In our class-obsessed pop culture, the “posh” tag is, to quote Billy Connolly, about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. Johnny Borrell went to private school with one of the Libertines, and Lily Allen was in the same year at Bedales as Luke Pritchard from the Kooks, but all of them would love to play down their privilege and beef up those working-class credentials. So it’s refreshing to meet the Gossip, a girl-girl-boy trio from the Southern American state of Arkansas whose talk of growing up poor refers not to the ignominy of being a day pupil, but of being so hungry that they had to eat squirrels.

“My mom hated us doing it, but all the kids we knew ate squirrels,” recalls Beth Ditto (pictured below right, with Brace Paine and Hannah Blilie), the booming-lunged vocalist of the riot-disco band, giggling at the memory as she sits in the bar of a London hotel at the start of the band’s six-week European tour. “I remember this one time, I was 13 and I was smoking pot with my cousin for the first time. He got the munchies so bad he just took out his BB gun and started shooting at them out of the window, and then he skinned them and fried them just like chicken. We used to play with the tails afterwards.”

Ditto talks fast and fondly about her childhood, and has a tattoo that reads “Mama” emblazoned across her shoulder, but claims to have no plans of going back to live with her “crazy” family.

The guitarist Brace Paine had a bad enough experience when he took a college girlfriend home to meet the parents. “She was Canadian, very middle-class, and when we drove up to my family’s door, my dad was standing there with a shotgun in his hand in front of a dead cow that was dripping with blood and stuck to the front of a bulldozer.” The girlfriend cried every day until she was allowed to go home.

Life in the Deep South was never really going to work out for the Gossip, three imaginative kids who loved drawing, music and radical politics and who weren’t prepared to follow the Church’s attitude that you should put your own happiness on hold for the sake of the afterlife. Ditto, their big, talkative and opinionated frontwoman, is pro-fat, pro-lesbian, and pro- doing whatever you want.

“All my life I was told that you should just put up with s*** because God would take care of it later. I’d never questioned the idea of God, then when I got to 18 I was so angry. People say, don’t you think it’s really idealistic and unrealistic to think you can actually change something? Well, you know what, you can accept it and grow up hating yourself and everybody else, or you can reach out.

“If everybody else is uncomfortable with you talking about being a dyke, or saying that you don’t want a bikini wax, then it’s their pain. I’m sorry but I’m not gonna live with those pains.”

As they had been so inspired by the riot-grrl movement, it seemed natural to move to Portland, Oregon, where they are now based, and where they count the members of the pioneering band Sleater-Kinney among their closest friends. It’s Ditto’s amazing gospel voice, coupled with a fast and furious discoinfluenced soul, that has led them on a slow but sure path to success. During their live shows Ditto will strip down to her bra and pants, her fuller form giving one in the eye to the sleek and skinny lads’mag culture. The band might be right-on but they’re not po-faced. As their drummer, Hannah Blilie, explains: “What’s really radical is making a living from your art.”

One thing the Gossip are not sure about is how they will know when they have “made it”. Blondie asking them to play as support was definitely a key moment, but making a few of those rock’n’roll megabucks wouldn’t go amiss.

The Gossip have no qualms about selling out. “Selling out is such a stupid phrase,” Ditto says. “People who accuse you of selling out tend to be the more privileged ones. If you grew up poor, no one should ever tell you how to make your money. It’s like vegans who give you a hard time for eating McDonald’s, but have enough money to be vegan. Or people who will starve themselves willingly because they can, when there are people starving because they have to.”

The Gossip’s album Standing in the Way of Control is out on Killrockstars. Their UK tour starts on July 17 www.gossipyouth.com

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