Growing up, all Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong wanted was to be normal. Her parents didn’t allow television or visitors to the house; her mother, a poet, put rye bread in her packed lunches; her father published books about military history. And she hated her name. She wished she were named Chloe, and once told kids she met playing around the corner that she was named Clare. The gambit worked, until her mum—named, incidentally, Clare—arrived and started asking for her daughter, using the quirky, Virgil-inspired nickname she’d had her whole life: “Where’s Dido?”
As if out of spite, Dido became the most normal pop star in the world. On the cover of her second album, 2003’s Life for Rent, she is pictured wearing a sensible jacket to match her sensible long bob and her sensible-sounding music, smiling to herself like the model that comes with the picture frame. She once described her perceived audience as families and couples—customers looking for a calm disc to throw on in the car during a tantrum or a row. Although the moody, groovy songs on her 1999 debut, No Angel, seemed to hint at danger or allude to Dido’s former life as a teenage wild child, Life for Rent was all middle-class Islington status quo. Would anyone other than a totally normal woman make homeownership the central metaphor of a record?
No score yet, be the first to add.
Life for Rent ended up selling more than 10 million copies globally—an astronomical figure for anyone in the CD era except Dido herself: No Angel has sold more than 15 million. The world, it seemed, liked normal. More realistically, I think the world liked that, beneath the Marks & Spencer drag, Dido was kind of a freak. Like characters in a Nora Ephron film or Sally Rooney novel, the protagonists in Life for Rent are mild-mannered women with dramatic, chaotic inner lives, sitting quietly at their lit agency jobs as they plot knock-down, drag-out arguments and seduce their best friends’ boyfriends. The entire record is a Trojan horse—a clear vision of white womanhood that hides a whole lot of churning, uneasy feelings.
Dido grew up in the center of upper middle class artistic London. Her parents might be best described as posh hippies: They didn’t allow television, sure, but they nurtured their children’s interest in music; when Dido wanted to start playing instruments, her mother did too. Dido was educated at all the best schools—City of London School for Girls, Westminster, Guildhall on the weekends for recorder classes—but she was also, ultimately, a Gen X-er growing up in ’80s London. By 12, she was going out to clubs in Brixton to listen to reggae, which her parents didn’t really seem to mind at first. As an early teen, she would come home at 5 a.m., wasted; her mum would simply run her a bath, and that would be that.
But the partying escalated. Dido has said she was never really into class-A drugs, but she was living by her own set of rules from early on. Around 15, she was kicked out of home; when she returned before her A levels, her parents tried to enforce a curfew. “I’d been out clubbing from the age of 12, then suddenly I had to be home at 10:30 p.m., which was the most inconvenient time you could imagine,” she once said. “I’d only got to the pub by 10.” The unruliness of Dido’s life—“I just smoked myself silly through school, went out every weekend”—meant that her parents refused to pay for her to go to university, as they had done for her older brother, Rollo. When she graduated, Dido got a job waitressing to pay her own way through school.
