The ordinariness of that period was not a consolation prize. It was the point. The career had been the vehicle for reaching a position in which the ordinary was possible — in which the school run was his to do because he had enough money and enough freedom to choose it rather than the M4 and the airport and the next leg of the international promotional tour. He made that choice with clear eyes, and he has described it with clarity in every interview where the question has been asked.
There is something worth sitting with in the image of one of the best-selling pop artists of 1987, a man whose debut single sold in the millions across two dozen countries, driving a child to school in Surrey in the years when the world had forgotten his name. Not as a tragedy. As a choice. As the specific outcome of having had the extraordinary and having decided, with full information about what the extraordinary required and what it cost, that the ordinary was worth more.
He was right. The extraordinary came back. The voice that made the debut single came back with him, unchanged in its essential quality, available to the home studio where he made *50*, available to the stage where he performed with the Foo Fighters in Tokyo, available to the re-recording that raised awareness for people who were losing what he had risked in every studio session since 1986. The voice was always there. It had just been doing something else.