I’m ready to ask Beth Ditto a question, but first she has a few for me. “I genuinely love doing interviews,” she says over Zoom from her home in Portland, Oregon, with visible glee. “I just like talking to people. Interviews can be difficult, though, because you only have an hour, and I want to ask questions about where you are and what you’re doing. Like, genuinely, that’s my favorite part! Where in London are you right now?” Ditto hesitates. “I have to learn to tamp it down,” she says with a sigh.
It’s this irrepressible energy that first made Ditto a star back in the mid-’00s as one third of Gossip—most notably with their breakout hit “Standing in the Way of Control,” which helped provide the soundtrack to many an OG indie-sleaze house party. Two more albums and seven years later, however, the group decided to part ways and Ditto embarked on a solo career while also burnishing her status as a fashion icon. (The singer has walked the runway for the likes of Marc Jacobs and Jean Paul Gaultier.) Somewhere in between all that, she also established a side venture as an actor, with appearances in the Kirsten Dunst–starring Showtime series On Becoming a God in Central Florida and the country-music TV epic Monarch.
Then, sometime in 2019—shortly after the band briefly reunited for a tour celebrating the 10th anniversary of their record Music for Men—Ditto found herself in Kauai, at the studio of their longtime collaborator Rick Rubin. “I was still in my 30s, for the love of God,” she laughs. She started out writing songs for her second solo album, but after a while she felt there was a missing ingredient: Gossip’s guitarist, Nathan Howdeshell. “I just was like, I wonder if Nathan would come out here and work on the record,” Ditto remembers. “And he did.” While Howdeshell was noodling away in the studio, Ditto recalls exchanging a knowing glance with Rubin and then turning to Howdeshell and saying it should be a Gossip record. “Nathan was like, ‘Oh, okay, well then I’ll actually start trying—I’ll start paying attention now,’” Ditto says, laughing. “It was so funny.”
Once they also had their third member, drummer Hannah Blilie, on board, it was full speed ahead for Gossip (albeit with a few pandemic-related disruptions along the way). And at the end of last week, almost five years after they first began working on it, the trio unveiled their sixth album, Real Power—a remarkable return to form after a 12-year hiatus. The record’s 11 tracks reveal themselves as some of the band’s most personal yet, charting Ditto’s divorce from her wife of five years (and her newfound romance with the band’s touring bass player), the death of her father, and also the personal estrangement between herself and Howdeshell that led, in part, to the band’s time apart. Yet there’s a subversive sense of joy woven through as well: The hip-shaking swagger of “Don’t Be Afraid” serves as a delicious kiss-off to a former lover, while the jangling, INXS-y guitars of “Give It Up for Love” lets Ditto’s vocals rip as she sings of falling head over heels into a new relationship.
But this is Gossip, after all, and they always find a route to that part of the Venn diagram where the personal meets the political. Take the thundering title track, which seems to hark back to the furious protest music of their early albums, celebrating the sheer force of collective resistance. “It’s really a song about Portland and how Portland gets a bad reputation for being a protest city,” Ditto explains, highlighting the city’s assiduous approach to masking and social distancing during the pandemic, as well as its place as an epicenter for the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd. “I can’t tell you how many people I talked to, especially in the South, [where] when I told them I was living in Portland, they’d be like, ‘Oh, there are looters! There are rioters! The town’s on fire!’ I think they thought we were living in Mad Max. But I just found it frustrating how people would talk shit about the city that I’ve called home for 21 years—the picture that had been deliberately painted of this town that was taking a stand for itself. But we’re not a city to be fucked with. And I was proud to live in a city that was at least trying.”
That not-to-be-fucked-with spirit has always coursed through Gossip’s music. Ditto even notes that if it weren’t for their reunion happening almost by accident, she doubts they would have ever gotten back together. “I think Gossip is…. We’re just such a bag of squirrels,” says Ditto. “Like, we’re insane. It’s always so scatterbrained. And I think had we planned to make a record, it wouldn’t have worked out. It had to happen like this, or it wouldn’t have happened at all. We never want to be told what to do. And I don’t like expectations. It was just happenstance. That’s a great word, isn’t it? Happenstance.”
