Okay. I wasn't planning to do this, but yesterday's writing on the technical significance of the Stereophonics has kind of brought me to the point where I almost feel comfortable - no, scratch that, I almost feel 'right' about writing about Dido.
Almost.
You see, this is a little like therapy for me. No, not Therapy?, just, well, therapy.
Not everyone gets to pick the significant music in their life. This isn't an abdication of responsibility, because I made every attempt to go out and find the band or artist that sung songs that might help me define myself, odd as that may sound. But it didn't really work.
However, I didn't get there direct. In the same way that a train runs into a siding, I ended up being immersed in Dido's unique brand of MOR grief-songs by the same route that many others did, I guess.
When I was younger - yes, so much younger than today - I was surrounded by middle-class white kids much like myself desperate to 'get' rap. In some ways it was admirable, and in some ways it was a little sad, but it was their 'thing', so, more power to them. The whole reasoning behind this, I suspect, was because small-town life, while safe and happy and blah, blah, blah, was also fairly boring. Rap, in the mid-90s, represented to the average suburban kid an entirely different world, one that they could access without fear of any of their parents or peers really knowing much about it. It would have been unique, it would have been special, it would have been, above all, interesting - for them, at least.
I like rap now, but at the time I had no idea. None whatsoever. The closest I came to interacting with rap at the time was via Coolio or Puff Daddy - as he was then - and their mainstream crossovers.
And then this dude came along and kicked all of that into touch. A white rapper? Who wasn't annoying like Vanilla Ice? Shit, wait a minute, you mean with catchy melodies, Dr Dre producing and a good PR machine, rap music might actually become accessible?
Well, maybe, maybe not. But he had my attention, at the time, for a long time.
Then this happened.
See, I got into Dido the same way I got into Moby for a few years; by letting my guard down. By not caring. By not worrying about the music I listened to, as long as it was new and interesting.
In an infinite number of other worlds, No Angel died on the vine after it's first release through lack of attention. It was first released in 1999, to no particularly great acclaim; if I remember rightly, Thank you got some exposure by being on the credits of Sliding Doors in 1998, of all places and times.
But then suddenly a white rapper in his ascendancy samples your record, and, well, shit, you'd better re-release it.
Licence. To. Print. Money.
I mean, you have to admire the skill of it, really; take an album that's got potential but not an audience. Take that album and deploy two of the songs - one with the aforementioned rapper, the other on a Buffy contender TV series that had, at it's height, an average of 3-4 million viewers in the United States, plus a cult audience in Britain. Get the songs out there and known.
Re-release album. Rake in cash. And now, here we are, over fifteen million copies sold worldwide later.
Not bad for a girl who has, to be fair, six names. `
And so, thanks to Eminem, I found myself temporarily shunted down a musical siding into Female Singer-Songwriter land, a strange place for a young man to find himself.
Not that it was entirely Eminem's fault, of course. You can also blame Faithless, whose influence on my later teenage years you can blame entirely on a crush on a brainy girl I had at school.
As a sidebar, I used to be a big - massive, huge - Terry Pratchett fan in my younger days. Now, if I remember correctly, Mr Pratchett had a theory about how inspiration works, involving a theoretical particle that sleets through the universe until it encounters a mind. Often, the particle comes at the wrong time, or hits the wrong mind, or just doesn't work. But when it hits the right mind in the right place at the right time, boom, bang-a-bang, inspiration takes hold.
I like to think that if my life had been a little different, I might not have been such easy prey for mass-marketed MOR grief pop-rock. But I was, at the time.
Which is why I now can't listen to No Angel without some very specific cultural signifiers coming to the fore. Not that I do listen to the damn album; I can't remember the last time I did, which is probably a good thing. But at the time - oh, such an odd time - it was the soundtrack to my life in a way that I don't think another album has been, apart from maybe Different Class when I was a teenager.
Ugh.
Remembering that time is a little like tasting ashes. I don't mean this in any sort of hyperbolic way; but as many will know, there is a time in a young person's life where the clay of their childhood is fired in the kiln of their teenage years, and they're supposed to be making their way out into the real world as fully-fired, ceramic adults.
This didn't really happen for me. My clay was problematic, and my kiln was set too low. So by the years 2001 - 2002, wherein I should have been readying myself to emerge from the searing heat of my teenage years into the relative coolness of The Adult World, I wasn't ready.
Perhaps nobody ever truly is, all evidence to the contrary.
