By 
Long before Adele came along and smashed chart records every other week, there was another British songbird selling enormous amounts of albums the world over.
Dido shifted a staggering 21 million copies of her debut collection No Angel following its release in 1999. It helped that Eminem sampled her delicate ballad 'Thank You' on his own monster hit 'Stan', but the singer-songwriter soon became a household name in her own right. Only on a first name basis, though: Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong isn't quite as catchy.
'White Flag' in 2003 helped her conquer the second album curse, with Life For Rent selling a cool 13 million copies. You have to remember that this was even more impressive considering millennials everywhere were pirating music on P2P services like Napster and Kazaa on the sly. Soon she was even co-writing Britney Spears's coming-of-age classic 'I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman'.
Dido's music wasn't a rulebook-ripping game-changer by any means, but as one critic astutely realised at the time, "her songs are so melodic and atmospheric they easily work their way into the subconscious". That didn't, however, stop novelty metal act The Darkness from nabbing the Brit Award for Album of the Year in 2004 over her. Jeez.
But just four years later, Dido's imperial phase had gone down with that ship. Third album Safe Trip Home was actually better received by critics and reached number two in the UK, but to this day has only sold a fraction over a million copies worldwide. It's still a noteworthy achievement, but you don't need to be a numbers person to notice it was a steep decline between albums.
A five-year break followed - save a few soundtrack submissions, including Oscar-nominated 'If I Rise' - before 2013's Girl Who Got Away, which saw her back in the UK Top 5 and selling a further 800,000 records. During that time she had become a mother for the first time, giving birth to her son Stanley (who definitely wasn't named after her Eminem hit single, FYI). That said, so much time away meant Dido's profile as a multi-million-selling singer-songwriter had dwindled, and when her Greatest Hits set was released at the end of 2013, it only managed a number 27 peak.
From a commercial perspective some might consider it a career low, but from Dido's view it was an exciting time. The release of her retrospective collection meant that she had completed her record deal with Sony Music and was finally an independent artist again. "I'm like an overexcited kid," she told HitFix. "I have so many ideas. 'I can do this, I can do that.' I'm like 'take a breath'."
Dido has confirmed that she's already started work on brand new music for her fifth album, but very few details about the project have emerged. "I'm in the middle of writing an album of original material and it took me a while to get back into it after Stanley was born just because I was so focused on him and my husband," she said back at the end of 2013.
But Dido's method of working means a new album could be anything between a few months or 10 years away. "Life For Rent is the only record I intentionally made as the label wanted another album and I was on a wave of excitement," she told us. "Before and after that, songwriting has been my way of communicating - I never sit down and think I must make a record. I just write songs until I think there's a body of work there." Maybe if we start the hashtag #D5 she might get her speed on.
Saying that, after her brief stint as a mentor on The Voice UK back in 2013, could one of the big red chairs at their new ITV home be a possibility? "Music, for me, isn't a competition so I find the whole concept of judging really funny," Dido has previously admitted. "I really enjoyed mentoring on The Voice - the contestants were amazing and it's quite a challenge. I was like, 'God, I wouldn't do this!' I don't think I would have had the confidence to perform on live TV in front of so many people - and I'm in total awe of some of the amazing artists I've met who are so young but totally poised."
What we do know is that today's biggest stars still look towards Dido for inspiration. Miley Cyrus covered 'No Freedom' for her Happy Hippie campaign, to the delight of the British star. Then Dido's 'Thank You' was sampled by Rihanna on her last album Anti for 'Never Ending'.
But that's about as much as we'd heard from the notoriously elusive star in the past two years. There were no Tweets, no Instagram posts, her official website has been all but abandoned, with no updates since 2014. We thought she'd been lost forever.
Then, out of nowhere, in June 2016…
Was it a stretch to hope that new music could be on the way?
Yes. Yes it was. She hasn't tweeted since.
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