Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong (born 25 December 1971), known professionally as Dido (/ˈdaɪdoʊ/ DY-doh), is an English singer and songwriter. She attained international success with her debut album No Angel (1999). Hit singles from the album include “Here with Me” and “Thank You”. It sold over 21 million copies worldwide,[6] and it won her several awards, including two Brit Awards; additionally, she won Best British Album and Best British Female as well as the MTV Europe Music Award for Best New Act. The first verse of “Thank You” is sampled in “Stan”, a critically acclaimed collaboration with American rapper Eminem. Her next album, Life for Rent (2003), continued her success with the hit singles “White Flag” and “Life for Rent”. In 2004, Dido performed with other British and Irish artists in the Band Aid 20 version of the charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”.

Dido’s first two albums are among the best-selling albums in UK chart history, and both are in the top 10 best-selling albums of the 2000s in the UK. Her third studio album, Safe Trip Home (2008), received critical acclaim but failed to duplicate the commercial success of her previous efforts. Dido was ranked No. 98 on the Billboard chart of the top Billboard 200 artists of the 2000s (2000–2009) based on the success of her albums in the first decade of the 21st century. In 2011, Dido’s duet with A. R. Rahman, “If I Rise”, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 83rd Academy Awards.

Dido made a comeback in 2013, releasing her fourth studio album, Girl Who Got Away, which reached the top 5 in the UK. Having taken time out of the music industry to raise her son, she reappeared on stage at the 2013 Reading and Leeds festival where she reunited with Eminem. Dido released her fifth studio album, Still on My Mind, on 8 March 2019 and embarked on her first tour in 15 years in support of the new album. In May 2019, Dido received the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors. In 2020, Dido co-released The Last Summer (Deluxe Edition), a studio album in collaboration with her brother Rollo Armstrong, under his alias R Plus.

Dido was born Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong, at St. Mary Abbot’s Hospital in Kensington, on Christmas Day in 1971. As she was born on Christmas Day, she also celebrates an “official birthday” on 25 June, following the example of Paddington Bear. Her mother, Clare (née Collins), is a poet of French ancestry, and her father, William O’Malley Armstrong (1938–2006), was an Irish publisher and former managing director of Sidgwick & Jackson. Her elder brother, Rowland Constantine O’Malley Armstrong, is better known as record producer Rollo, part of the British electronica trio Faithless.

Despite their birth names, the pair were known from childhood by the names Dido and Rollo. Dido considers this as her real name, not simply a stage name or nickname. As a child, she had to deal with her birth name’s ambiguous and unusual nature, which led to her being bullied and even to her pretending to have an ordinary name. In a 2001 interview, she said “To be called one thing and christened another is actually very confusing and annoying. It’s one of the most irritating things that my parents did to me. … Florian is a German man’s name. That’s just mean. To give your child a whole lot of odd names. They were all so embarrassing. … I thought it was cruel to call me Dido and then expect me to just deal with it.” The name “Dido” derives from the legendary Queen of Carthage.

Dido was educated at Thornhill Primary School in Islington, Dallington School, City of London Girls’ and Westminster School, where she was taught by the contemporary musician and Head of Academic Music, Sinan Savaskan. After she stole a recorder from school at the age of five, her parents enrolled her at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. By the time she reached her teens, she had learned to play the piano, recorder, and the violin. She later studied law at Birkbeck, University of London, while working as a literary agent. She never completed the degree, deciding instead to take up music full-time.

In 1995, Dido began recording 10 demo tracks which were put together on a collection entitled Odds & Ends and sent out by Nettwerk management. Nettwerk had signed her after she was brought to their attention by her collaborations with Faithless, the UK dance act spearheaded by her brother, Rollo Armstrong (Dido co-wrote and provided vocals for album tracks, such as “Flowerstand Man” and “Hem of His Garment”). The collection was released by Nettwerk on CD-R acetate in 1995 and featured a mixture of finished productions and demo versions which she later considered for release on her 1999 debut album, No Angel. Odds & Ends brought her to the attention of A&R Peter Edge at Arista Records, who signed her in the US in late 1996, and negotiated a co-sign deal with her brother’s independent record label, Cheeky Records. Of the tracks included on Odds & Ends, “Take My Hand” was included on all editions of No Angel as a bonus track; “Sweet Eyed Baby” was remixed and renamed to “Don’t Think of Me”, while “Worthless” and “Me” were released exclusively on the Japanese edition. Peter Leak became Dido’s manager during the recording of No Angel after Edge played some of the in-progress recordings and been “blown away” by them.