As indie-rock band Gossip prepare to headline the 6 Music Festival, frontwoman Beth Ditto explains their 12-year absence, reveals her shy side, and discusses the “fear” facing America's LGBTQ community.
Any raver worth their glowsticks will, at some point, have lost their breath dancing to Gossip. With indie anthems like Standing In The Way Of Control and Heavy Cross, the trio perfected a mish-mash of punk, dance and soul that kept dancefloors burning throughout the 2000s.
Frontwoman Beth Ditto became a cultural icon, too. Outspoken and anti-conformist, she charmed the media while challenging their attitudes to femininity and sexuality. Even the morbidly chauvinist NME succumbed, calling Ditto “the coolest person in rock”.
In hindsight, she says the attention was unexpected.
“I didn't have a goal to sell a tonne of records,” she recalls. “We never wanted to be famous. The only goal was to not work a fast food job.”
Fame knocked anyway, extracting its usual levy: Fractured relationships, frayed nerves and disillusionment.
“Eventually, you just need a break, but in the music industry you're not allowed to have that,” Ditto explains. “So you end up making things you don't like. You become a product.” Gossip dissolved in 2016, with Ditto declaring she “needed to be independent and stand on my own”.
The singer threw herself into a solo album, launched a plus-size clothing line, and starred in the TV show Monarch – but her personal life was in turmoil. She divorced her wife of five years, Kristin Ogata, her father passed away, and she lost touch with Gossip co-founder Nathan Howdeshell, after he became a born-again Christian.
So when she joined super-producer Rick Rubin at his studio in Kauai, Hawaii, to sketch out a second solo album, things didn't get off to a flying start.
“My ex-wife is from Hawaii, we got married there,” she says. “So trying to make a record there after the divorce was really difficult.
“I was looking out at the ocean, literally in paradise, but I was so down in the dumps.”
Creatively gridlocked and “beating herself up”, she called Howdeshell and invited him out. They'd repaired their relationship on a short reunion tour in 2019. Ditto now compares their estrangement to a squabble between siblings.
“We're childhood friends and we're family,” she says. “It sounds really gross, but it's true.
“I think we just needed to let each other grow and change and make mistakes and do things that hurt each other.” Encouraged by Rubin, who's worked with Run-DMC, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty and Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Howdeshell began to flesh out Ditto's songs.
Slowly but surely, it began to sound more and more like a Gossip record than her solo material.
“I was watching Nathan playing guitar in this little makeshift studio and I was like, ‘I can't in good conscience take that credit away from him',” Ditto says.
“So I looked at him in that moment and I said, ‘Well, this is a Gossip record now'. And he said, ‘Oh, I'll try harder, then!'
“I thought that was so funny. He hadn't wanted to step on my toes. After that, it felt more collaborative.” The pandemic put the sessions on hold but, after restrictions eased, the original trio (Ditto, Howdeshell and drummer Hannah Billie) reconvened to complete their first album in 12 years.
Titled Real Power, it's a restless and daring 45 minutes of electric pop: The sound of a band ripping through their favourite riffs and rediscovering the joy of playing together. The title track was inspired by the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, celebrating anyone who stood up to abuse of power at a time when gathering in the streets “could literally make you ill”.
Elsewhere, the band are more vulnerable and reflective.
“I like peace and quiet… but the silence is killing me,” sings Ditto, in one of several songs referencing the end of her marriage.
“You can definitely hear the sadness on the record,” she says. “I like sad songs. Every singer loves a ballad. We want the key change, we want Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
But the sadness wasn't exclusively hers.
“Nathan lost someone and it was very upsetting. A lot of his music became very country-influenced, so that was the mood, and those are the words that came up.” Since the album was finished, however, Ditto has found love again. She's now engaged to musician Ted Kwo, who also happens to be Gossip's touring bassist.
She admits it was hard to introduce him to songs about her ex-wife.
“It's wild when you make a record about something that's so sad, and now you're with somebody else and the music is like a time capsule of all of your downs,” she says. Ditto couldn't even bear to have him rehearse the songs in their house. He practiced for their tour “upstairs with his headphones on”.
“And it's not just him. I don't want to know what anyone thinks. I'm too shy. It makes me really self-conscious.”
That last comment might come as a surprise.
In public, at least, Ditto has never seemed afraid of expressing herself. An outspoken advocate for body positivity and LGBTQ rights, her attitude was inspired by the feminist queer punk scene she fell in love with as a teenager.
But while her quotes jump off the page, her conversation is all sweetness and Southern charm. She giddily confesses to loving Christmas so much that her “gaudy” decorations don't come down 'til February, and shyly declines to turn on her Zoom camera.
“I'm so dumb,” she says. “I don't want to see my face, because then I'm fixing my hair instead of paying attention.”
‘No clout'
Ditto grew up poor in the Bible-toting town of Judsonia, Arkansas. The middle of seven children, she learned self-reliance at an early age.
“If we wanted something, it wasn't like. ‘You've got to work for it and earn it', it was, ‘Why don't you learn how to make it?'”
She recalls coveting a particular 1960s-inspired trouser suit as a teenager. With no money to save, let alone spend, she took a pair of trousers, drew their outline onto a spare piece of fabric and sewed the outfit herself.
“If you don't have money, and you don't have clout, it makes you incredibly resourceful,” she says. “You have to think your way out of things, and figure out how to navigate in a world where all you have is your talents and your skills.”
Independence informs everything she does, from her music to her activism. At a time when pop music was determinedly apolitical, she wrote Standing In The Way Of Control in response to the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have outlawed same-sex marriage in the US.
It was dedicated to a friend who'd been shaken by the wave of homophobia unleashed by the proposal – not just from politicians, but from family and friends.
“When your entire existence is being debated in public, it stirs things up,” says Ditto.
“So that song wasn't just about marriage or equality. It was about your right to exist and be left alone. It was for my friend.”
She sees a parallel with the current spate of Republican-backed laws that limit classroom instruction on LGBTQ issues, restrict access to gender-affirming care and ban drag performances in front of children.
Supporters argue that young people should be shielded from life-altering health care decisions; but more than a dozen major medical organisations have opposed the laws, which the American Civil Liberties Union have characterised as being “Anti-LGBTQ”.
Ditto sees the fall-out first hand. Her fiancé is a transgender man, and she describes the atmosphere in America as “chilling”.
“I feel like I need to make it clear that I don't want to speak for the trans experience, because I'll never know what it feels like, but we live in fear of the repercussions every day.
“The lack of compassion is really hard to watch. It really does feel like a dystopian novel. I try not to get upset about it, but it's hard.” They take pleasure in the small things – celebrating Christmas for three months straight, or “crying my eyes out” at the Abba Voyage show.
“We're having such a good time, it's really fun,” she laughs.
“Teddy's 48 years old but he looks so young that a lot of people think he's my son!”
— CutC by bbc.com
