Saturday, September 25, 2004
Sisters under the skin They sprang from the scuzzy bars of New York's East Village, blossomed in the UK, and now they're about to seduce middle America. Can Scissor Sisters survive with freshness and honesty intact? By Gareth McLean Saturday September 25, 2004The Guardian Scissor Sisters ... honest, different and - say it quietly - authentic Scissor Sisters are midway through their set and, having identified Paris Hilton as emblematic of everything that's wrong with America, firecracker frontwoman Ana Matronic is now cursing the twisted values of Wal-Mart. The über-retailer refuses to stock the band's self-titled album, on account of lyrical use of the words "tits" and "shit", but it will happily sell guns with which customers can mow down playgrounds of children. The crowd whoops with approval at Matronic's sweary remonstrations, then Scissor Sisters launch into another of the anthemic pop songs for which, along with polemic and performance, they've become famous. The audience - from skinny fashion kids to tops-off muscle marys, East Village arty types to middle-aged couples with matching Elton John tour T-shirts - dance in the pouring New York summer rain.
An hour earlier, and the band are relaxing in the green room. In the corridor, there is a commotion. A group of people - mostly women and wholly beautiful - approaches. This is not simply a group, though: this is an entourage. There is Someone here.
The Someone is Bono. With a space in his schedule between glad-handing presidents and raising awareness of pressing global issues, he has popped in to watch the gig and say hello. Not just hello, of course: he also says Scissor Sisters are the best pop band in the world. They take this in their unusually-trousered stride. It's what happens now in Scissor Sister world. In the year since their cover of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb was first released in the UK, the lives of Jake Shears, Ana Matronic, Babydaddy, Del Marquis and Paddy Boom have undergone a remarkable transformation. Their rise, from singing along to CDs in shabby-chic New York clubs to, next month, playing a sellout gig at the Royal Albert Hall, is staggeringly steep. And maybe because Shears and Babydaddy are horror film fans, it reminds you of that bit in The Silence Of The Lambs when Hannibal Lecter charts the ascent of Agent Starling, "Getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the way to the FBI."
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At home in the US, they are relatively unknown beyond New York, but here Scissor Sisters are ubiquitous, you hear their record constantly in high street fashion stores. This is nothing new: there's a history of more alternative US bands making their name in the UK first - Blondie, for example. British audiences seem more willing to embrace the different and the distinctive. It helps that our music isn't as rigidly compartmentalised as America's where the dominant genres of rap, rock and country are very fixed. There's also a more cynical theory: record labels like to use the UK as a test market for new indie bands because it's cheaper here. The payoff is that British buzz is worth more than US word of mouth.
And there has been a buzz. Scissor Sisters are good: amid manufactured pop, misanthropic rap and dull rock, they stand out as honest, different and, say it quietly, authentic. "The radio is full of liars, blatantly dishonest people who don't care about what they're doing," says Babydaddy. "They see celebrity as an end in itself. We care about what we're doing. Our goals aren't contrived. We put out something that makes sense to people. But the big trouble with getting dressed up like we do is that a lot of people think we're some kitschy throwback to the 70s, and they ignore the music. I would hope that people would listen and realise we're not that at all."
Bizarrely, the band has been compared to the Village People. This is partly due to rock nerds' outrage at the Comfortably Numb cover, as well as homophobia in the music press, where there's a suspicion of bands not consisting of angst-ridden, greasy-haired, guitar-wielding indie kids. Especially one without a definite article in its name (as opposed to, say, The Thrills, The Von Bondies, The Strokes and The White Stripes). But the absence of a "the" makes a point, one concerning inclusivity. As Shears says of their gigs, "There's no hierarchy. The only reason the stage is five feet off the ground is so that everyone can see us. We're all there together to have a good time. It's all one room." Matronic succinctly tells an audience in Brighton, "We are Scissor Sisters and so are you."