Just as striking as the music on Real Power is the visual world surrounding it. On the cover, Ditto and her bandmates pose in kitschy ’80s getups like the protagonists of a John Waters movie—an image created by Cody Critcheloe, who also directed all the music videos for the record. (These include the eye-popping visual for lead single “Crazy Again,” in which Ditto variously appears as a down-and-out glamour girl smoking a cigarette on the toilet, a buttoned-up news broadcaster, a weather girl in a yellow anorak, and, finally, onstage as the lead singer of Gossip—in a shocking pink wig, a Christopher Kane “Sex” T-shirt, and a pair of black knickers, naturally.) Surely Ditto would have to chalk this garish yet strangely cohesive vision up to more than just happenstance?
“It was Cody’s vision, because I didn’t really have one at that time,” Ditto says after a pause. “I felt really disconnected, and I think that’s because I lost one of my best friends—she was my hairdresser, which sounds silly, but it’s not silly at all. Her name was Lyndell [Mansfield], and she had such an impact on me that it’s hard to talk about without crying. The first photo shoot I ever did for a magazine, she was there, and we were inseparable from then. I felt so lost.”
While Ditto chokes up with tears, she quickly assures me they are bittersweet. “When Cody came along, it felt so good to meet someone I could trust with the visuals because I didn’t know how I was gonna get through it otherwise. I don’t think I realized how much I had relied on Lyndell not just for inspiration but to tell me the truth about what was good or not. I needed someone who had that same ‘fuck off, who cares’ energy. And when Cody stepped in, I felt like I was gonna be okay.”
It was also, she explains, Mansfield’s influence that allowed her to understand what she could bring to the fashion world—and why she now counts so many industry figures as close friends, from London designers like Erdem to industry titans like Gaultier. “I don’t think I would have understood how punk fashion could be if Lyndell hadn’t been there to explain it to me—that participating in it could be powerful,” Ditto continues. “I wasn’t open to giving the fashion world a chance before that. And now I enjoy being around fashion people way more than music people—like, are you joking? There’s more women, it’s more queer, and it’s so creative. Yeah, it has a lot of fucked-up shit about it, but let me tell you, the music industry is still not a diverse, accepting place. I’d rather be in a room full of fashion people than in a room full of rock-and-roll dudes who just want to talk about the good old days, you know?”
Well, you do get the sense that Ditto would be an awful lot of fun at a fashion party. She’s uproariously funny (“I can’t wait to read this below a Pantene ad,” she jokes of this article) but also has the kind of openness and candor—especially when it comes to her experiences with depression and ADHD—that translate into how compelling she is as a performer. It’s a mix of deep introspection and boundless curiosity about the world surrounding her that feels all too rare. Did the more uplifting moments on the record—the moments that celebrate queer joy, in particular—serve as a riposte, of sorts, to the rolling back of rights for LGBTQ+ people in America over the past few years? “It’s a fucking joke, and I think it’s hard when you are somebody who really cares,” she says, pointing to the wider political turbulence of the last decade. “And that isn’t just me. I don’t think I’m special. All of my friends are going through it so hard right now. Something that I keep trying to point out to people is that the world is emerging from a global trauma, but there’s this weird expectation that we’re just supposed to go back to normal. I mean, how do you feel about it?”
Ah, yes. Once again Ditto wants to turn the conversation back to me. Instead, I ask her about how the band is preparing to bring Real Power to life onstage. Are they excited to take it out on the road, especially given the riotous energy of songs like the title track? “Talking about the record too much can take the fun out of it,” she says. “I don’t want to think about if the record is gonna do well or not. What’s the point? It’s not up to us, we can’t control that. So I’m like, Can we just tell jokes? Can we just hang out?” After an hour in Ditto’s endlessly charismatic presence, I realize she somehow coaxed me into doing exactly that. Maybe that’s real power.