Just last year, Craig David pulled off one of the most astonishing comebacks the British music industry has ever seen. Now, after a No1 album, headliner festival slots across the world and a residency in Ibiza (which GQ experienced first-hand last year), he’s gearing up to release his sixth studio album The Time Is Now in January 2018.

The record is rammed with on-trend collaborations with everyone from GoldLink, to AJ Tracey - alongside another very familiar name on the first single. Released at the end of November, "I Know You" features Dan Smith, the frontman of the British band of the moment: Bastille.

To find out more about this seemingly unlikely collaboration, GQ sat down with the pair to talk everything from drunken nights with friends to Jeremy Corbyn’s chances of getting into Number Ten.

GQ: We first saw you both performing together with the full Bastille band at Apple Music Festival in 2016. How did the collaboration on "I Know You" come about?

Dan Smith: We met on air co-hosting the Breakfast Show on Radio One. Afterwards we chatted, exchanged information and I said to Craig “we do these mixtapes and they feature loads of other artists, we’d love you to jump one one”. From there we saw each other at various festivals and then we did Apple Music Festival together. For us, as massive fans of Craig’s music - and with him back touring again - it was really nice to be able to do that.

Craig David: The timing was really right, the day that the session happened. I was in the studio with Fraser T Smith - who used to be my acoustic guitarist when we first started off and recently has produced for Kano, Stormzy, Dave - and I’d said to Dan it would be great to get in the studio together. The stars aligned [on that day] and Dan was five minutes down the road in another studio, so he said he’d pop down after. Then literally the first song we do together, all of us [Dan, Craig and Fraser T Smith] is “I Know You”, there was just that feeling, when I looked at you [Dan]. You know when a melody just connects, and at that point we didn’t have that naughty little drop, but it catches you. I love that I hear your voice on that type of drop.

DS: Maybe on paper it might seem like an “interesting” combination of artists, but I think there are elements of the song that feel really naturally like a Craig song and elements that feel really naturally like something that my band would do as well. But to go back to your original point, it just came through us becoming mates. It wasn’t suggested by labels or anything.

**GQ: Would you say you’re one another’s favourite celebrity mate? **

CD: Dan is the man. I don’t have loads of [celebrity friends]. I can’t even see you [Dan] as a celebrity, in so far as Dan is the most humble, grounded guy that I’ve met. He’ll come in and deals with everybody in such a respectful way, treating everyone the same, yet will have just come off stage playing to 16,000 people in an arena. He’s so cool with it, and I love that because he hasn’t allowed it to inflate - I’ve seen that as well. I don’t see Dan as a celebrity friend, just as a friend.

DS: I’m not a celebrity. But likewise with Craig.

Read more: Jeremy Corbyn interview: 'As far as I know, my team voted Remain. I haven’t asked them'

**GQ: It seems fitting then that “I Know You” is all about friendship rather than romantic relationships. Or at least that’s what the lyrics suggest to us. What inspired the song? **

DS: It’s a positive song about friendship and having a good time and forgetting about responsibility for a minute, enjoying a night out and the moment where you care passionately about your friendships and not much else. What I loved about being able to write that with Craig and the other guys was that it definitely brought an optimism out of me that speaks to Craig as a person. If you spend more than thirty seconds with him you’ll know how positive he is, which is amazing. I’m not quite so optimistic. I think you can feel that in the music, it’s got a slight edge of darkness to it and humour, but at the same time it’s meant to be uplifting and unifying in a sort of woozy way.

**CD: **The sentiment of the song is that the best times you can have depend on being with the right people, it doesn’t matter what the environment is. This can be the go-to record when you’re going out, it’s for the lads in the pub who are getting a bit lairy, it can be at the football match where everyone is like “wooiii we’re stumb-er-liiiiing”, it can be at Glastonbury where you don’t know where the night’s going to end.