It's the antithesis of the macho posturing of cock rock, and it works. They have sold just shy of one million albums and made the summer festivals their own, attracting the largest crowd at V and wowing Glastonbury twice. They appeal to a young, urban, stylish crowd and a more MOR set, blending disco glitter with dance music exuberance, the energy of punk with classic songwriting. Older musicians are keen to court them - it's a demonstration that their fingers are still on the pulse. Before Bono's blessing, they were anointed by Elton John, who was savvy enough to invite them to support him on tour. Scissor Sisters' Take Your Mama Out has been compared to Elton's funky 70s oeuvre. Kylie has also lured them into the studio. (By now, you may have spotted a queer sensibility and, yes, Shears, Babydaddy and Marquis are gay, while Matronic has described herself as a drag queen trapped in a woman's body. In fact, Boom, the drummer, is the only straight man.)
The songwriting partnership of Shears and Babydaddy is the fulcrum of Scissor Sisters. They're not coupley or fraternal, but they share an intimacy. Like Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lennon and McCartney, their partnership produces an alchemy. Going into the studio is, says Shears, "food for the soul". Babydaddy says it's Shears who writes most of the lyrics. "Sometimes we start with a musical idea of mine, or a lyrical or melodical idea of his - it just depends." Shears has an affinity to pop that he's passed on to Babydaddy. "It's something that comes really naturally to him - wanting to have the big exploding chorus." Shears - who is a tornado of energy, one of those people for whom the world doesn't spin fast enough - agrees that the magic songs just come: "It happens in just one moment. A song like Laura just came out - I just sang it. It's instinct or something; I don't necessarily think you're in control, and the songs I really love are the ones I don't even feel like I've written." Shears says he hates getting all new age, but making music is "a spiritual thing", euphoric.
Babydaddy is responsible for the lush sound, a feat all the more impressive when you know that the record was created in his tiny home studio in Brooklyn. In public at least, he is diffident about the achievement. "I haven't listened to the album too much since we finished it, and when I do hear it I wonder how it sounds to other people. To me, it's a very primitively made album, a polished turd. We turned sounds that were imperfectly recorded on cheap equipment into something unique. I want to keep doing it that way - I have a fear of coming into money for production. I think money ruins artists. I am a huge fan of Tim Burton, but the second he got big budgets, he ceased being interesting to me. There's something about the struggle that gives art its own life."
As is often the way with ubiquitous things, Scissor Sisters' music may now be regarded as déclassé in certain circles, but if you only listen, it's brilliant, bumptious - full of razor-sharp hooks, sublime lyrics and soaring choruses.
Babydaddy and Shears met when Shears was 18, through a mutual friend who took him to visit Babydaddy in Lexington, Kentucky, his home town. "He saw my mom's immaculately clean kitchen and got a bit frightened - as people usually do," says Babydaddy. They bonded over horror films and video games, and, months later, Babydaddy visited Shears at home in Seattle. "He showed me Valley Of The Dolls, which freaked me out. And he had a full-time hooker staying with him at the time."
Nothing out of the way there. Shears, born Jason Sellards, had an unusual childhood. He had his first gay relationship at 13 and came out to his parents in Las Vegas (as good a place as any, I imagine) two years later. He lived away from home for a time and had a terrible time at state school - he wore make-up and dresses, and became a target for the hatred of his mostly Mormon classmates. "I don't know what I was thinking," he says of his early exit from the closet. "I probably wouldn't recommend it to every gay 15-year-old, but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
Stronger then, Shears transferred to a private school ("Somewhere where I could be who I was and not be scared"), where his creativity flourished. He was "heavily into books", and filled stacks of jotters and notebooks with poetry and prose. Leaving school, he ventured to LA and dabbled in filmmaking, but hated it. New York beckoned. "I knew if I hated LA, I'd love New York, and I did, but it was really challenging for a long time. I was living in a really scary place [upstairs from a crack den]. I was on the pay phone on the corner telling my mom everything was all right when I was terrified. But in New York, you can't just throw your hands up and say, 'Things aren't going well, I'm leaving.' Well, you can, but that's why you're not cut out for New York. You have to stick with it."
