Deep into the recording of their third album, Scissor Sisters realised it wasn't working, so they took a break before starting again. The shake-up helped to bring the sex and disco back, they tell BRIAN BOYD
WHAT DO you do when your first two albums sell by the millions but you’ve just binned your third album because you think it’s rubbish and you really don’t know what to do and you just wish the band could break up quietly? If you’re Scissor Sisters singer Jake Shears it’s easy: “I went to Berlin, went to these really great techno clubs, took drugs and stayed out until eight in the morning. That seemed to work.”
Feeling they had got a bit “watered-down”, a “bit packaged”, Shears and the band’s Babydaddy wanted to get back to being “sinister and sexual” on this album. “The sexiness had gone on the last album,” says Shears. “We probably went back far too early to record it, and we did get an album sort of finished but our hearts really weren’t in it. It was sub-standard. If we had released it the band would have been over.”
“We went straight back into the studio after touring the last record,” says Babydaddy. “There was supposed to have been an album out two years ago, but now it’s a four-year gap between albums. It wasn’t a lack of material – we had the songs – but when we started to hear how these songs would sound on the radio, as just passable Scissor Sisters songs, we threw them all out. We just all went our separate ways until we felt there was a great new album in us. I learnt how to paint – Jake went dancing in Berlin.”
The two finally clicked when Shears would send Babydaddy missives from Berlin techno clubs. “At times in Berlin I was really reminded of the 1980s clubbing scene in New York. When it was really progressive, transgressive and if felt like boundaries were being pushed. I was thinking of artists like Sylvester,” says Shears. “That party came to a sudden end in the mid-1980s. A whole generation got wiped out . So I was asking myself ‘but what if?’ and that’s where I hope we’ve ended up on this album. As if that New York club scene had kept going.”
“Once we had that time and that place we knew where we were going” says Babydaddy. “Then, to help things along further, Jake bumped into Neil Tennant in Berlin. Jake told him the grand plan for the album, and Neil suggested we get Stuart Price (who has worked with New Order, Madonna and The Killers) to produce. It was an inspired choice, and we found when we played back these new songs to people they were really excited – this was ’80s dance-floor pop music, a world away from the somewhat tepid stuff we had previously tried for this album.”
“How we imagined the album while recording it was that it was one night out at a club,” says Babydaddy. “You’ve got that sense of abandonment, that capturing of youthful joy, that sense of euphoria and then on the last track, something of a comedown. If that’s a concept album, then we’re okay with that. But it is a unit of work – and a tribute to that New York ’80s scene that influenced us so much.”
That epic last track (very Trevor Horn and Frankie Goes to Hollywood) features a spoken-word part by actor Sir Ian McKellen. “In the studio somebody said the song needed a deep, British-sounding voice,” says Babydaddy, “and he was the first person we thought could fit the bill.”
"The first single, Fire with Fire, was a real way in," says Shears. "We knew then we weren't making the first album or the second album again. We had lift-off. This is a clubbing album with no ballads."
Babydaddy (real name Scott), from Kentucky, first met Jake Shears when he was visiting the area. The two of them “playing really bad stuff” was the first incarnation of the band before they decamped to New York and met up with singer Ana Matronic. They were a complete band when Shears met guitarist Del Marquis when the former was working as a stripper in a bar.
Their breakthrough – a glitter-ball cover of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb, which was originally a B-side – came when the track was picked up by London DJs during the brief electroclash musical phase. "We were signed in Britain to Polydor, and to this day there's still a much bigger following for us in the UK and Ireland than there is in our own country," says Babydaddy.
"When Comfortably Numbwas re- released as an A-side it went top 10 in Britain and Ireland, and then the first album (also containing Take Your Mama, Lauraand Filthy Gorgeous) was a huge hit."
That eponymous debut was the biggest-selling album of 2004, and it has gone on to become the 50th best-selling album of all time. A giddy, hedonistic affair, it showed that edgy club sounds and pop could mix.
