Once upon a time, Beth Ditto was named the coolest person in rock by the NME. It was 2006 and both the British music magazine and Ditto’s band Gossip were at the height of their powers.
“I had no idea what it meant and then it changed things for ever,” she says in her Southern twang, decked out in a bright summer dress and relaxing back in a chair in the infamous Abbey Road Studios. “I didn’t really know what a big deal it would be! I knew things had changed when people were climbing the railings of venues to take pictures of us. British tabloids were trying to catch you out to show that you were insincere, that you didn’t walk the path you said you did. In America, no one gave a shit about us.”
Beth Ditto grew up poor in the God-loving, devil-fearing town of Judsonia, Arkansas. For the record, Ditto doesn’t believe in God, but she is still scared of the devil. “I had lived a very small existence. I was coming fresh off the turnip truck. I had only recently taken my very first flight at 18 years old,” she says, noting that she was both political (a grunge kid who loved activism and learning about civil rights) and pretty naive when Gossip became famous. “I wasn’t aware of the weight things carried or that people gave a shit about what I said. All the bands that we really adored were really underground.”
If you entered any club or festival DJ set for the rest of the 2000s, you were sure to be blasted with Gossip’s biggest hit and LGBTQ anthem “Standing in the Way of Control”, a song Ditto – who is queer – wrote in two minutes, sparked by a George W Bush proposal to outlaw same-sex marriage and which took in her feelings about sexism, racism, homophobia, her size, and working class life in the Bible Belt.
Ditto’s face was almost as synonymous with indie for Brits as Amy Winehouse, Camden, The Libertines and Carlsberg. It’s remembered now as a period of youthful rebellion, relative economic prosperity and relevance for UK pop culture. And they resisted bowing to the pressure of fame. “We’re all self-deprecating as well. At the time we thought, ‘this isn’t fucking serious, it’s not surgery, you’re not saving anybody’s life, you’re not delivering any mail, it is just music’ and that was freeing,” she says. Now she feels differently. “I wish that there were times that we had come together and celebrated that we came from nothing, where we looked at each other and said, ‘This is fucking crazy’, but we never did.”
The stomping rallying cry of “Standing in the Way of Control” is, in Ditto’s opinion, just part of a really sad song. “For years I said of that song: I’m angry because people are pieces of shit and they don’t respect gay people,” she recalls. It took on a tone of a pro-gay marriage anthem, she says, and it was – but there was a sense that the song became so big it ran away with itself. “When your existence and your rights are being brought up in the news every day, you have become a fucking target. It becomes a reminder every day that you’re a second-class citizen and that you are being debated as a human being and that’s so fucking crazy.”
Gossip dissolved after a long career in 2016, with Ditto chasing the independence and creative freedom she felt that she’d lost. After a solo album, TV roles and a plus-size clothing line, she found herself in a period of personal difficulty. She lost touch with Gossip co-founder Nathan Howdeshell after he became a born-again Christian, divorced her wife of five years, Kristin Ogata, and her father died. What does she advise for rough times such as these? “I believe in medicine. If medicine helps you and you’re open to it, fucking take it. It changes me. I’ve been on an antidepressant since I was like 17 off and on. That for me is one of the biggest things,” she says. “Also just not engaging in things that make you feel like shit. That could be the internet, talking to people, shopping, anything. It took me years to realise, I don’t want to go on a hike. People say nature is so inspiring! Nature does not inspire me. People do. The silence makes me want to rip my hair out.” If Ditto is sad, she sews and sleeps a lot—and of course there is always making music.
It was in 2019 that she had started work on a second solo album with celebrity producer Rick Rubin. Ditto had recently reconciled with Howdeshell and he ended up coming out to Rubin’s Hawaii studios to help write and record it. “I had decided to just do the album by myself but I missed Nathan,” she recalls. “When you’re in a band for so long, it’s just like a relationship, especially this one, it’s straight out of high school marrying your high school sweetheart. We were in a band together from the time I was 18 and it did get harder because I really wanted to keep it going.” When she had the conversation with Rubin about whether to call Real Power, her heartfelt disco-infused album about break-ups and family, a “Beth Ditto album” or a “Gossip album”, Rubin advised her to name it a Gossip record. “I just told Nathan out of the blue and he said, ‘Oh well, I better start trying harder,’” she laughs.
The album has only recently been released a full five years later. Mostly this was down to an ever-shifting timeline due to the pandemic, which like most sane people, Ditto did not enjoy much. “Nobody’s back on track really. I’m not kidding you, only maybe six months ago I actually started leaving the house again. It was weird. I was just like, what’s the point?” But now for the great return of Beth Ditto and Gossip, Ditto is determined to enjoy every moment of it.
The peak of this comeback will be playing 2024’s Glastonbury festival next week. Ditto can scarcely contain her excitement, as she rattles the ice with her straw in an empty extra large Starbucks iced coffee cup. “I hope people come – I get really nervous at festivals,” she squeaks. “I just wish I knew what to prepare for as festivals are such a grab bag of people.” That said, whether it’s festival stages or sweaty club shows, Ditto prides herself on playing the same set with identical high energy. Naturally, in light of what she has just shared about that disconnect she felt from her early fame, she doesn’t even really remember the first time Gossip played Glastonbury, in 2007. “I look back at that kid 20 years ago and I’m like, ‘Do you know how crazy that was?’ I tell that little person that I’m proud of them. Because there was so much of this,” she says and makes a shielding motion, hiding her face behind her hands.
“I felt when we were younger, it was so hard to enjoy things, because there was guilt. There was survivor’s guilt. There was shame. I moved away [from Arkansas], but my friends and my sister didn’t make it out,” she says warmly. “Being in my forties I realised I just don’t want to walk through the world miserable. I don’t want to walk through the world feeling afraid. I don’t have to live that way. I’m not gonna let people steal my joy anymore.”
Gossip play the Woodsies stage at Glastonbury next Saturday at 10.30pm. Their UK tour begins on 1 September (bethditto.com)