And stick with it he did. Go-go dancing in an East Village gay bar, Shears' penchant for performing was apparent. By this time, Babydaddy (real name Scot Hoffman) was at university in the city and the pair hooked up. They had plans to organise a club night where every month they'd perform a new song. The night never came about, but they did perform at other clubs on other nights, with Shears sometimes dressed as an abortion. This is when Scissor Sisters were born, emerging from Manhattan's electroclash scene. Electroclash was a new strain of dance music that took in the androgynous, debauched electro pop excess of the early 80s and married it to the musical advances of the techno age - it's a fair classification of Scissor Sisters' early work on bijou New York label A Touch Of Class. One of the seminal electroclash records (along with Fischerspooner's Emerge, Tiga's Sunglasses At Night and Miss Kittin's Frank Sinatra), Comfortably Numb was originally the b-side of Electrobix, a song about gym obsession and body dysmorphia among gay men. But the razzmatazz surrounding electroclash always outstripped the talent involved. Judiciously, Scissor Sisters extricated themselves from the scene, which soon withered. Their scorn for fashionability and their desire to appeal to a mainstream audience saved them from the fate suffered by the likes of Fischerspooner who, through little fault of their own, were crushed under the weight of hype. In truth, Scissor Sisters were bigger than the scene from whence they came.
One of those other nights at which Shears and Babydaddy pitched up was organised by one Ana Matronic. The theme was "origami orgy", and the song they performed had "a bit of a weird Asian sound to it that we described as Sisters Of Mercy meets Cher", says Babydaddy. "It was called Bicycle Of The Devil, a wretched, hilarious, bizarre, gothy techno-y nightmare."
Matronic (née Ana Lynch) "comes from a long line of wild women". Her grandmother was a flapper in the 20s - "she won a best legs competition at her university" - and her mother moved to San Francisco in the 60s, when it was the hippy destination. When she was young, Matronic always identified with the wicked queen characters in Disney films ("the ones that turned into dragons") and wrote songs about outsider girls with weird haircuts. Suddenly, you can see the little girl the woman used to be. "I was raised without boundaries," Matronic says. "I was told I could achieve whatever I wanted with my life, and I was always blessed with an overabundance of love and support. The difficulties I've been through mean I'm pretty good with the hard stuff. I wouldn't be the person I am without the hardships I endured."
First among Matronic's hardships - and decisive in her development into the fuck-you live-and-let-live gal that she is - was her parents' divorce when she was very young. Then, when she was six, her father came out. He died of Aids when she was 15. "My grandmother, she of the best legs, died exactly a month before my father, and I was really close to her as well. That really was the worst year of my life. I was sad more than anything that I didn't really know my father as a person. That was the hardest thing."
Matronic's father was the first person to have taken her to New York City - "Getting off that plane when I was 13 and seeing Manhattan, I knew I was going to live there one day." She also inherited his love of music. Her mother is a painter of religious icons and, from her, Matronic got her artistic bent. "My mother is amazing."
Leaving Portland, Oregon, for San Francisco, where her family used to live, Matronic hung out on the gay scene. She says it might have been a subconscious attempt to form a posthumous closeness to her father. She performed at Tranny Shack ("I took my mother on 'plastic surgery disaster' night, so she's seen it all") and got into "that instant gratification" that comes with performance. She moved to New York and worked on a dance music project involving mathematical principles, "because music is very scientific". The Golden Mean forms part of the technicolour tattoo on her arm.
When Shears and Babydaddy asked Matronic to join their sisterhood, she didn't take much persuading. Two weeks after their first performance together - at electroclash club Luxx in Brooklyn - they were signed to A Touch Of Class.
While leonine lead vocalist Shears slinks on stage, throwing shapes as if in an improvisational dance class, Matronic is much more calculated in her performance, the legacy of her Tranny Shack years. The focused foil to Shears' spontaneity, she prefers playing smaller crowds: having conversations with the audience and reading them poetry. "I got my start in cramped clubs, so it feels like a return to form," she says. The polar opposite of the blank pop princesses who clog up the charts, Matronic is the kind of friend you'd want. She's the heart of the band, the ringmistress, the queen of proceedings. "I do have a dream of being the first woman ever to play the Emcee in Cabaret."
The trio continued to perform in scuzzy-cool, below 14th Street clubs, but there was a realisation that, to rise above their electroclash origins, they would have to recruit - specifically, a drummer and a rhythm guitarist. Auditions were held. Paddy Boom (Patrick Seacor) and Del Marquis (Derek Gruen) made the grade.