Despite having only one straight member, Shears doesn’t like the “gay band” tag. “Maybe it’s me being high-minded, but I really hope the music transcends gay,” he says. “Whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual romance, it can be interesting.”
Perhaps better live than they are on record, Scissor Sisters put on a show. “Dressing up and really going for it is what we’re about on stage,” says Shears. “When we started out – and we were one of the few bands to emerge from that electroclash scene – we found that a lot of live music shows were dull. The person on stage looked like the person standing next to you in the audience. We never wanted that confusion with our shows!”
With 2006's Ta-Dahunable to match the sparkle of their debut, a gradual unease was creeping around the band. The album, buoyed by the hit I Don't Feel Like Dancing(a co-write with Elton John), did well for them, but Shears believes the band were becoming "neutered" by popularity and fame.
"We needed to get the sex back," says Babydaddy. "An edginess had been lost maybe on Ta-Dah, which is perhaps why we took two attempts to get this new one out. We had produced the first two albums ourselves – we really didn't know what we were doing. We just used to double-track Jake's vocals and hope that was enough. This time we sound like a more mature band, but paradoxically younger as well, because of the songs."
Or as Jake Shears has it: “We had to go back to the past to find a future for Scissor Sisters.”
- Night Workis released next week. Scissor Sisters play the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on June 20th
"That's not my ass. I wish it was"
The album cover for Night Workis a photograph of a ballet dancer from behind by Robert Mapplethorpe. But many people are assuming it's Jake Shear's ass. "I know I'm going to get asked this a million times, but no – it's definitely not my ass on the cover of the album. I wish it was.
“Mapplethorpe took that photo in 1986, which is the time we are really trying to represent musically on the album. In that way it made perfect sense. I had so many arguments with everyone, trying to get that as the cover image, and eventually I wore them down. It works in so many ways: the time era and the fact that he’s a dancer – and this is a dance album.”
Strange bedfellows: odd musical alliances
If the thought of Scissor Sisters roping in Sir Ian McKellen for a thoroughly entertaining collaboration fills you with joy (or dread), then read on for four even stranger examples of when rock and pop and whatever-you’re-having-yourself went weird on us. And we haven’t even mentioned Ozzy Osbourne and Miss Piggy.
DAVID BOWIE & BING CROSBY
PEACE ON EARTH/ LITTLE DRUMMER BOY
Once utterly, utterly odd, but now – thanks to it having been broadcast so often – oddly familiar, this 1977 duet still resonates with Bowie fans as the moment the Thin White Duke totally lost the plot. Crosby seems bothered, bemused and befuddled as he doesn’t ask: who is this dude? As for Bowie, he did it because he knew his mother liked Bing. Who’s a good boy, then?
NICK CAVE & KYLIE MINOGUE
WHERE THE WILD ROSES GROW
Yes, they were linked by country of birth, but back in 1995 the thought of pop princess Minogue (who up until this song had enjoyed 16 UK Top 10 singles) performing with gruff Cave (who up until this song had not entered the UK Top 30 singles chart – a situation that hasn’t changed for him). Result? A murder ballad brought back to life.
THE KLF & TAMMY WYNETTE
JUSTIFIED & ANCIENT
Situationist UK duo KLF (Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty) threw all sorts of caution to the wind in 1991 when they teamed up with first lady of country Tammy Wynette for this county and western-style acid house oddity. KLF’s mindset was, said Wynette, “a lot more interesting than Tennessee, but I wouldn’t want to live there”. Quite.
BURT BACHARACH & DR DRE
GO ASK SHAKESPEARE
One of pop music's most sophisticated and revered easy-listening songwriters hangin' with hip-hop homie Dre? You better believe it – and the feeling is reciprocal, as when Dre's album is finally (if ever) released it could well contain some Bacharach piano. TONY CLAYTON-LEA
