What better antidote to the dusty horror of a family Christmas than the company of New York’s finest boogie-funk innovators?Turning a space resembling an air hangar in Ballsbridge into a glitzy underworld of Manhattan nightlife may be no mean feat, yet the Scissor Sisters accomplish it in one fell swoop. They’re not so much a band as they are the ringleaders of a particularly spangled, joyful spectacle.
Rumours abound that one of the Sisters’ many new friends might make an appearance tonight. Okay, so Kylie didn’t show up as expected, but if you closed your eyes, you could pretend that Prince, Elton John, Donna Summer and the Bee Gees had descended upon the stage.
Serving up a steamy ragout of knowing pop, 80s dance and high-octane disco, Scissor Sisters are presumably the type of band that Ministry Of Sound shelled out big bucks for when they signed fellow New York elecro-overlords Fischerspooner. Effectively, the Sisters mix their pulsating electro with a playful, accessible twist – and lots of marabou. Correspondingly, tonight’s crowd is a mosaic of diverse fans – flapper girls shimmy with baggy indie heads, while die-hard pop fans sidle up to the mamas they’ve taken out.
By turns funky and loungey, tonight the Scissor Sisters are…well, partying like it’s 1979. They delight fans with a nicely Elton-ified version of Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take Me Out’, while with ‘Comfortably Numb’, they’ve even managed to turn Pink Floyd’s paean to drug rehab into cause for pill-popping frivolity.