Even to those who work closely with them, it’s apparently hard to remember that there are three people in the Gossip. The contents of the most recent press release sent out by the group’s record company were, in themselves, nothing exceptional — but, in a simple e-mail concerning some tour dates, it was the subject field that revealed the most. No Gossip; just “Beth Ditto”.
Needless to say, it wouldn’t have happened three years ago, before appearances on Skins and Friday Night with Jonathan Ross made a hit of their third album (and its eponymous single), Standing in the Way of Control, in the process thrusting Ditto past the velvet rope that usually prevents access to amply upholstered Arkansas lesbians. The woman who once ripped up a copy of NME on stage in protest at a “sexist” Missy Elliott review was now top of its Cool List, duetting with Mika at the Brits and chummy with Kate Moss — the same Kate Moss of whom she once said: “Just because she’s sleeping with a singer and sings a few backing vocals, she thinks she’s it.”
Co-opted into the machine against which she once raged or subverting it from within? Music for Men suggests that Ditto has belatedly wised up to the perception that the guitarist Brace Paine and the drummer Hannah Billie are mere passengers on her stardom trip. It’s not just the sleeve, depicting a bequiffed monochrome Billie, that hints at a reaffirmation of the group’s core values. On Dimestore Diamond, Ditto sings: “Everybody knows/ But no one can tell/ A home-made haircut but she wears it well.” By making it the opening song, Ditto depicts herself a little overkeen to remind the world that she’s still here to represent outsiders setting their own style agenda.
Deliberately or otherwise, it’s a revealing snapshot of a singer willing the world to be as it once was, yet also eager to use her new platform. Emblematic of the latter desire is Pop Goes the World, in which Paine and Billie’s overcaffeinated Latino electro-clatter propels a stirring Ditto hymn to sexual empowerment. Harking back to their punk roots, the self-explanatory Spare Me from the Mold is another vehicle for Ditto to celebrate her militant otherness.
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The music sounds competent for the most part. Oddly, it’s an uncharacteristically muted showing from Ditto that creates an unwelcome sense of distance here. Rick Rubin’s “as live” production should be anything but a problem. You wonder then if the desire to accentuate the Gossip’s “band”-ness accounts for Ditto’s relative lack of presence in the mix and, on For Keeps and Vertical Rhythm, a reticence to let rip as we’ve seen her do countless times in concert.
The one blazing exception to all this, the current single Heavy Cross, has already been pounding out of the airwaves for the past month. Alas, one slab of slinky, superconfident funk genius has a counterproductive effect when placed amid 11 performances barely fit to hold its coat. Someone really ought to have told Beth Ditto: star quality v great band — it’s not an either/or thing.
(Columbia, TS £12.72)