Boston-born Boom has been playing live since 1987. He's been in three bands: "The only steady in my whole life has been playing music." An earnest, honest chap, he loves the life he's living. "Keith Richards said that being in a band was like being a teenager for ever, and it's true. This last year has been a blast. I love travelling [he spent six months on a motorbike, driving from New York to Rio], so it's the ultimate fusion of my passions."
The dinky, sometimes strangely whiskered, axeman Marquis met Shears while the latter was go-go dancing, and had seen the three Sisters performing: "Babydaddy was doing choreography; he looked like a deer in headlights." A week after Marquis joined their ranks, they flew to Britain to begin touring and promotional duties. Marquis knew London already and was a habitué of the capital's more alternative gay clubs, Popstarz and the Ghetto. Growing up in New York, he'd been obsessed with Robert Smith, Johnny Marr and the Cult's Billy Duffy: "I was a box bedroom guitar player, striking poses in my basement." He describes joining the band as "stepping on to a moving train".
The train shows no sign of slowing, at least not for the next few months. Poached from A Touch Of Class by Polydor, their album was released in America at the end of July. In the US, they're at the stage they were here back in February. So it's appearances on cheesy radio breakfast shows such as New York's WPLJ ("the best mix of the 80s, 90s and today!") and support slots on bigger tours. The night before I met them for the first time, they supported the B-52's in front of an audience of Boston "soccer moms". They're the first to acknowledge their uneasy, prodigal status.
"We're a group of people who've always felt a bit estranged from America," says Babydaddy. "You don't move to New York if you feel accepted in America. I was a kid who grew up gay in a town where I never knew a single gay person; I didn't have sex until I was 19 years old. It's a conservative country, much more conservative than the UK. I do feel very American, that we've made a very American album and America is home to me, but, in a way, we're estranged."
Shears concedes that their "outrageousness" might work against them. "We have our subversive moments, but we're wholesome. We're worldly, but what we stand for is moral. We stand for bringing people together. I don't care what someone's political beliefs are. What we do, the music rises above that. My family is rightwing and Christian; I could still have fun with a Republican. What I hope is that someone like that can listen to our song Mary and feel something." Marquis, meanwhile, says that getting airplay on "mom and dad" radio heralds "a tiny revolution, a bit of subversiveness in middle America".
Tricia Romano, columnist on the Village Voice, who has long followed Scissor Sisters' career, says "they don't have a shot" at America. "When anyone is any good, I have no hope they will break through. Thanks to the morons in the middle of the country, the music scene stinks. With the presidential election, even now the country is evenly split. Do you expect these people to make sensible decisions about music? If Scissor Sisters did succeed, they'd be in bad company."
Still, Shears dreams of being "one of those big touring bands we saw when we were growing up". Babydaddy's world was rocked at 14 when he saw a spectacular Mötley Crüe concert. "Rock'n'roll grandiosity is not foreign to me: I saw Tommy Lee ride over the crowd on his drum set."
"We started in the US," says Shears, "but we couldn't really muster up enough interest here, so we went overseas. Now we're coming back here, having learnt a lot more and having developed. And you know what, we fit the American model of what a touring rock'n'roll band should be better than we did when we left."
So now they're touring, from Seattle to New York (where they played to 3,000 people), Atlanta to Cleveland (where they played to 30), before returning to the UK in October for a national tour and that gig at the Royal Albert Hall. Then, of course, there's the obligatory trip to Australia and Japan.
Inevitably, though, ricocheting across the Atlantic is taking its toll. They are tired and Shears is frustrated at playing such similar sets night after night. Yet even that is providing impetus for writing another record. They've got "a nice little nugget of songs", though the ever-cautious Babydaddy adds, "There's a lot of work to be done." Shears continues, "Come February [when they finish touring], we'll be 100% ready to have a life again, to get back into the studio again. Or else ..." he pauses, "... someone will quit," Babydaddy concludes, firmly.
On a New York rooftop, Scissor Sisters look a bit weary, waiting to have their picture taken. Babydaddy is applying sunscreen and explaining that the scar on his forehead, usually hidden by his trademark trilby, is a memento of when Marquis crashed the Scissor Sisters' van last winter. Matronic is relating the joys of $29 wigs and her love of pot and chocolate. A fidgety Shears is standing on sandbags as the asphalt is too hot for his bare feet. (Shears, as anyone who has seen the band live will know, has an ambivalent relationship with clothing.)