**GQ: What are your thoughts on prioritising your friends over your partner? Should you ever put your friends first? **

CD: We just looked at each other like, “do you want to answer that?” [both laugh]. It’s all about balance. For any healthy relationship to work you have to be able have that time to spend with your friends. And to have a healthy relationship with your friends - and to be honest, if they “know you”, pardon the pun, then they’ll understand that you need to spend time with your partner. If people are pulling at you from both sides then maybe there’s something a little off balance within the relationship. But it also depends on how you are as a person. You need to set the guidelines quite clearly, and say “I need my friends im my life. I got with you, but my friends are part of me also”.

DS: Most friendship groups will have someone who starts a new relationship and you just don’t see them for four months. And that’s always kind of sad, almost like an inverted break up. I guess the ideal situation is that whoever the new partner is can be subsumed into the friendship group.

**GQ: Bastille's single “World Gone Mad” soundtracks Netflix’s new dystopian sci-fi Bright. Do you think we’re living in a kind of dystopia right now? **

DS: This year speaks for itself and I think it’s important mindful of what’s happening, but also try not to get consumed by it. Particularly as someone that travels a lot and likes to stay across what’s happening, because of the way things are presented and the extremity of what’s going on, it’s very easy to get sucked in on quite a negative level and it’s just quite anxiety provoking. It’s about being conscious, but also being realistic about what you can and can’t do. It’s about trying to affect change if and when you can and being a good person, but also living your life and not letting it completely tarnish everything. The news is everywhere, particularly now, it’s so dramatic, a certain person sends out a tweet and it reverberates everywhere, you can’t avoid it. “World Gone Mad” speaks to one side of me, and this song speaks to this side of me, just trying to remain positive in a way, and enjoy bits of your life like those nights that give you the space to be carefree, because you can’t think about heavy stuff all the time.

GQ: Do you think Jeremy Corbyn will be prime minister this time next year?

CD: He has all the potential, for sure.

GQ: Would you back him?

CD: I’ve realised that as long as the youth has the ability to use social media and their voice is there, people can actually cut through the nonsense and see what’s really going on. People are live streaming from the ground, so everyone’s starting to become more aware. When you pull back from this playground of duality, where someone is right and someone is wrong, you recognise that this is the way things have played out for years and years. And as long as the youth culture can see the madness that’s going on in the world, there will eventually be a revolution. It won’t be about this party or that party, it will be like, “we get this, things aren’t changing”. It’s like in basketball when you’re always one up or one down, if you play in that arena it’s always going to be the same. But I do think it’s changing.

DS: I think Craig’s point about youth culture is interesting. What was fascinating about the last election was the mad generational divide in opinion. What Jeremy Corbyn offers is positivity and a looking forward, hope and inclusiveness, which is directly in contrast to a lot of the other exclusive, negative opinions that sit further on the right. That really spoke to young people and was really empowering. Obviously I’m just an idiot in a band, nothing that I’m saying is of any note, but it was just fascinating to watch and so amazing to see young people getting involved. Even though the result was what it was, anybody that speaks - and I know this is cheesy - to being good to each other and looking out for one another in society [is a good thing]. I’d like to hope that people think that they owe it to each other to look out for one another, to look to people who they don’t know but as part of living in a country and being a member of the same society. Regardless of your beliefs, or whether or not you have any, that’s just such a fundamental thing. To see a certain area of politics that just seem really obsessed with self promotion and self gain, it’s like "errgh". That’s really not appealing to me.

Head to Vero to watch Craig David and Dan Smith of Bastille play a game of "I Know You", where they ask each other questions covering everything fro the most expensive thing they've ever bought to their pet peeves and how they'd spend their dream day off. We're also sharing the music, film and books the pair are currently enjoying. Follow British GQ on Vero for exclusive music content and commentary, all the latest music lifestyle news and insider access into the GQ world, from behind the scenes insight to recommendations from our Editors and high-profile talent.

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