Dido: Queen Of The Road

Dido is Britain's most successful female artist ever, yet is releasing only her third album since her 1999 breakthrough. She tells Sheryl Garratt about the physical and emotional journeys that have brought her this far. Photographs by Kayt Jones

It's 6.30pm on an autumn evening in Los Angeles, and Dido is driving down Santa Monica Boulevard facing right into the setting sun. The glare is blinding and she cheerfully admits she can barely see, which is worrying because when he said goodbye earlier, her manager, Peter Leak, had made some pointed quips about her eccentric 'jazz driving'.

Telegraph Music homepage 'It's always like this when the sun is going down,' she says, squinting through the windscreen. 'Earlier this year I got a bicycle. What I was thinking, I have no idea. I'd cycle along the road parallel to this, and no one could see me coming. It was like being on a rollercoaster!'

She seems very much at home in LA, so much so that I had assumed that she had moved here. She has lived here, on and off, since coming to do some writing with the producer Jon Brion in 2005, and this is where she has ended up writing and recording most of her long-awaited third album, Safe Trip Home. But it turns out that the Lexus utility vehicle she is driving is a rental, as is her house in West Hollywood, and her roots are still in Islington where she grew up.

'London is still where all my stuff is, where I feel at home,' she explains. 'I'm just really enjoying working here. Los Angeles is a city built on storytelling, on imagination and ideas. And after a while you start soaking that up. It's very easy to get into a headspace that's good for writing. There's a lot to look at, a lot of emotional stuff going on. I've felt so creative and so confident here, but this isn't somewhere I would set up shop permanently. It's a great city, but you need to be able to leave it.'

Earlier that evening, I had watched her rehearse in a cramped but cosy studio space in West Hollywood kept by her guitarist, Joel Shearer. With the album finished, Dido is in that delicate transition period when songs that were private are starting to become public, and when she will soon have to take music created in the closed world of the recording studio out to live audiences.

'Which is always a shocker for me!' she says. 'I still forget that anyone's actually going to hear it while I'm writing songs. It just becomes a relationship between you and the music, you and the emotion. You're not thinking at that point, you're not even filtering yourself - you're not having to, because it's just you sitting on your own in the kitchen. If I did think about the eventual audience, I don't think I could do it.'

Right now she is easing into it all gently, playing with just Shearer and the percussionist Brendan Buckley. She seems relaxed, happy, totally in charge as she swaps from piano to guitar to recorder and confidently runs through four songs from the new album in that pure, clear voice. When she sings the hauntingly beautiful Grafton Street, about the death of her father in 2006, I find myself blinking away tears.

'We had a good day today,' she smiles as they pack up for the weekend, adding that they had even learnt a new song, one she might include on her fourth album. She's on a creative roll at the moment, writing so prolifically that she's reluctant to stop. The album was originally due to come out at the start of 2008, but she ended up delaying it to add some new tracks, and now she is collecting songs for the follow-up before the ideas get lost in the whirlwind of promotion and touring. 'I know that if I break this run, it's not going to happen like this again,' she says. 'I just became oblivious to the outside world and got into writing.'

One of her great strengths, as a songwriter and as a performer, is her ability to make what feels like a direct, emotional connection with the listener. This is perhaps not so hard today, when she's playing to an audience consisting of me and her manager, but she also pulls it off on a far grander scale. Sales of her first two albums now total some 22 million, making her the most successful female artist ever to come out of Britain. Which is surprising, since all she set out to do, in the beginning, was record a low-key chill-out album.

Dido recorded No Angel for her older brother Rollo's independent dance label, Cheeky, signing with him in Britain, and Arista for the rest of the world. But when Rollo decided he wasn't cut out to be a record executive - he is primarily a producer, as well as being a key member of the dance group Faithless - and began negotiations to sell out to Arista, Dido's album was delayed. Released in the States in the summer of 1999, it didn't come out in Britain until early 2001. With little else to do, she went to the States and did the kind of promotion few British acts are willing to do, criss-crossing the country to do radio interviews, meet-and-greets of sales teams, and gigs in tiny venues for 18 exhausting months. There was never any grand plan, she says. 'I sort of set off and just kept going. It was always, "Well, just do this one thing more", and then this one other thing more.'

