TINA DICO INTERVIEW

From the feature Tina Dico Interview

Tina Dico

Singer-Songwriter Tina Dico was born in Arhus, the second largest city in Denmark, which, with a population of half a million, she points out, “isn’t very large”. Her upbringing was trauma-free. Mum was a nurse, dad was a carpenter. Dad was also a hi-fi nut. He built speakers and a music room in the basement, and filled the house full of records. It didn’t matter what these records were, so long as they sounded good. Tina remembers the Russian opera singers and the German classical concerts and, although her ear was turned by the works of Leonard Cohen and Donovan, there was no musical epiphany. Not just yet.

If you’ve ever wondered what music lessons for a 12-year-old in a Danish school are like, Tina reveals they’re not much to write home about. “We would sing traditional boring Danish songs, from traditional boring Danish songbooks,” she says. One day, though, a relief music teacher broke with convention and allowed the class to play whatever instruments they liked. Tina, who wasn’t backwards in coming forwards with her appetite for learning, attempted to master the lot: from drums to guitar.

What Tina needed, of course, was an audience. Aged 15, she got one: friends asked her to sing in their band. “It was an amazing revelation,” she says. “To get that reaction. It made me realise how music could make me live in the moment. When you perform music you can’t think of anything else. You just exist. You let it flow through you.”  This was her musical epiphany.

Still, a career in music still seemed unthinkable, and given Tina’s love of learning (great grades at school; a silver medal in the Danish basketball championships) she promptly went off to college to study religion. “I was very much into philosophy and western civilisation, so religion seemed a good place to catch both,” she explains.

And yet, the music bug had bitten: Tina was drafting lyrics in her religious texts and her mind wasn’t really on the classes. Where others might have dropped out, formed a group and toured Europe by Transit, Tina did something else – she enrolled in the Danish Royal College of Music. “I wanted to do music properly,” she says.  “I got completely sucked into it.”

From here, things happened fast. Tina assembled a band. Two of the first gigs she played were talent contests. One was on TV and one was the chance to release a single. She won both. A song “Your Waste Of Time” became a hit and she gigged constantly. Record companies came knocking and Tina signed a major record deal with Sony in the UK. Tina went on to record what would be her most successful album to date ('In The Red'). The album was produced by Chris Potter (best known for his work with The Verve). With the Sony/BMG restructuring, Tina became a pawn in the merger and the newly formed Sony BMG gave Tina back the masters for her to release independently. Since her dad had always ran his own companies, she figured it was in the blood, anyway. Tina has never looked back.

2005 saw Tina album Number Three – ‘In The Red’-a terrific record of emotional honesty, finely wrought tunes and stadium-sized choruses, get released in Denmark where it promptly shot to the top of the charts, whizzing past U2 and Coldplay as it did so. Now, with ‘Count To Ten’-released 4th Feb 2007 on Finest Gramophone-Tina’s fourth UK album of sumptuous, rocking songs-we’re about to see how much further a little independent spirit can go.

“Music has always been a very big and mysterious part of my life,” she says. “It’s definitely my way to feel alive. It feels like you can take the whole world and bring it into your body. It’s fair to say that I found my calling.”

Not only that, but Tina’s shown that you can make it in the music business in a way few people would have considered possible in the 21st Century: by herself.

“I guess I might change people’s perceptions,” she says. “I suppose what I achieved in Denmark goes to show that anything’s possible.” Next stop: the rest of the world. 

 

See also
Tina Dico Live Session 2
Tina Dico Live Session