Gossip

"I came from a white family in a very white town. For the most part, there was not a lot of blues culture." This may seem confusing coming from the Gossip's Beth Ditto, whose personalised and radical incarnation of the most solidly and naturally gospel blues ladies of the past has recently generated one giant positive charge in an otherwise jaded domain. "It's just that I can't sing any other way," she explains. After trolling with numerous choirs as a child, Beth and her comrades are still creating with an approach that has always allowed them to stay true to themselves. This is something that has surprisingly proven to be appreciably trying, with Beth's status as super-sultry queer girl icon bringing both massive support from trans-national queer communities as well as the hard-to-avoid element of typecasting and pigeonholing. But that hasn't stopped her from doing her own thing. "I like to represent the sexy person, but I don't like for it to be that all the time. I don't have to put on any kind of mask to play a show." Throughout all of this, and after just five years since the trio first met and bonded over a new passion for punk in the midst of small-town Arkansas, the Gossip have already developed a name for themselves. Somehow achieving the less-than-typical distinction of honestly unique, the Gossip entertain that oh-so-talked-about garage punk sound, but throw it straight out of run-of-the-mill waters with the rare, seriously soulful swinging croon and burst of everyone's newest hardcore girl-crush. Movement is a continuation and expansion of past releases that have progressed logically and satisfyingly. "I think that what I've learned is that I don't have to write songs about sex, I don't have to write songs about being queer. I can sing about being mad or I can sing a song about dancing or I can sing a song about anything I want."