Craig David’s most famous song ‘Re-Rewind’ was saved from being lost by a cassette tape copy.
The 34-year-old singer and producer Mark Hill were left stunned after finishing the iconic garage tune only to see the computer file it was saved as had become corrupted but luckily they had made a copy on an old school cassette to play in the car and that became "gold dust" as they recreate the track from that recording.
He recalled: "We finished the song and dubbed it onto a little TDK D90 cassette to go and play it in the car. It sounded good but there was a couple of little tweaks we wanted to do – and literally as [producer Mark Hill] turned the computer on, all we saw was this error, file number’ message. The only way to get rid of it was to press OK. So we pressed OK, and it kept coming up with new error numbers. So we’d press OK, press OK, press OK. But when we looked at the session, all that we saw was the hi-hats. I was like, ‘Are you actually for real? So that plastic TDK tape became gold dust. We had the whole song on there, and we had to use the recording as our reference, playing it very carefully so it didn’t get chewed up, and trying to remember all the things we did. And that was ‘Rewind’."
Without ‘Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)’ – which reached number two on the UK single chart in 1999 – Craig doesn’t think he would have secured his first album deal with Sony Records.
And Craig thinks it was that song that paved the way for garage music to become a phenomenon.
The pop star – who is returning with a new album this year – told the BBC: "It got to the point where every artist, and every new pop group that were put together, were doing garage and it started to become a fad thing."
Craig David’s Re-Rewind saved by cassette
