It’s the day before Michael Jackson’s death, and Tina Dico is sitting in a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, restaurant reminiscing about Live Aid. Then a seven-year-old in Aarhus, Denmark, she was so moved by the 1985 rock charity concert that, soon after, she sat down at the family piano and penned her first song. “It was about hungry children and injustice in the world,” says Dico. Of course, in a typical kid move, she ditched the piano for a guitar the minute Tracy Chapman came onto the scene a few years later.
Onstage in Birmingham, England, in 2008.
Now 31 and with five albums behind her, Dico (pronounced Dee-ko) is proving herself an anomaly amid the popified Lily Allen/Lady Gaga/Katy Perry movement of late. She writes all of her own songs, often bringing simply a pair of guitars—currently she owns seven—and her chilling falsetto onstage. (She only recently started touring with one or two other musicians.) And unlike those ostentatious, campy acts du jour, for whom fashion practically serves as a backup singer, Dico’s sartorial choices are all about discretion. “The point of the show is for me to try and disappear and let the music speak,” she says. “I think if there’s too much of a fashion statement going on, in my case, it’s not really a good thing.” But make no mistake, her outfit today is consciously chic: black leather biker jacket and gray strapless jumpsuit with superdroopy (and supertrendy) drawers, both by the Scandinavian label Day Birger et Mikkelsen, and studded suede booties from Zara.
Fashion icon or not, Dico is a superstar in Denmark. She headlines massive outdoor festivals, where her fans often “sing along so loudly that sometimes I can’t even hear myself,” she says. And on the streets, she’s unable to run an errand without being stopped for autographs and photos. Here in the States, though, Dico is still playing small venues like the Highline Ballroom in New York and the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles and occasionally appearing just as the opening act for bigger names. And she’s perfectly fine with that, thank you very much. “Fame is not what I strive for,” says Dico, who has called London home for the past seven years. “I’m sort of in the midst of parting with a lot of my ideas of what my career and life should be like and what, you know, was my dream and [whether it has] lived up. Fame in itself is not going to make anyone happy.”
Indeed, as she talks while nibbling at a beet and green apple salad, it becomes apparent that Dico is hardly amused by her current schedule. “Travel is beginning to wear me down a little bit, but the difficult thing, in the name of art and in the name of the music, is you can’t say it’s not worth it,” she says with a sigh. “I think it would be perfect if I could have some time to just sit and not know what to do.” Since releasing A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending (a three-CD box set) in January, she has toured the United States and Europe for the better half of the year and also shot a commercial for Scandinavian Airlines, now in heavy rotation overseas. After a mini holiday with her parents in Switzerland, Dico will play a slew of summer festivals in Germany and Denmark, followed by her second American tour of the year (beginning in New York on September 29) and then another European one. But not before W gets inside the mind of this fashion-cautious songstress by way of a little shopping spree.
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