Ditto strips again

Over on the Guardian Music Blog, she suggests that Beth Ditto is the Natalie Imbruglia of indie.

That's really unfair to Imbruglia.

Seriously, Sullivan suggests that The Gossip is, effectively, just Beth Ditto, and Beth Ditto is, pretty much, Standing In The Way Of Control and that's it, as Imbruglia's career might be summarised as "Torn... erm..."

The trouble is, this feels a lot truer than it would have done this time last year. The Gossip seemed an excellent band; Ditto a frontwoman bursting with promise. 2007 should have been great for them.

Instead, we got precious little music, and an awful lot of Ditto using the song that everyone likes as a platform for confused public pronouncements, most of which were, roughly translated, "look at me". It worked, but with rapidly diminishing returns. Indeed, the repeat of her NME cover - she stripped naked again for Harper's Bazaar's Christmas issue - barely even raised a murmur. God, even we forgot about our intention to mention it for three weeks. (Yes, once again, she was making a point that larger women can be sexual; once again, it appears, only if they get airbrushed to buggery.)

We'd love to believe that The Gossip have another couple of cracking albums in them. But instead of hearing them, we get Beth chatting with Jonathan Ross; Beth telling Guardian readers how to avoid fear of flying. What is she doing writing an advice column? No, seriously: in the piece she claims that:

As with most phobias, the fear of flying does make some sense

- despite a phobia, by its very nature, being irrational; to be offering advice to people while not understanding the difference between a fear and a phobia is, at best, reckless.

Added to which, of course, Beth has already told Guardian readers about her experiences of turbulence - which left her "freaked out" despite "not usually being afraid of flying". Which makes it odd that this week she was a large number of tried-and-tested ways of copying with being afraid of flying.

Misplaced advice, nude magazine shoots, chatshow appearances trotting out the same anecdotes. She's not the indie Natalie Imbruglia; she's the indie Andy Millman.