And so, when I was living in a bedsit flat with three other people - two of whom were friends at the time, but those friendships were evolving day by day because, right at that time, I really wasn't that likeable - and the third was, at the time, the person who I ended up in a doomed relationship with.
Let's be honest, who can sing about doomed relationships better than Dido? So, without even realising it, the soundtrack to my life was also the soundtrack to an ill-fated relationship stumbling along on the inability of the two participants to see just how bad it was for either of them, because the alternative - being alone - seemed just, so, much, worse.
Which is why I became a Dido fan, and which is why it's been so difficult to shuck that MOR scaffolding from my musical life. Up until now, I believe.
I don't think I'll ever be able to listen to the album without being transported back to a small bedsit in south-east London, filled with people who are starting to hate me (although they got over this, for the most part, later) and someone starting to love me for oh, so, many wrong reasons. The album is intimately connected in my brain with trips on the DLR to Bank, with walking for twenty minutes along an unlit canal path to get to somewhere that I didn't, at the time, want to go -
- that is, until I had to take time away from it, at which point I really did want to go, but that's because, well, I'm stubborn -
- and it's connected with too much takeaway pizza, too little social exposure, and, as I mentioned in the previous article, a growing tendency to see journalism as an excuse to freeboot rather than a platform from which to launch myself. Other, little things spring to mind; a mirror breaking, an addiction to Diablo II among other games, David Gray's White Ladder, and failing almost everything I tried to do. No, scratch that. Failing everything I attempted.
I got over it, in case you're wondering.
So I managed, by accident and design, to intertwine my personal grief with the shared grief of everyone listening to No Angel and getting the point - or at least thinking they were getting the point. I couldn't disentangle myself, no matter how hard I tried, for at least a year.
I maintain now that it's not a particularly bad album - the production is faultless even if the Faithless touches are obvious at places, the lyrical work is intelligent and well-designed, and the voice, oh, well, the voice, that'll stay with you for a long time.
But it's addictive. Being able to selectively access your personal grief and deploy it without thinking is powerful, and occasionally useful, but addictive. And like most, if not all addictions, if you don't take it in hand and sort yourself out, it'll take you over.
So we are here, and this is now, and I think I'm cured.
There are two happy codas to this tale of grief addiction.
The first is the release of Life for Rent. By the time this comes out, I'm in a much better personal place, working, studying, being as social as I can, but A Big Thing is approaching where everything changes; and I'm nervous, because, up to this point, my existence for the last year has been good, and I've got everything more or less balanced.
I'm working in a bar, and I get on with the majority of the people there - I've been there the longest out of almost everyone. Almost everyone, that is, bar one other person; someone I like, and respect, and who I realise now had more of an influence on my life than I knew then, because she - yes, it's another unrequited crush, but hey - was smart, in a sensible way, and knew how to... I don't know. She knew how to make me laugh, and she had a smile that stays with me even now.
Soppy? Oh yes. But I trust you'll forgive me that.
Now, at the place I was working, the staff changing room is up two flights of stairs, along a corridor and through another door, to a pokey little room with a sink, a rack of unused lockers, and a wonky table with two chairs.
One day, when I was ready for my shift, I changed, left the staff room, and headed downstairs. On that day, this person was working in the kitchen, which you had to walk through to get to the bar. So far, so usual.
But on that day, she was singing. I remember it, because it was unusual; she was a little shy, and I'd never heard her sing before. I don't remember the particulars of her voice, but I suspect she was a good singer. I listened, for a second, because I didn't recognise the song on the radio that she was listening to.
It was White Flag, which was just starting to get radio play.
As soon as I went into the kitchen, she stopped, and looked embarassed, and I didn't know what to say, so I suspect I said nothing, smiled, and went out to the bar. And, a month or so after that, The Big Changes happened, and here I am now, wondering what she went on to do with her life, and, hell, wondering what I went on to do with my life.
But that's a happy memory - of someone I knew well, uninhibitedly singing - and even if the song is one of unending unrequited love, I can live with it, as long as I remember emerging from that kitchen with a smile on my face into the full August / September sunlight.
The other coda is shorter, you may be glad to hear.
Towards the end of last year, there was a new Dido album. I approached it with some trepidation, but I was, in a caveman-sensing-fire sort of a way, intrigued.
I heard Don't believe in love. I liked one or two aspects of it; some lyrical cleverness, a nice bridge.
Then, having heard it a few times, I realised, I think, that I was cured.
I think.