When the photographer is ready, the band's tiredness evaporates. They are suddenly "on", all pouts and posturing. Even though they're just people mostly standing still, you can't help but stare. It is a reminder of the difference between people like them and the rest of us. They are pop stars. Bright young things under the sun
· Mary is released on October 11.
An hour earlier, and the band are relaxing in the green room. In the corridor, there is a commotion. A group of people - mostly women and wholly beautiful - approaches. This is not simply a group, though: this is an entourage. There is Someone here.
The Someone is Bono. With a space in his schedule between glad-handing presidents and raising awareness of pressing global issues, he has popped in to watch the gig and say hello. Not just hello, of course: he also says Scissor Sisters are the best pop band in the world. They take this in their unusually-trousered stride. It's what happens now in Scissor Sister world. In the year since their cover of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb was first released in the UK, the lives of Jake Shears, Ana Matronic, Babydaddy, Del Marquis and Paddy Boom have undergone a remarkable transformation. Their rise, from singing along to CDs in shabby-chic New York clubs to, next month, playing a sellout gig at the Royal Albert Hall, is staggeringly steep. And maybe because Shears and Babydaddy are horror film fans, it reminds you of that bit in The Silence Of The Lambs when Hannibal Lecter charts the ascent of Agent Starling, "Getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the way to the FBI."
Advertiser links
Allegro Music - Jazz Savings
Hard-to-find European jazz labels and recordings. Audiophile...allegro-music.com
300-Page Jazz Piano Course and Cd - $69
Learn to play absolutely any song on the piano in virtually...hearandplay.com
Sue Tucker - Jazz Vocalist
Current bio, music, CD and gig info.suetucker.com
At home in the US, they are relatively unknown beyond New York, but here Scissor Sisters are ubiquitous, you hear their record constantly in high street fashion stores. This is nothing new: there's a history of more alternative US bands making their name in the UK first - Blondie, for example. British audiences seem more willing to embrace the different and the distinctive. It helps that our music isn't as rigidly compartmentalised as America's where the dominant genres of rap, rock and country are very fixed. There's also a more cynical theory: record labels like to use the UK as a test market for new indie bands because it's cheaper here. The payoff is that British buzz is worth more than US word of mouth.
And there has been a buzz. Scissor Sisters are good: amid manufactured pop, misanthropic rap and dull rock, they stand out as honest, different and, say it quietly, authentic. "The radio is full of liars, blatantly dishonest people who don't care about what they're doing," says Babydaddy. "They see celebrity as an end in itself. We care about what we're doing. Our goals aren't contrived. We put out something that makes sense to people. But the big trouble with getting dressed up like we do is that a lot of people think we're some kitschy throwback to the 70s, and they ignore the music. I would hope that people would listen and realise we're not that at all."
Bizarrely, the band has been compared to the Village People. This is partly due to rock nerds' outrage at the Comfortably Numb cover, as well as homophobia in the music press, where there's a suspicion of bands not consisting of angst-ridden, greasy-haired, guitar-wielding indie kids. Especially one without a definite article in its name (as opposed to, say, The Thrills, The Von Bondies, The Strokes and The White Stripes). But the absence of a "the" makes a point, one concerning inclusivity. As Shears says of their gigs, "There's no hierarchy. The only reason the stage is five feet off the ground is so that everyone can see us. We're all there together to have a good time. It's all one room." Matronic succinctly tells an audience in Brighton, "We are Scissor Sisters and so are you."
It's the antithesis of the macho posturing of cock rock, and it works. They have sold just shy of one million albums and made the summer festivals their own, attracting the largest crowd at V and wowing Glastonbury twice. They appeal to a young, urban, stylish crowd and a more MOR set, blending disco glitter with dance music exuberance, the energy of punk with classic songwriting. Older musicians are keen to court them - it's a demonstration that their fingers are still on the pulse. Before Bono's blessing, they were anointed by Elton John, who was savvy enough to invite them to support him on tour. Scissor Sisters' Take Your Mama Out has been compared to Elton's funky 70s oeuvre. Kylie has also lured them into the studio. (By now, you may have spotted a queer sensibility and, yes, Shears, Babydaddy and Marquis are gay, while Matronic has described herself as a drag queen trapped in a woman's body. In fact, Boom, the drummer, is the only straight man.)
