CARRIE LYELL CHATS TO SINGER-SONGWRITER DODIE CLARK ABOUT FEELINGS, FAME AND FORGIVENESS

COVER STORY

Dorothy “Dodie” Clark is a singer-songwriter, bestselling author and internet celeb, who, to most of the millennials in the crowd, will need no introduction at all. Arguably the most successful DIY artist of recent times, this softly spoken 23-year-old from Epping has built a gargantuan following of adoring fans from her bedroom: 2.6 million of them, to be precise. Dodie’s also had two EPs in the UK top 40 album chart, amassed more than 350 million streams, and sold out iconic London venue the Roundhouse, all with very little in the way of promotion, and before she’s even released an album. And yet, as is the case with many who find fame on YouTube, there will be many of you scratching your heads, wondering who on earth I’m talking about. For you, we’ll go back to the beginning. This is a story all about how a young woman’s life got lipped, turned upside down.

“I grew up surrounded by music,” Dodie tells me when I call to talk about her recently released third EP, Human. She is as I expected – chatty, warm and instantly likeable – as she tells me that while her family weren’t particularly musical, her dad often played music around the house, and that when she was younger, he would fill her iPod “full of music he loved”.

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Those songs clearly ignited a life-long passion, and the self-confessed music geek soon took every chance she could to learn. “It was like choir, the recorder, orchestra, wind band, African drumming… and I went to every single one.” It wasn’t long before she was writing her own songs – “I was such a dramatic kid that I just wrote songs all the time about my life,” she laughs – and in 2011, aged 16, she began uploading them to YouTube.

Instafame wasn’t instantaneous – it very rarely is – but over the course of a year Dodie’s subscriber count grew to 1,000. “That was wild!” she laughs. There was never a defining moment, she says, rather “hints along the way” that it might turn into something more, from her first gig in 2013 – “It felt strange for me to be singing on a stage that wasn’t in my school” – to quitting her full-time job in 2015 to go on tour. That must have been a tough decision to make? “That was really scary because I had to take a leap of faith as to whether I’d still be able to afford my rent.”