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dido: no saint, no sinner, no angel When Dido Armstrong was a child of five, she traveled the European continent as a child prodigy playing the recorder. Beethoven, Bach, Vivaldi--Dido covered the classics and wowed the old geezers who yelled, "Bravo!" Little did her adoring audience know that after the applause stopped, the child star retired to her hotel room and her secret, her obsession... "I had this fixation with books on the holocaust," says Dido. "I was weird. I didn't talk for ages. I couldn't be bothered. I just did music and read my books and kept to myself. At [age] nine, I read War And Peace and Middlemarch. I played all the classics, ran out of music by the time I was 15. I hate that word, 'prodigy.' So I stopped. I am a sunnier person now." Sunnier? Well, this comely 28-year-old lass may laugh during conversation, and no doubt she is happy that one of her songs has already been picked up for a WB ad spot, but her debut, No Angel, is as beautifully melancholy as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein set to a trip-hop symphony. Dido's gorgeous, dusky voice sails like a siren over her ethereal songs, which recall Beth Orton without the folk trappings. Lush love songs set to trip-hop beats and surreal atmospheres, No Angel is more mysterious than Dido lets on. "I thought the album title was all embracing in what I was trying to get across. I am not afraid to make mistakes and I don't think anyone should be. Nobody's perfect and it doesn't really matter, anyway. The whole album is about being flawed. Things go wrong and mistakes are made, that is part of life. That is the beauty of life." Dido's musical training gives her album a weight missing from much of trip-hop. "Don't Think Of Me" sounds like a lost Dusty Springfield classic. "Here With Me" scuffles over boiling bass waves and interstellar blips as its tumbling melody gathers a trance-like chorus, Dido chanting, "I cannot be until you're resting here with me." "My Life" is a spectral missive on individualism. Elsewhere, the songs are as morosely winsome as a Massive Attack graveyard gig. So, are Dido's gorgeous tragedies fact or fiction? "All fact," she replies. "Whether it's jumbled-up fact or my fact; some of it is other people's fact. I find it quite hard to write about things that don't mean something to me or a specific incident that I can relate to. I've kept it to writing about things that are important to me." Cutting her vocal skills with U.K. trip-hoppers Faithless, whose Rollo (Dido's brother) produced and co-wrote No Angel, Dido admits to a healthy electronica fascination. But that's not all. "I love Sting's voice, and Lauryn Hill, but when I started listening to pop music it was in the middle of this New Romantic mid-'80s thing. So I have hideous influences as well, people like Boy George and Spandau Ballet." Now that this once strange but gifted child has become an accomplished adult entertainer, is there anything that can stop Dido now? "I love performing," explains the singer, who just wrapped up some Lilith Fair dates, "but I have bad stage fright. But the audiences at Lilith Fair have been fantastic, they actually listen to all the words. Something like 'Don't Think Of Me' I sing with a lot more irony than is on the record. So everyone bursts into laughter on the line 'Your best friend spent last night with her.' They are properly listening. I love that."