The songwriting partnership of Shears and Babydaddy is the fulcrum of Scissor Sisters. They're not coupley or fraternal, but they share an intimacy. Like Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lennon and McCartney, their partnership produces an alchemy. Going into the studio is, says Shears, "food for the soul". Babydaddy says it's Shears who writes most of the lyrics. "Sometimes we start with a musical idea of mine, or a lyrical or melodical idea of his - it just depends." Shears has an affinity to pop that he's passed on to Babydaddy. "It's something that comes really naturally to him - wanting to have the big exploding chorus." Shears - who is a tornado of energy, one of those people for whom the world doesn't spin fast enough - agrees that the magic songs just come: "It happens in just one moment. A song like Laura just came out - I just sang it. It's instinct or something; I don't necessarily think you're in control, and the songs I really love are the ones I don't even feel like I've written." Shears says he hates getting all new age, but making music is "a spiritual thing", euphoric.
Babydaddy is responsible for the lush sound, a feat all the more impressive when you know that the record was created in his tiny home studio in Brooklyn. In public at least, he is diffident about the achievement. "I haven't listened to the album too much since we finished it, and when I do hear it I wonder how it sounds to other people. To me, it's a very primitively made album, a polished turd. We turned sounds that were imperfectly recorded on cheap equipment into something unique. I want to keep doing it that way - I have a fear of coming into money for production. I think money ruins artists. I am a huge fan of Tim Burton, but the second he got big budgets, he ceased being interesting to me. There's something about the struggle that gives art its own life."
As is often the way with ubiquitous things, Scissor Sisters' music may now be regarded as déclassé in certain circles, but if you only listen, it's brilliant, bumptious - full of razor-sharp hooks, sublime lyrics and soaring choruses.
Babydaddy and Shears met when Shears was 18, through a mutual friend who took him to visit Babydaddy in Lexington, Kentucky, his home town. "He saw my mom's immaculately clean kitchen and got a bit frightened - as people usually do," says Babydaddy. They bonded over horror films and video games, and, months later, Babydaddy visited Shears at home in Seattle. "He showed me Valley Of The Dolls, which freaked me out. And he had a full-time hooker staying with him at the time."
Nothing out of the way there. Shears, born Jason Sellards, had an unusual childhood. He had his first gay relationship at 13 and came out to his parents in Las Vegas (as good a place as any, I imagine) two years later. He lived away from home for a time and had a terrible time at state school - he wore make-up and dresses, and became a target for the hatred of his mostly Mormon classmates. "I don't know what I was thinking," he says of his early exit from the closet. "I probably wouldn't recommend it to every gay 15-year-old, but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
Stronger then, Shears transferred to a private school ("Somewhere where I could be who I was and not be scared"), where his creativity flourished. He was "heavily into books", and filled stacks of jotters and notebooks with poetry and prose. Leaving school, he ventured to LA and dabbled in filmmaking, but hated it. New York beckoned. "I knew if I hated LA, I'd love New York, and I did, but it was really challenging for a long time. I was living in a really scary place [upstairs from a crack den]. I was on the pay phone on the corner telling my mom everything was all right when I was terrified. But in New York, you can't just throw your hands up and say, 'Things aren't going well, I'm leaving.' Well, you can, but that's why you're not cut out for New York. You have to stick with it."
And stick with it he did. Go-go dancing in an East Village gay bar, Shears' penchant for performing was apparent. By this time, Babydaddy (real name Scot Hoffman) was at university in the city and the pair hooked up. They had plans to organise a club night where every month they'd perform a new song. The night never came about, but they did perform at other clubs on other nights, with Shears sometimes dressed as an abortion. This is when Scissor Sisters were born, emerging from Manhattan's electroclash scene. Electroclash was a new strain of dance music that took in the androgynous, debauched electro pop excess of the early 80s and married it to the musical advances of the techno age - it's a fair classification of Scissor Sisters' early work on bijou New York label A Touch Of Class. One of the seminal electroclash records (along with Fischerspooner's Emerge, Tiga's Sunglasses At Night and Miss Kittin's Frank Sinatra), Comfortably Numb was originally the b-side of Electrobix, a song about gym obsession and body dysmorphia among gay men. But the razzmatazz surrounding electroclash always outstripped the talent involved. Judiciously, Scissor Sisters extricated themselves from the scene, which soon withered. Their scorn for fashionability and their desire to appeal to a mainstream audience saved them from the fate suffered by the likes of Fischerspooner who, through little fault of their own, were crushed under the weight of hype. In truth, Scissor Sisters were bigger than the scene from whence they came.
