“ Where are we, by the way? At first, I thought, Does this place belong to Burt Bacharach?” She pokes her tiny feet out from underneath the table to show me the red Gucci mules she also donned for the occasion. I figured I should wear something fancy while I was here,” she says, curling her accent around “fancy” to stretch it into three syllables. The dress is from 2008 and is one of Ditto’s favorites. She wears a black silk Mulberry minidress printed with playful roses and women’s faces by the quirky British illustrator Julie Verhoeven. When the server arrives, Ditto orders a black coffee by asking for “ditch water,” a small homage to her Searcy, Arkansas, roots. “My whole life, everyone would say, ‘Beth, your voice just carries,’ which is kind of a nice way to say, ‘You talk really loud.’ I guess it’s a gift?” She puts her hand under her chin and bats her eyelashes with goofy false modesty. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it, my entire family is so loud,” she says. She laughs, and the sound echoes through the space. “I wish we could just pretend to powder our noses and listen to them for two hours.” “I love hearing New York women talk,” she whispers in a hushed Arkansas twang. Ditto swivels her head around so that she can delicately eavesdrop on their conversation. The only sounds are a quiet lounge playlist piped in overhead and the chattering of two elegant older women lunching behind us in pearls. They were not wrong: The restaurant, which is festooned with a giant sphere made of hundreds of red roses, is eerily silent, as if we are sitting inside a remote gypsum cave. We are inside the Baccarat Hotel on 53rd Street in midtown Manhattan, a location that Ditto’s team felt would be a quiet respite from her whirlwind week promoting Fake Sugar, her first solo record after leaving her band, Gossip.
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Released in June 2017, the album found Ditto embracing her Southern roots as well as the punk, pop, and disco she'd explored with the Gossip.Beth Ditto is sitting in a high-backed faux-fur armchair inside a room that’s literally dripping with crystals: There are crystal chandeliers, crystal tabletops, and floor-to-ceiling crystal windows that bend the light so that pedestrians walking below look like skittering rainbows. Ditto returned to music with the single "Fire," which appeared on her debut solo record Fake Sugar. That year, the Gossip also released their sixth and final album, Joyful Noise the group disbanded in 2015 when Howdeshell returned to Arkansas.
In 2012, Ditto released her memoir, Coal to Diamonds, which she co-wrote with Michelle Tea. Ditto also had her own advice column in British broadsheet The Guardian, launched a campaign to ban the clothing size "zero", and formed supergroup Crisis with Paul Weller and Graham Coxon to raise money for a homeless charity.
After providing guest vocals on records by Calvin Johnson ("Lightning Rod for Jesus"), Simian Mobile Disco ("Cruel Intentions"), and Jarvis Cocker (a duet cover version of Heaven 17's "Temptation"), she released her solo self-titled EP in 2011. Ditto's larger-than-life, uncompromising image turned her into a fashion icon, a development which resulted in her opening Jean Paul Gaultier's Spring Collection at 2010's Paris Fashion Week, and creating her own collection for U.K. After being named "the coolest person in rock" by NME, one of three publications she posed nude for (alongside erotica magazine On Our Backs and London style bible Love), the band broke through to the mainstream with their third album's title track, "Standing in the Way of Control," written by Ditto as a response to the U.S. Born Mary Beth Patterson in 1981, she grew up in a tiny house in Searcy, Arkansas before moving to Washington at the age of 18, where she teamed up with guitarist Nathan Howdeshell (aka Brace Paine) and drummer Hannah Blilie to form the Gossip. First known as the non-conformist lead singer of the Gossip, Beth Ditto became just as famous for challenging the perceptions of female beauty and sexuality as she did for her spellbindingly raw voice.
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