Sometimes creativity can only properly thrive in exile, at a necessary distance from the familiar. So it has proved for Tina Dico, a 31 year old singer songwriter who left the safe and sociable world of her native Denmark 8 years ago, and upped sticks for a city where she knew nobody and nobody knew her: London.
Here, based in a flat in Ladbroke Grove, Dico lived alone. She walked a lot and, in the process, wrote a pile of songs that filled her previous 5 remarkable albums – the album before last being a trilogy of EP’s, ‘A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending’ - and re-defined contemporary urban folk. Somewhere along the way Dico became one of the voices of Zero 7 (on the single ‘Home’ and ‘The Space Between’) and she’s been a feted Album of the Week artist on Radio 2. Meanwhile iTunes UK has, uniquely, given her their coveted Single of the Week prize twice.
But it was the anonymity of her life in London that kept her going. “Being a stranger amongst strangers is what inspires me to write music – at least at that moment. It’s like a private observation post: everything potentially complicated is stripped away when I’m there. I don’t have to talk to anyone and I can be picky about which words and stories I let into my days. It can be lonely sometimes, but it suits me. In Denmark it’s very different as everybody knows who I am and things get complicated very quickly. I become far too self-aware.”
Tina Dico was born in Arhus, Denmark’s second city, the daughter of parents who listened to 60’s folkies in her carpenter dad’s hi-fi heaven basement. Here she heard Dylan, Donovan, Leonard Cohen, with some occasional Irish input thrown in for good measure. “There was something magical about the grown ups’ music,” Dico recalls. “Their songs and stories felt like they meant so much more to them than what me and my friends were listening to, like Wham and Duran Duran.” At around 10 years old, she found a new way to re-connect with the ‘grown-ups’’ music. “Tracy Chapman gave it all some point. Hearing her music was a defining moment; it felt like I had a soul mate. She turned me on to the guitar and made me want to write my own songs.”
Dico spent her teenage years writing songs in secrecy, only ever playing them to the 4-track tape recorder her Dad had bought her for her 14th birthday. At the age of 20 she mustered the courage to put together a band and over the course of 3 years she won several talent shows, picked up (and rejected) the interest from various Danish major labels, started her own record label and released her debut in 2001 (‘Fuel’) before moving to London and signing a publishing deal with Kojam.
“In London, I started writing with all the big pop writers but it so wasn’t me. It almost hurt. My second album was a rebellion against this “pop machine” and this was the album that got lots of critical acclaim in Denmark. Dico won “Best Composer” at critics’ award show and “Best Songwriter” at the Danish equivalent to The Brits and Grammys. Dico’s 3rd and 4th album from 2005 and 2007 have both gone on to sell double platinum in Denmark and Tina has for quite some time been the biggest female artist of her generation over there.
“Fame doesn’t sit very naturally with me. I was a girl from nowhere who didn’t know anybody who was an artist and suddenly, everybody thought they knew everything about me.”
For 8 years she stayed in London, where, barring longish absences for the touring she loves so much, she remained, more or less incognito. It’s only in the last few months that she decided to up sticks and re-locate back to Denmark to re-immerse herself in her native culture. Maybe she’d just used London to the max and it was time to reacquaint with her roots…time will tell. The independence and integrity, which blaze from her songs, are fundamental to her life. Deco owns all of her recordings, via her Finest Gramophone company, and if she wants to put out a couple of albums in the same year - as she did in 2008, first with ‘Count To Ten’ and then with ‘A Beginning, A Detour. An Open Ending’ – then that’s her prerogative.
“On ‘Count To Ten’ I went for a richer sound with full band and big arrangements but I had a drawer full of folkier songs that leant themselves to a much more raw and naked sound. Songs that I loved and couldn’t bear to see gather dust in the drawer. I wanted to do a trilogy because I needed to break out of certain patterns and frames that I’d written myself into over the past couple of albums. And the thought of creating 3 separate and shorter journeys that would interact with each other captured me.”
It is indeed the scouring directness of her observations on the accidents of life and love that makes the 5th Tina Dico album such a compelling listen.
“All my life I’ve been waiting to “arrive” somewhere and “lock into” my life. This album was me coming to terms with the fact that life is one long messy string of beginnings, detours and open endings and that I’m never going to “arrive” anywhere. “It’s also me growing up and realising that it’s not all about being free and doing what you want,” she says, contradicting earlier comments with a knowing grin. “In many ways “A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending” felt like the beginning of a new chapter in my life and I was excited to see where the detours would take me from there…”
The challenge now for her is to live up to present expectations, which are, like her music, a tad more ambitious than those of many of her contemporaries. In September 08, she won the Crown Prince’s Cultural Award, Denmark’s premier arts prize. Her work with Amnesty International continues, as does a touring schedule which will keep her on the road, in the UK and Europe mainly, between now and Christmas. This is where the restless exile that is Tina Dico finds her greatest release. “I don’t find it easy to just be. I ask way too many questions. Performing is my cleansing ritual.” Hers, and anybody and everybody lucky enough to hear her, actually.
Tina followed up 'A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending' with her first original sound track recording to accompany the new Danish film 'Oldboys'. The album and film were released to critical acclaim in December 2009. Titled the 'The Road To Gavle', what started out as a request to provide incidental music for the movie soundtrack, the ideas progressed into a set of songs and then in to a new fully-fledged album, which is equal to her best, work thus far.
Recorded in Spring 2009 in New York, Iceland, and Denmark, working alongside Tina were her trusty long-term sidekick Dennis Ahlgren and the Icelandic multi-instrumentalist Helgi Jonsson.
The journey continues in to 2010. Tina is already planning her next album and this will be released in September 2010. But, to keep everyone entranced until then, the 14 songs contained on ‘The Road To Gavle’ will more than keep her followers happy.
This biography was provided by the artist or their representative.
