Despite the T-shirts insisting "Gossip is a band" at the merchandise booth, there's only one star in this Arkansas trio. Beth Ditto has been part of everyone's life this year.

She's the one-woman personality explosion who has made being an overweight lesbian the most glamorous thing on the planet, whose bulging catsuits and howled proclamations have transported her from the indie ghetto to tabloid infamy.

As her group finally closes its long campaign for breakthrough album Standing in the Way of Control with two major London shows, Ditto can look back on a period in which she has been dissected by Germaine Greer, written a problem page for the Guardian and appeared naked, armpit hair proudly dangling, on the cover of the NME.

Gossip-column interest has edged her dangerously close to freak status, but as last night's show proved, above everything else, she can really sing.

Tottering back and forth, bawling and wailing, her towering voice dominated the room. As she frequently wandered off the script to improvise repeated lines with genuine soul, guitarist Brace Paine and drummer Hannah Blilie could do little but watch carefully and try to keep up. Their skeletal backing kept Ditto's voice as the focus but also often failed to match her fire. Paine had a fraction of the ability of Jack White of the White Stripes or Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, other members of thinly populated bands who can make their guitars erupt.

Paine's instrument squalled impressively on Jealous Girls and a surprise cover of George Michael's Careless Whisper, and finally found power to match the singer on the latest album's title track, still their best song by such a margin that tonight it prompted a stage invasion.

Even amid the clamour, Ditto stood out a mile. She may disappear now to record a new album, but she won't fade away for a long while yet.