Dido's song became a hit only after a TV finale played it whole
Dido's first single, Here with Me, was flopping on radio and her label was thinking of switching tracks. Then the TV series Roswell, which already used it as its theme, played the whole song in a season finale. Weekly sales jumped from 2,000 to 9,000, and her debut album went on to sell over 21 million copies.
She was born in Kensington, London, on Christmas Day 1971 as Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong, though from childhood everyone called her Dido, after the legendary queen of Carthage. She has said being christened one thing and called another was confusing and embarrassing, and she was bullied over it. Like Paddington Bear, she keeps an official birthday on 25 June. When she pinched a recorder from school at five, her parents responded by signing her up for lessons at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama; by nine she was touring Yugoslavia with a recorder orchestra.
She studied law at Birkbeck while working as a literary agent, then dropped out for music. Singing on tracks by Faithless, the dance act led by her brother Rollo, got her noticed, and a set of demos from 1995 led Arista to sign her in the US the next year. Delays when her UK label was sold let her focus on America, including a slot on the Lilith Fair tour.
In 2000 Eminem, with her permission, sampled the first verse of Thank You for his single Stan, introducing her to a huge US audience, and she appeared in the video. Import sales alone pushed No Angel into the UK top five before its official release there, and it became the world's best-selling album of 2001.
Life for Rent followed in 2003, led by White Flag, and sold over 152,000 copies on its first day in the UK. It made her the only singer with two albums in the UK's ten best-selling of the decade. Her third album, Safe Trip Home, sold less, and she chose not to tour it because its songs about her father's death were too hard to perform.
Source: Dido (singer)