Each week, the album sold a little more than the week before, and when one of the tracks was chosen as the theme music for the cult sci-fi tele­vision series Roswell High, sales finally passed the million mark. Shortly afterwards, Eminem sampled her sweet love song Thank You and twisted it into a tale of warped obsession on his single Stan towards the end of 2000, and Dido became a worldwide phenomenon.

With her sometimes deceptively gentle, beautifully crafted songs, Dido is now one of the few British acts - Coldplay being the other big one - to make a substantial impact on the US charts. Yet when we sit down in a busy health food restaurant to talk after her rehearsal, no one appears to recognise her. Wearing her blond hair scraped back into a ponytail, ripped jeans and an off-the-shoulder white T-shirt, she looks younger than her 36 years, and not at all conspicuous. Only the rather lovely Miu Miu handbag at her feet hints at what must, by now, be a very healthy bank balance. But some time ago Dido worked out what makes her happy, and it isn't buying lots of stuff, or surrounding herself with too much clutter or complication. It is, simply, making and playing music. 'I love what I do, and I feel very confident as a songwriter,' she says. 'In so many other things in life I'm just so awkward and clumsy. I'm lost! I have moments when I can talk clearly, and moments when I just can't.'

Music is her way of expressing herself, of interacting with the world. It calms her. 'If I'm frightened, or I'm really stressed, I'll find myself humming and singing,' she says. 'There was an earthquake here recently, and my house is quite tall and wooden, and I felt like it was going to fall. Then I found myself starting a little song, and I immediately calmed down.'When Dido first came to LA, she stayed in a big house up in the Hollywood Hills. She had a bed, a piano and one bag of clothes. After injuring herself on a trip to Mexico - she is notoriously accident-prone - and finding it hard to walk, she bought herself a drum-kit as a way of staying active. 'I was just sitting on the sofa, and I'm not good if I'm not moving,' she says. 'So I thought it might be nice to hit things. And then I got obsessed, and would just play along with my iPod. It became a really good writing tool. If I'm writing on the guitar I'll move to the piano if I get a bit stuck, and now I can take it to the drums as well. Which can sometimes free up a part of your brain. Drumming is great for that, it just lets something go. God knows how it sounds, but I don't care. I just enjoy doing it.'his spartan existence - just her, the piano, the drums and the bag - continued for more than a year. She loved the simplicity of it, she says. The views were great from her house in the hills, and with no near neighbours she could make as much noise as she liked. 'But it felt weird up there, full of people who don't talk to each other. So now I've moved my bag to a smaller place where I've got neighbours, and it's really nice.'

The new house is tiny, she adds. Which is just as she likes it. 'It's perfect,' she says. 'Everything is within arm's reach, so I can just write a song and I don't have to worry about moving stuff to another room or anything. I like things simple, and I actually get quite tense if I've got too many things around me. You work these things out about yourself as you get older. And what am I going to write songs about if I'm rambling around in a big old mansion?'

Success came late for Dido. She was almost 30 when the big cheques began to come in from No Angel, and as a result she perhaps has a more balanced approach to it all. 'God knows what would have happened if all this had happened to me when I was 19,' she laughs. 'I was an absolute mess! But now, you've established your life, you know what you love doing, and it's very important to me - for songwriting - to not disturb that equilibrium.'

So although her place in Islington is lovely, it is not palatial. One of the great pleasures of success is being able to look after people close to her, and it has also enabled her to quietly put money behind one of her passions: education, especially for girls, funding schools in the developing world via Oxfam. When I ask what her indulgences are, she says buying musical instruments, mainly. And a season ticket to her beloved Arsenal, although she hasn't been able to see many matches recently. 'Someone else has been borrowing it. I last used it in April.'

She enjoys clothes, but she rarely goes out to buy them. 'I'm quite lazy about what I wear. It just feels like life's too short, and there are certain things I just can't be bothered with - like getting dressed up, and going shopping.' The only time she has been into a shop in LA this year was to buy her assistant a birthday present. 'I hate it,' she shrugs. 'I find it a very hostile environment.'

