portrayal of Black celebrities following the death of George Floyd in the US, which sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the globe.

However, David said the apology was “very coincidentally timed” and that Francis has not reached out to him personally.

“All I’ve seen since his apology is people still tweeting him thinking Bo’Selecta! is fun and the tone of his response being very much still, ‘I’m the funny guy here’. That he plays it like a joke after his apology tells me everything.”