Brody Dalle interview: 'I'm not going to be held down'

The last time the Guardian sat down with Brody Dalle, in 2004, her band, LA punks the Distillers, had released their third – and what would be last – album, Coral Fang. They were also on the eve of implosion, and unknown to her fans, Dalle was battling a crystal meth addiction. "I couldn't find a way out. [Meth] was literally killing me. I wanted to blow my fucking head off." Mortality rates for meth addicts are woeful. Yet here is Dalle with a new album to talk about, 10 years on – a clear-eyed, fair-skinned picture of health, all platinum hair and chunky silver rings – stretched across a sofa at the Ace Hotel in east London.

How has she managed to stay clean? "I got pregnant," she says pragmatically, "with my daughter, Camille." The Distillers had broken up, Dalle's husband, Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, was away on tour and Dalle was staying at her mother-in-law's when she discovered the news. She'd quit meth two months earlier, and the pregnancy galvanised her resolve. "I quit everything: booze, coffee, cigarettes." Raising Camille grounded her after years of feeling "unanchored, out of my body". But ultimately, Dalle says, she saved herself.

Dalle is a survivor in more ways than one. The same year Coral Fang dropped, Dalle was liberating herself from a turbulent marriage to her first husband, Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong. The pair had met when the veteran Cali punks played Australia's Somersault Festival, sharing the bill with Dalle's all-girl teen punk band, Sourpuss. Two years later, they wed. Dalle was 18 years old to Armstrong's 32, and leaving behind a turbulent, dysfunctional childhood in Melbourne for a new life in LA.

The story pushed by Armstrong's camp five years later, following the divorce, was that Dalle had used Armstrong. The truth, says Dalle, was that she paid her own way. "I moved to America with money I got from the government of Australia for being sexually abused," she says. "I'd gone through a couple of court cases when I was 14, 15 years old, and I'd been compensated for one of them. When I turned 18, I got that money and got the fuck outta there." Once they'd settled in LA, Armstrong – a patriarch on the LA punk scene – established control over Dalle's fledgling music career, dictating who she worked with and which label the Distillers signed to – ensuring everything stayed in "the family".

It took her three years to leave Armstrong, and when she did, the aftermath was brutal. His celebrity friends waged a public campaign against her, criticising Dalle in the press, and reportedly threatening the male Distillers and blacklisting anyone associated with the band. "We lost every fucking body. Me and my guys were left there standing alone, holding each other." But it was burnout, rather than pressure from her ex, that eventually broke the Distillers, Dalle says. "We'd been on tour for two years straight and we were exhausted. We were sick of each other, uninspired." Drugs, she says, only made things worse. "It was really heavy. What we should've done was take a hiatus. But it was so intense – the Distillers always was. We were so young, we couldn't see any other way for it to be."

Bridges have since been rebuilt. Dalle is in touch with former Distillers guitarist Rose "Casper" Mazzola ("She's a mum now, with a beautiful little girl"), while Mazzola's successor Tony Bevilacqua – who played in Dalle's late noughties, post-Distillers outfit Spinnerette – plays lead in Dalle's current touring band. The career-spanning set they unleash at a sold-out Hoxton Bar & Grill is fierce – a slew of Distillers favourites peppered with Spinnerette track Ghetto Love, a Misfits cover and a select clutch of numbers from the new album, Diploid Love. The former feel as ferocious as they always did, while the latter are steady and rich with buzzsaw bass, revealing Dalle's maturing songwriting craft. She plays her Fender slung low, and her voice – a sultry, gravel-laced yell – is as potent as ever. Long-time Dalle fan Marina Diamandis is in attendance, tweeting her praise.

But Dalle seems frustrated, angry even. There's no goodbye when she exits the stage, and despite stomping entreaties from the crowd, no encore – though she's charming to the swarm of fans that wait for her after the show, signing posters and smiling for photos. "The sound [at the Grill] wasn't great," she explains the next day, sipping a lunchtime bloody mary in the Ace's restaurant, "I couldn't hear anything." And the no-show encore? "I hate encores. I don't think I've ever played encores. They're like this weird, 70s leftover. Now you see us; now you don't. Oops! Now we're back!"

Stage anxiety is understandable. This is Dalle's first time recording and touring as a solo artist, and her last stint on the road, with Spinnerette, was blighted by serious postnatal depression. The vicious internet chatter about the weight she'd gained while pregnant with Camille can't have helped. "It didn't. It's part of the reason I didn't tour properly for that record," she admits. "I played a show here, in the UK actually, and I walked to the signing tent and I saw this young girl. She looked at me and said to her friend," Dalle cups her mouth, speaking in a stage whisper, "'OH. MY. GOD. SHE'S. SO. FAT.' And it just fucking crushed me." She seemed awkward on stage then, too, naked without her guitar. "Its true. Some of the Spinnerette stuff was too complicated for me to play live. I felt so disempowered without my axe." She laughs. "I had zero confidence back then. It was a weird, dark time."

Diploid Love, written around the arrival of Dalle second child, two-year-old Ryder, and recorded in large part at Homme's Pink Duck studio, comes from a much stronger place. Don't Mess With Me is a sparring stick 'em up, written "for my kids, and kids everywhere who are bullied for being different" – while the lead single, Meet the Foetus (Oh the Joy), was a premonition of sorts, penned before Dalle found out she was carrying Ryder. "I've always been able to manifest things in my life by thinking about them. I feel a little bit psychic." If there's a unifying theme on Diploid Love, Dalle says, it's survival – and not just her own. Rotten GM crops, oil-slicked birds, poisoned oceans and scenes of bloody civil violence fill the animated video for Meet the Foetus, referencing the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Arab Spring. Syria, and now Kiev, are on her mind. Politics have always edged her music; the 2002 album Sing Sing Death House referred to landmark political moments, from women's rights conventions to the fall of the Berlin Wall. She's fascinated by rebellion – it's what first drew her to punk – and that environmentalist streak began as a teen, working at hippy co-ops and an anarchist book shop. "I was fired from my job in McDonald's for trying to install a recycling plan," she observes. As an adult, her politics haven't changed much. "Politically, I still feel … not necessarily anarchistic, but I still have a problem with authority. I don't want to take any shit and I don't want other people to take any shit."

Dalle stopped taking shit a long time ago. The vulnerable tearaway she sang about in Young Girls has grown up, found her power, learned to channel the rage through chords and lyrics and built a family. When she's not on the road, her life is productive domesticity – waffle breakfasts ("from scratch"), the school run, long hikes with her dog, Bob. Dalle exercises – a lot. "If I don't, I get depressed." She remembers a counsellor telling her she'd "always be damaged" by the abuse she endured. "I remember thinking: that's bullshit. I might have a scar, but I'm not going to be held down, or owned. You think you know everything when you're 24, but I felt so lost. I really feel in my body now, not floating off somewhere else. And that comes with maturity. I love growing up; it's awesome."

Diploid Love is released on Caroline on 28 April