She has the luxury, she adds, of not having to think about money. There's an enormous freedom in that, and she feels very lucky. 'But I don't feel the need to do anything wildly different from how I've always done it.'

Fame seems of no interest to her, either. She is rarely seen at awards ceremonies, premieres or industry back-slapping events, and with just a few exceptions - such as the paparazzi trying to get into the hospital when her father was ill - she has sidestepped becoming yet another character in the tabloids' celebrity soap opera. She has been lucky to be left alone, she says, and she hopes to keep it that way. So when I later ask if she is still single, she just smiles and says she has strict boundaries now, and avoids talking about her personal life. 'But - I'm very happy.'

We first met in 2001, just as No Angel was breaking big, and she seems to have changed very little: she's more confident, more self-assured, but then she's also seven years older. 'There's a confidence that comes with that,' she agrees. 'You accept certain things about yourself - like I'm never going to be Christy Turlington, and that's OK! I like being a woman, and I haven't reached a point yet where I feel negative about getting older - my life has only got better. I'm sure there is a point where you start coming down the other side of the mountain, but I can look back now on all sorts of stuff - even interviews - and see that old uncertainty, and realise I don't feel that any more.'

Dido's background is often described, somewhat snottily, as privileged. She grew up in a big, book-filled house in north London, and her early aptitude for music was encouraged with lessons at the Guildhall School of Music. Her father, William Armstrong, headed the publishing house Sidgwick & Jackson for 25 years until illness forced an early retirement in 1995, building up an extraordinarily varied list from serious history tomes to early bonkbusters and memoirs from the likes of Reg and Ron Kray, Bob Geldof and Boy George. Her mother, Clare, is a somewhat eccentric poet who often acted more like a friend than a parent.

Dido and Rollo, now 42, grew up without the kind of consistent boundaries and routines children often need. There were rules, but they tended to be arbitrary. They could come and go as they pleased, and in her teens Dido would disappear for days on end without comment, only to be shouted at for not wearing her slippers in the house. Everything about her family seemed different: they had no TV, no stereo, and no visitors. Clare shared her daughter's aversion to shopping, so the children's clothes were always oddly mismatched, while their packed lunches at school would be dried banana chips or leftover ratatouille rather than the nice white-bread sandwiches and Penguin bars everyone else seemed to have.

And then, of course, there were their names. Dido was named after the Queen of Carthage mentioned in Virgil's Aeneid, which you would think would be burden enough. (When meeting new people, she often tried to pretend she was called Clare or Chloe.) But her birth certificate, famously, lists her glorious full name as Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong. Now, both siblings can see that there were advantages to their unorthodox upbringing, and they wonder if either of them would be as creative without it. But when they were younger and desperate to fit in, it must have been tough. 'We've always striven to be… normal,' Dido told me in 2001.

An intense, self-contained child who often practised on her recorder, piano and violin for six or seven hours a day, she went off the rails as a teenager. She became a Goth, got into fights, and scraped through her A-levels with such a lack of commitment that her parents refused to fund her through university. So she left home and got a job as a waitress, then followed the advice of one of her father's authors, Shirley Conran, and went to secretarial school. Afterwards she worked in publishing, and by the mid-1990s she was studying for a law degree at night but also hanging round the studio while Faithless made their first album, Reverence. Rollo, who had already enjoyed a string of one-off dance hits at this point, discouraged her musical ambitions, feeling luck could not hit the same family twice, but she persisted and was finally allowed to sing on a couple of tracks. She has contributed a guest vocal on every Faithless album since, while Rollo has helped out on hers.

Although just over half of Safe Trip Home was recorded with Jon Brion (a producer and multi-instrumentalist who has worked with left-field artists such as Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann), her brother came out to LA this summer with his partner and their two young sons, and Dido says it was almost like the old days: Faithless worked on their new album in the studio while she worked on songs in the programming room, then Rollo and Sister Bliss, the main musician in Faithless, pitched in on her tracks.

