The reunion announcement, heralded by Insta-bugle, was typically joyous — and defiant. ‘Our Gossip family of pure maniacs is BACK TOGETHER AGAIN!!!!’ blared November’s social media statement from the American band. It teased a sixth Gossip album, Real Power, produced by Rick Rubin in Hawaii and appearing 12 years after the agit-disco punk-rockers last released a record. ‘Chosen family is real family and we all need each other right now more than ever!’ the post added. Also important in a collapsing hellscape of a world: prioritising creativity and happiness. ‘Making something with your friends, laughing, disagreeing, talking it out… choosing joy and radical love whenever you can is power!’
Beth Ditto, the out-and-proud-and-loud frontwoman who, 20 years ago, wrote deathless indie anthem ‘Standing In The Way of Control’ in protest at proposed Bush-era legislation outlawing same-sex marriage in the United States, could be directing her two fingers at any number of things. The week we meet at Tim Walker Studio in Shoreditch for her ES Magazine cover shoot, inspired by the voluptuous images of Japanese artist Namio Harukawa, she might easily have fatphobia in her sights.
In early December, Paloma Elsesser was crowned Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards. ‘I was there!’ Ditto, 43 next week, interjects excitedly. ‘So cool!’ Less cool was the immediate aftermath. The 31-year-old Londoner, the first plus-size model to win the award, was hounded off Instagram by haters. ‘She came off?’ gasps Ditto as we sit on comically small chairs (‘like from a McDonald’s play space!’) in the attic eyrie of the studio. Vaping on her bright green and fluorescent blue, toy-like Flerbar (‘can y’all get kids more interested?’), the tirelessly animated Ditto expresses upset, then sympathy, then dismissiveness.
‘The older I get, the more I realise I come at things from a punk-rock way,’ says a musician who formed Gossip when she was 18 with fellow Arkansas natives Nathan Howdeshell (guitars) and Kathy Mendonça (replaced on drums by Hannah Blilie in 2003). ‘I’m just like: who f***ing cares?
‘I’m grateful that I didn’t have to come into that positivity through the beauty industry. I didn’t want to be a model,’ continues a pop-cultural force who, nonetheless, has walked for multiple brands including Stella McCartney, Marc Jacobs and Gucci. ‘That shit didn’t matter to me. And it still doesn’t matter… But at the same time, it’s backlash and 50 years of ridicule.’
Accordingly Ditto, a deliciously in-your-face performer who we first see in the video for new single ‘Crazy Again’ peeing in a manky toilet in her underwear, has a message of support for Elsesser: ‘You have a purpose beyond what people think of you. Beyond being beautiful. You don’t owe anybody anything. There are other people in the room who are much cooler than the popular kids. Stick with those people.’
Ditto’s own outsider status made her the epitome of cool. Powered by the Top 10 UK success of ‘Standing in The Way of Control’, Gossip landed with a bang in the mid Noughties. She was so enamoured with London that she had a flat in Hackney until the Covid years, she was NME’s Coolest Person of the Year 2006 and in 2009 appeared, naked, on the cover of the launch issue of Katie Grand’s fashion magazine, Love.
But Ditto was never ‘the partier’ in Gossip, even in the buzzing music scene now known as indie sleaze. ‘I’m just loud and crazy!’ she hoots. ‘Nathan was more into that scene than I was. I was queer, and it was very straight and coke-y, I think, in hindsight. I was drinking and I was around. But I didn’t do drugs. I didn’t do MDMA till I was 30!’
Did you like it? ‘It was hilarious! But I’ve always said fat people shouldn’t do drugs, they always die young,’ she laughs. ‘But no, it’s more [about] addiction. I’ve seen so many friends struggle. Especially now that we’re older, because the party’s over. And they keep it going. You’re just like: we’re not kids.’
There is, though, a brilliantly youthful energy pulsing through Real Power. From its clarion-call opening line (‘Every beat of my heart is a merciful act of God’) delivered in Ditto’s downhome diva power-vocal, via lovestruck dancefloor bangers ‘Crazy Again’ and ‘Edge of the Sun’, to a title track valorising the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations in her adoptive hometown of Portland, Oregon, Real Power is the glorious sound of Ditto getting personal and political. And there’s been a lot to dig into. The song ‘Real Power’ is her response to the violent protests in Portland during the first lockdown, the ‘summer of rage’ when BLM and Antifa protestors clashed with police and gun-toting Trumpists. Ditto duly wrote a song reflecting her pride at ‘living in a city where people cared enough to get mad’.
