Beth Ditto starts international tour in Little Rock

"They're going to heckle me," Beth Ditto says with a laugh.

The Judsonia native is talking about her family, who will surely make up a good portion of the audience at her concert Wednesday night at the Rev Room in Little Rock.

The show is the first of a tour that will have the former Gossip front woman on the road through the summer across America and Europe in support of her 2017 solo debut LP Fake Sugar.

The Rev Room set is also a homecoming for Ditto, who lives in Portland, Ore.

"I'm so excited," she says. "I think I'm going to come down a couple of days early, see everybody and make the rounds."

Her older sister, Akasha Carroll, says Ditto has nothing to worry about at the show, which will be opened by Ssion -- a Kansas City-based synth-pop project of painter/filmmaker Cody Critcheloe.

"We're not going to heckle her," she says with a laugh. "She's going to have fun and put on a good show for her family and fans. It'll be awesome."

Ditto, 37, left White County right after graduating high school to join her friends Jeri Beard, Kathy Mendonca and Nathan Howdeshell in Olympia, Wash. The three were drawn by the Riot Grrrl scene and bands like Sleater-Kinney, Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill, who embraced the do-it-yourself ethic of punk and welcomed gay, lesbian and transgender people.

They formed The Gossip with first Beard and then Mendonca on drums, Howdeshell on guitar and Ditto's fierce, deeply soulful voice up front. The garage punk of early efforts like 2001's That's Not What I Heard and the 2002 EP Arkansas Heat gave way to the more groove-centric, dance punk of the band's breakthrough, Standing in the Way of Control, with Hannah Blilie drumming (along the way they also lost the The in the band name).

Gossip developed a loyal following, especially in Europe, and Ditto became a voice for gay rights and the body-positive movement. She posed nude on the cover of Love magazine, appeared in runway shows, designed her own plus-size fashion line and wrote a column for The Guardian.

Ditto is still close with Mendonca and Beard, who also live in Portland. Howdeshell moved back to Arkansas and Gossip ended officially in 2016. The group's final album was 2012's A Joyful Noise.

Fake Sugar finds Ditto confidently moving forward with a pop-rock sound that also nods to her Southern roots. NPR said the record "recasts Ditto as a versatile, pop-minded rock star who can still shake the rafters with her voice when the moment calls for it."

More recently, she released a gritty, buzzing cover of "I'm Alive," the 1968 track by Tommy James and the Shondells. She was asked by Max Factor to record the song for a commercial in Britain and it was eventually turned into a single.

"I love Tommy James and the Shondells," she says. "He was a hit machine. He still plays shows. And you don't even realize how many songs he wrote. You think 'Mony Mony' and 'Crimson and Clover,' but he also wrote 'Crystal Blue Persuasion' and 'Draggin' the Line.' I've been a big fan of them since I was a little kid. My mom really likes them."

Working on the track also gave her some ideas for her next album, she says: "I want to do a record more like that. After recording that song, I think it would be cool to do a record that is just that raw."

Lately, she says she has been listening to lots of ABBA, Cat Power's The Greatest and podcasts like the political-comedy-theme Lovett or Leave It and Pod Save America.

"I like listening to political comedy," she says. "It's like listening to the news and getting a lot of information, but you don't feel like you want to jump off a cliff."

While Wednesday's show will lean toward tracks from Fake Sugar, Ditto says she will include Gossip songs, and is hoping that Howdeshell, with whom she is still friends, will be there: "We are doing Gossip stuff. If Nathan comes, it might be a little weird, but he's so chill, he won't care."

Perhaps she could get him onstage?

"I would like that a lot" she says. "I miss him. He's so funny."

Style on 03/06/2018