Think of a word to describe singer Beth Ditto and “confident” would be up there. The singer has posed naked on the front of both Love magazine and NME and now, after a two-year break, she has her musical confidence back, too.
“I realised doing this album how influential I was in Gossip,” she says. “When I showed people the album and some songs, they said:‘That is like Gossip’, and I was like: ‘Well, I was a third of the band’, but I realise now what an integral part I was.
“I’ve always been confident, but doing this album has shown me what I can do”
“I’ve always been confident, but doing this album has shown me what I can do.” Fake Sugar, out next month, isn’t Ditto’s first solo work – she released an EP in 2011 while still in the band – but the process was different this time.
“I had worked with James Ford and Jas Shaw of Simian Mobile Disco before, so there was an ease, as we knew how to work with one another and went with a more electro vibe,” she says.
“With this album, I felt more vulnerable and it was more intimate. Finding the people I would work with was like speed-dating. We’d do some songs and just see how we worked with one another. There were some people to whom I just said: ‘I think we would totally be friends but this isn’t working’.
“There is a level of trust when you work with someone. You have to gel and have something. For example, if I said I loved Abba and you said you hated everything about them, there would be certain things we wouldn’t agree on.”
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She also hired session players to sound out her ideas. “I’m used to sitting there forever in a band, trying to get it right. With them, it was like performing miracles.”
Now 37, Ditto grew up in the small Arkansas town of Judsonia, raised as one of seven by her mother. After leaving her home state at the age of 18, she helped to form Gossip in Olympia, Washington, more than 2,000 miles away, on the West Coast.
“I was running away from the bad parts of Southern culture”
“I was running away from the bad parts of Southern culture,” she says. “I’m old enough now and so grateful for my family that I can finally embrace the good in where I grew up.”
It was in 2006 that Gossip went from punk to mainstream when their single “Standing in the Way of Control” became a mega-hit and was used in promotion material for E4 teen drama Skins.
The band split two years ago. “When Nathan [Howdeshell co-founder of the band] decided to leave the band, he went back to Arkansas,” she says. “I felt like the future of the band fell to me. I felt like, if we fail, it’s my fault and if we succeed, it is my fault, so the decision was made for me, really.
“It took a while for me to decide to do my own album, but once I did, it was all done in six months”
“I knew from that moment that there was no way I was going back to Arkansas. It took a while for me to decide to do my own album, but once I did, it was all done in six months.”
Going solo was more of a learning curve than she had expected. “I had to be more technical than I had been before,” she explains. “I didn’t know about pitch or notes, really. In Gossip, we couldn’t read music, we just knew how to communicate and had our own language – but this was different: I had to know what I was talking about.”
Since leaving Gossip, Ditto has also launched a plus-sized luxury line with Jean Paul Gaultier, posed in an Alexander Wang portrait series, modelled for Marc Jacobs on the runway and in print, and appeared in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals.
“I don’t think about that stuff like: ‘This is good for my career’.” she says. “It’s like; ‘This’ll be hilarious fun’.”
Fake Sugar is about love, loss, looking back and moving forward
Fake Sugar, which started as 80 songs, is about love, loss, looking back and moving forward, a “mash-up of driving blues, malt-shop pop, swooning rock and countrified soul”.
“I wanted this album to sound more Southern than it does,” she says, “but when I try for an idea and don’t succeed, it usually ends up better.”
It wasn’t a conscious decision to move away from Gossip’s dancey garage-punk, she says, it just happened organically.
“Songs are just songs. They aren’t a commodity, they don’t reflect who you are as a person”
Was she nervous about people hearing her new material? “No,” she laughs. “That sounds bad, doesn’t it? I think coming from a punk background, songs are just songs. They aren’t a commodity, they don’t reflect who you are as a person, so I just think if people are going to like it, they’ll like it.
“Some people like Pink, some like Lady Gaga everyone is different, so you can’t please everyone. I just wanted to feel that I had done my best and put the best out there, and I think I have.”
She is looking forward to touring the album. “I love playing the UK,” she smiles. “On this tour, because the venues are more intimate when I am at the front, it is like being with friends.”
She considered calling the album “Music for Moms” in joking reference to Gossip’s 2009 LP Music for Men and her own settling down. In 2013, she married her girlfriend Kristin Ogata – the two have been best friends since they were 18. “This is adulthood, baby,” Ditto smiles.
As for the name Fake Sugar, it seems there is no hidden meaning. “I just like the sound of those two words,” she explains. “I thought about how it would sound if my mum or a genteel aunt said it, and it worked.”
Beth Ditto plays Glasgow O2 ABC, on 25 May; Cambridge Junction on 29 May; Electric Brixton, London, on 30 May; and Brighton Concorde 2 on 31 May. ‘Fake Sugar’ is out on 16 June on Virgin Records
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