One of those other nights at which Shears and Babydaddy pitched up was organised by one Ana Matronic. The theme was "origami orgy", and the song they performed had "a bit of a weird Asian sound to it that we described as Sisters Of Mercy meets Cher", says Babydaddy. "It was called Bicycle Of The Devil, a wretched, hilarious, bizarre, gothy techno-y nightmare."
Matronic (née Ana Lynch) "comes from a long line of wild women". Her grandmother was a flapper in the 20s - "she won a best legs competition at her university" - and her mother moved to San Francisco in the 60s, when it was the hippy destination. When she was young, Matronic always identified with the wicked queen characters in Disney films ("the ones that turned into dragons") and wrote songs about outsider girls with weird haircuts. Suddenly, you can see the little girl the woman used to be. "I was raised without boundaries," Matronic says. "I was told I could achieve whatever I wanted with my life, and I was always blessed with an overabundance of love and support. The difficulties I've been through mean I'm pretty good with the hard stuff. I wouldn't be the person I am without the hardships I endured."
First among Matronic's hardships - and decisive in her development into the fuck-you live-and-let-live gal that she is - was her parents' divorce when she was very young. Then, when she was six, her father came out. He died of Aids when she was 15. "My grandmother, she of the best legs, died exactly a month before my father, and I was really close to her as well. That really was the worst year of my life. I was sad more than anything that I didn't really know my father as a person. That was the hardest thing."
Matronic's father was the first person to have taken her to New York City - "Getting off that plane when I was 13 and seeing Manhattan, I knew I was going to live there one day." She also inherited his love of music. Her mother is a painter of religious icons and, from her, Matronic got her artistic bent. "My mother is amazing."
Leaving Portland, Oregon, for San Francisco, where her family used to live, Matronic hung out on the gay scene. She says it might have been a subconscious attempt to form a posthumous closeness to her father. She performed at Tranny Shack ("I took my mother on 'plastic surgery disaster' night, so she's seen it all") and got into "that instant gratification" that comes with performance. She moved to New York and worked on a dance music project involving mathematical principles, "because music is very scientific". The Golden Mean forms part of the technicolour tattoo on her arm.
When Shears and Babydaddy asked Matronic to join their sisterhood, she didn't take much persuading. Two weeks after their first performance together - at electroclash club Luxx in Brooklyn - they were signed to A Touch Of Class.
While leonine lead vocalist Shears slinks on stage, throwing shapes as if in an improvisational dance class, Matronic is much more calculated in her performance, the legacy of her Tranny Shack years. The focused foil to Shears' spontaneity, she prefers playing smaller crowds: having conversations with the audience and reading them poetry. "I got my start in cramped clubs, so it feels like a return to form," she says. The polar opposite of the blank pop princesses who clog up the charts, Matronic is the kind of friend you'd want. She's the heart of the band, the ringmistress, the queen of proceedings. "I do have a dream of being the first woman ever to play the Emcee in Cabaret."
The trio continued to perform in scuzzy-cool, below 14th Street clubs, but there was a realisation that, to rise above their electroclash origins, they would have to recruit - specifically, a drummer and a rhythm guitarist. Auditions were held. Paddy Boom (Patrick Seacor) and Del Marquis (Derek Gruen) made the grade.
Boston-born Boom has been playing live since 1987. He's been in three bands: "The only steady in my whole life has been playing music." An earnest, honest chap, he loves the life he's living. "Keith Richards said that being in a band was like being a teenager for ever, and it's true. This last year has been a blast. I love travelling [he spent six months on a motorbike, driving from New York to Rio], so it's the ultimate fusion of my passions."
