‘You went to church or got knocked up’

Ifirst interviewed the singer Beth Ditto six years ago. Just over 5 ft tall, she was perched on an absurdly oversized bed in an all-white hotel room, her legs dangling off the edge. I’d unwisely taken a seat on a low-slung ottoman, and so was forced to direct my questions upwards, a supplicant before a doll-faced oracle. Awkward as it was, it felt somehow fitting, because Ditto was a rare creature: there was no other pop star so proud and political about being a woman, being gay, and being fat and beautiful. At the time, Ditto was still the lead singer in Gossip, the garage-punk trio who had become suddenly and unexpectedly famous in 2006, when they released Standing in the Way of Control, a juddering gay rights anthem. The band was successful – they got signed to a major label, and sold a reasonable number of records – but Ditto was the star. Not only did she have an original voice – sometimes singing with honeysuckle sweetness, other times with a wildcat howl – but she was charismatic, too.

She got picked up by the fashion crowd, counting as admirers everyone from Kate Moss to Karl Lagerfeld, released a clothing line and appeared naked on the cover of magazines. Germaine Greer pronounced her an icon. At 27, she wrote her memoir.

From time to time, someone would ask her if she minded talking so much about her life rather than her music. “I’d be like, no!” says Ditto, laughing. “I always felt like my personality went further than music did, and I always felt really happy about that.”

It is a rainy day in Dalston, east London, and Ditto has just completed a photo shoot that has left the photographer almost hyperventilating with delight. It’s been five years since she brought out any new music, Gossip having broken up soon after the release of their fifth record, A Joyful Noise, in 2012. Now the 36-year-old is releasing her first solo album, Fake Sugar.

For all her confidence – within 10 minutes of our meeting, she decides to change her outfit and strips down to her underwear, as she often did when she performed live with Gossip – she is surprisingly self-deprecating about this new direction. When I first mention the record, she puts her hands up to her face: “I won’t look you in the eye when you talk about it,” she says.

When I met Ditto in 2011 she had just put together a soulful, disco-inflected EP with dance producers Simian Mobile Disco. She found the experience of singing in front of them so nerve-racking that she had to get drunk before the first recording session. This time, she took a different route, first finding a collaborator – the Grammynominated producer and songwriter Jennifer Decilveo – with whom she felt comfortable.

“I feel like there was a special connection because we were both queer females, and that’s really rare in this industry,” says Ditto. “When you’re listening to a queer love record it’s so different from when you’re listening to a straight one. It’s like when you hear [George Michael’s] Father Figure, it’s so moving. It’s more than some pop song.”

AFormer Gossip frontwoman Beth Ditto tells Horatia Harrod about growing up gay and godless in the American South ‘My new album is not cool. I wanted to call it Music for Moms’

couple of years before she made Fake Sugar, Ditto went on a pilgrimage to Graceland with her older sister, listening to Paul Simon’s record the whole way there. Her obsession with Paul Simon is ongoing, as are those with earlier musical loves – Carole King and David Bowie. These, to Ditto’s mind, are artists: people who can spin poetry into music, “who can write a pop song like nobody’s business”. She counts herself, on the other hand, as part of a different, less illustrious tradition. “I’ve always said I’m a crafty person and a performer, but I’m not that much of a songwriter. I’m a ham!” she says, laughing. “If you were like, ‘write a song about pickles,’ I’d be like, yes! Writing a