“Life is a series of little moments”

Dido is back with a new album and her first tour in 15 years. She talks to Sarah Bradbury about writers’ block, the urge to play live and working with Eminem

Iwas writing after I had my son. But I don’t think I wrote anything good for three years,” Dido says. “Partly because my songwriting is so much about light and dark. My whole MO from the beginning has been that every song is about a conflicted situation or emotion. Then I had Stanley and was like, ‘I just love him, I want to keep him safe.’ There was nothing to write. I stopped seeing the light and dark.”

The Londoner christened Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’malley Armstrong – at 47 unfathomably unaged – is now set to break a 15-year touring hiatus following the release of fifth album Still on My Mind.

It was 1999 when the singer, who had been providing backing vocals for her brother Rollo’s group Faithless, saw her debut album

No Angel clock up 21 million sales worldwide – still the top-selling debut by a British female artist – and result in two Brit awards for Best Album and Best Female. Life For Rent continued in the same vein in 2003, with 400,000 copies flying off shelves in the first week.

Years of solid touring took their toll. While further material followed, with Safe Trip Home (2008) and Girl

Who Got Away (2013), Dido needed a breather. “I did a show in the South of France, in a Roman amphitheatre in Nîmes,” she recalls. “A summer’s evening, the most incredible crowd, my best ever show. But it was also when I decided to stop touring. I was doing these amazing things but they weren’t resonating [with me], because I wasn’t sharing them with someone.”

After giving birth to her son in 2011, the laid-back musician’s formerly fluid approach to songwriting seemed to drift until one day she “sat down to start playing the guitar in my studio and found myself singing a