Dido rarely talks about her lyrics, saying it stops people interpreting songs for themselves, and also that it would stop her writing freely if she felt she would have to explain it. Some of the lyrics have always been Rollo's, she points out, and not all of her songs are about her life. 'Obviously you're going to use your own emotional experiences, but I'm not trying to diarise my life through music. I've no desire to do that whatsoever.'

She does, however, say that her father's death, at the age of 68, after a long struggle with the auto-immune disease lupus, has influenced some of the new songs, especially Grafton Street, on which Dido plays the first instrument she ever learnt, the recorder.

'I'm proud that Rollo and I managed to do something that is a really lovely tribute to Dad,' she says quietly. 'That song still really moves me. And I'm so glad I put the recorder on it. At the time I thought, "Oh God, I can't believe I'm doing this!" But I didn't care what anyone thought of the song, I just wanted to make it. Dad is so much responsible for the way I am, and for me being creative. His way of telling us bedtime stories was to sing all his Irish songs, and you could hear him coming a mile off in the car with his overly loud Irish music. I loved it, and I know that was instilled into me. He always supported anything creative we've done, and there was never any pressure. He was just immensely, immensely proud.'

Before finishing her second album, Life For Rent, in 2003, Dido separated from her partner of seven years, Bob Page, a music industry lawyer. After touring to promote the record, she travelled alone to places such as Thailand, Canada and Ireland, revelling in her new freedoms. At the time she talked excitedly about having adventures, of trying new things like snowboarding and parachuting, but when her father's health deteriorated she headed back home.

'I've been remarkably rooted in wherever I am for the last years, and part of that was because of Dad. I just wanted to be with him when I was in London. I'd go to see him every morning and every evening, and I had just no desire to go anywhere else. I knew if I did, I just wouldn't enjoy myself anyway. And I really enjoyed that time we had, actually. Loved it.'

I wonder if she went back to the adventures afterwards, but she says she feels less restless, immersed in her work. Her explorations are different now. She has been mastering the technical side of studio work, and can now record her own songs on to her laptop, at home. One song on the album, Quiet Times, was recorded this way, with her playing everything, including the drums. She never did go sky-diving.

'People kept putting me off.Nobody seems to want me to jump out of a plane! Not with my record for clumsiness. A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to learn to fly. Because you can do it here, and I just thought it would be amazing. And everyone was just like, "No! Not with your driving skills!"'

She's not that bad a driver, she huffs, saying that it's hard to avoid accidents in LA. 'People just come bumping into you. You'll be sitting at a traffic light, and bang! It's extraordinary here, there's a lot of people in their cars multi-tasking - putting lipstick on while talking on the phone.'

When she first came to the city, she would drive around at night, listening to Turin Brakes and Citizen Cope, or the string arrangements on Randy Newman and Nilsson. Later, she would go on longer road trips to Kings Canyon in the Sierra Nevada mountains, to the Yosemite National Park, driving alone across the desert for hours on end playing Brian Eno's pioneering ambient exploration Another Green World.

'Eno definitely works in the desert, at sunset,' she says. 'Music is an emotional thing for me - I'm not someone who has it on in the background. That's why I like listening when I'm driving. Because I want to listen. It transports you.'

She ended up working with Eno and Cope on the new album, which also boasts some gorgeously lush string arrangements. But mainly, on these trips, she's catching up on music she missed, growing up without a stereo. From classic disco to singer-songwriters such as James Taylor and Carole King, there's always something else to discover. 'The thing I love about music is I'm never going to have to stop learning. There's just so much,' she enthuses.

Talk to Dido for long, and you will notice that the word 'learning' comes up a lot. Last year she started taking English classes at UCLA. She never did complete her law course, but she is now thinking about enrolling to do an English degree.

'It was really fun,' she says of the night classes she took at UCLA while making her album. 'I'd leave the studio early evening, go off and do this quite intense class, and I'd come back and I'd just be on fire! I did it purely to enjoy it and learn. We were doing mythology - I even had to read most of the Bible, which was bizarre. But it was fascinating, and I'd like to do more. Do that, do gigs, write songs and record… that's my ideal life, and that's what I'm heading for.'