Beth Ditto interview: Hot gossip

BETH Ditto is lying flat on her back when I enter her hotel room in London's Mayfair. She is short enough that her toes don't reach the end of the sofa, and all that famous flesh that has graced the covers of magazines from the NME to the launch issue of Katie Grand's Love is spilling in great doughy rolls out of a black vest stretched so tight it thinks it's a body-stocking.

Photographers always want to shoot her naked, Ditto tells me later, and "naked or whatever, it's fine". Her hair, black and spiky, is a mess, and her eye make-up, also black and spiky, is wandering south. Her face is like a china doll's, sweet and young, and the rosebud mouth set into it unpainted for a change. She looks tired and scrappy, like she doesn't give a damn what I think of her.

And she doesn't. Ditto's catchphrase, repeated in a soft, cracked twang – Dolly Parton meets Scarlett O'Hara – is "I don't care", or rather a hand-on-hip "Ah don't cay-er." The whirlwind couple of years that have catapulted her from punk riot grrrl from deepest, godliest Arkansas to size-20 muse of Anna Wintour and mate of Kate Moss don't seem to have had much effect. In fact, all this ripe Southern sass is refreshing and rather fabulous. "I stopped worrying a long time ago what other punks were going to think, and I stopped worrying a long time ago what all this was going to look like to people." She gestures at the beige surroundings, the posh hotel room standing in as today's metaphor for how much life has changed. "I surround myself with people I trust. I won't go anywhere without our manager, and it's not because I'm like, 'Don't talk to me, talk to my manager.' It's because she's a feminist dyke like me. That's how I stay sane around it all."