The dinky, sometimes strangely whiskered, axeman Marquis met Shears while the latter was go-go dancing, and had seen the three Sisters performing: "Babydaddy was doing choreography; he looked like a deer in headlights." A week after Marquis joined their ranks, they flew to Britain to begin touring and promotional duties. Marquis knew London already and was a habitué of the capital's more alternative gay clubs, Popstarz and the Ghetto. Growing up in New York, he'd been obsessed with Robert Smith, Johnny Marr and the Cult's Billy Duffy: "I was a box bedroom guitar player, striking poses in my basement." He describes joining the band as "stepping on to a moving train".
The train shows no sign of slowing, at least not for the next few months. Poached from A Touch Of Class by Polydor, their album was released in America at the end of July. In the US, they're at the stage they were here back in February. So it's appearances on cheesy radio breakfast shows such as New York's WPLJ ("the best mix of the 80s, 90s and today!") and support slots on bigger tours. The night before I met them for the first time, they supported the B-52's in front of an audience of Boston "soccer moms". They're the first to acknowledge their uneasy, prodigal status.
"We're a group of people who've always felt a bit estranged from America," says Babydaddy. "You don't move to New York if you feel accepted in America. I was a kid who grew up gay in a town where I never knew a single gay person; I didn't have sex until I was 19 years old. It's a conservative country, much more conservative than the UK. I do feel very American, that we've made a very American album and America is home to me, but, in a way, we're estranged."
Shears concedes that their "outrageousness" might work against them. "We have our subversive moments, but we're wholesome. We're worldly, but what we stand for is moral. We stand for bringing people together. I don't care what someone's political beliefs are. What we do, the music rises above that. My family is rightwing and Christian; I could still have fun with a Republican. What I hope is that someone like that can listen to our song Mary and feel something." Marquis, meanwhile, says that getting airplay on "mom and dad" radio heralds "a tiny revolution, a bit of subversiveness in middle America".
Tricia Romano, columnist on the Village Voice, who has long followed Scissor Sisters' career, says "they don't have a shot" at America. "When anyone is any good, I have no hope they will break through. Thanks to the morons in the middle of the country, the music scene stinks. With the presidential election, even now the country is evenly split. Do you expect these people to make sensible decisions about music? If Scissor Sisters did succeed, they'd be in bad company."
Still, Shears dreams of being "one of those big touring bands we saw when we were growing up". Babydaddy's world was rocked at 14 when he saw a spectacular Mötley Crüe concert. "Rock'n'roll grandiosity is not foreign to me: I saw Tommy Lee ride over the crowd on his drum set."
"We started in the US," says Shears, "but we couldn't really muster up enough interest here, so we went overseas. Now we're coming back here, having learnt a lot more and having developed. And you know what, we fit the American model of what a touring rock'n'roll band should be better than we did when we left."
So now they're touring, from Seattle to New York (where they played to 3,000 people), Atlanta to Cleveland (where they played to 30), before returning to the UK in October for a national tour and that gig at the Royal Albert Hall. Then, of course, there's the obligatory trip to Australia and Japan.
Inevitably, though, ricocheting across the Atlantic is taking its toll. They are tired and Shears is frustrated at playing such similar sets night after night. Yet even that is providing impetus for writing another record. They've got "a nice little nugget of songs", though the ever-cautious Babydaddy adds, "There's a lot of work to be done." Shears continues, "Come February [when they finish touring], we'll be 100% ready to have a life again, to get back into the studio again. Or else ..." he pauses, "... someone will quit," Babydaddy concludes, firmly.
On a New York rooftop, Scissor Sisters look a bit weary, waiting to have their picture taken. Babydaddy is applying sunscreen and explaining that the scar on his forehead, usually hidden by his trademark trilby, is a memento of when Marquis crashed the Scissor Sisters' van last winter. Matronic is relating the joys of $29 wigs and her love of pot and chocolate. A fidgety Shears is standing on sandbags as the asphalt is too hot for his bare feet. (Shears, as anyone who has seen the band live will know, has an ambivalent relationship with clothing.)
When the photographer is ready, the band's tiredness evaporates. They are suddenly "on", all pouts and posturing. Even though they're just people mostly standing still, you can't help but stare. It is a reminder of the difference between people like them and the rest of us. They are pop stars. Bright young things under the sun
· Mary is released on October 11.