Her own life has been similarly disrupted. Since she last put out music, for the 2017 solo album Fake Sugar, the musician has divorced her wife; found love with transgender musician Teddy Kwo; embarked on an acting career (with mixed results — country music drama Monarch, with Anna Friel, was ‘a f***ing mess’); and reunited with Howdeshell, the lifelong friend whose return to Arkansas and embracing of born-again Christianity helped split Gossip. ‘He and I grew up railing against that,’ she told me then, recalling a childhood in the Bible Belt that wasn’t so accommodating for the queer, the weird and the punk, ‘so it was like watching your friend relapse. It felt like losing somebody to the past.’ When reminded of that, she nods. ‘It still feels that way sometimes. But Nathan needed it. Something to put faith into. It’s not my job to... take that away from him, or judge him for it. I love him so much, and he loves me so much.’
It was that deep platonic bond that morphed Real Power from its origins as a second Ditto solo album into a new Gossip album. When she and Rubin began recording, in 2019, she asked Howdeshell to contribute. Then, when she realised that ‘Nathan and I writing together was super easy and fun and painless’, changing tack was a no-brainer. ‘We’re putting out a record when the world is a shitshow,’ acknowledges Ditto. She admits that she had been burying herself ‘in utter misery for so long… After Roe v Wade was overturned,’ she says of the 2022 Supreme Court judgment, ‘Instagram activism wasn’t working for me. I didn’t want to feel like I contributed because I posted about something.’
How did she pivot? ‘I started donating money — to the ACLU, Arkansas Abortion Support Network, things like that. Just whatever I could afford. That felt better to me. Or talking to my 17-year-old niece and hearing what it’s like to be her age, with so many school shootings. It’s been awesome to be in the real world again and realise that there’s so much we can [change] — not just the activism but [about] how we’re all performing for each other.’
She mentions the potential political reach and impact of another, epically bigger, musician. ‘The fact that the right wing is freaking out that Taylor Swift is telling people to vote is incredible to me. I love how much power that blonde pop singer has,’ she says with deep admiration. As an American presidential cycle grinds into gear, overlapping with the next legs of Swift’s Eras tour, there’s the hope that Swift uses her platform to speak now and speak up.
‘I hope so, too. But I don’t put that on her. It’s a lot to put on one young girl. I don’t think she’s afraid to upset people. What if she’s afraid that something goes wrong? And everyone blames her if the election doesn’t turn out [the right way]? But it’d be cool, even if she didn’t tell people what to do, if she gave people resources and talked about cool shit.’
Right now, of course, whether on URL or in IRL, ‘upset’ comes hard and fast, not least in the arena of queer politics and trans rights. Ditto has been fighting those battles for the two decades since she wrote ‘Standing in The Way of Control’. But since ‘hooking up’ with Kwo, a transgender man, in a ‘tryst’ during her 2017 solo tour, I wonder how the relationship has changed her views on straight privilege?
‘I always knew it was real. I’ve been in straight relationships, I know lots of straight people. But you do get perceived differently because you are in a straight-presenting couple. So you get treated that way.’ And, she thinks, the trans debate is ‘f***ing intense’ in the UK, even more so than in the US. ‘The Terfs are weird to me. I will never understand why people are so precious about their identity that they can’t just shut up and chill out.’
As for her thoughts on JK Rowling’s views, she begins by recognising that ‘queer people really loved those books’ and admits that, yesterday, she made the pilgrimage to King’s Cross, to Platform 9¾, on behalf of her Harry Potter-loving niece. ‘But it’s heart-breaking when people double-down on being an asshole. I don’t understand what she thinks she’s protecting… I hate that she’s a kajillionaire and she could be such an awesome ally. But she’s just doubled-down on… acting like an old-ass weird woman.’
Ditto, though, is not one for negativity or hating — the life-affirming energy of Gossip’s comeback album attests to that. But where, then, in 2024, a year of generationally important elections on both sides of the Atlantic, does real power lie? ‘For me it was getting back into the real world and actually putting a little bit of money into things. Even if it was $20 or $5, and splitting it up. I understand not everybody can do that. But it’s about getting in touch with what is really making you happy.’ That, simply put, could be about ‘making a change — for you. You know, it could be a nice pair of new pantyhose!’
