Never Mind The Buttocks

Jake Shears’ eyes are on stalks. “Wow... is that what I think it is?” says the Scissor Sisters’ singer, gazing dreamily at your correspondent’s lap. “It’s... it’s amazing.”

Well, yes – it is rather impressive isn’t it?
“I’ll say. I’ve got one too. I can’t stop messing around with it. The rest of the band will tell you, it’s all I ever talk about.”
So we’re agreed then: the Apple iPad is about the whizziest, most superlative piece of kit you can get for €500.
“I think it’s going to save the art of the album cover,” says Shears. “Because the screen is so large, you can get full-sized album sleeves again. It’s bringing us back to the days of vinyl.”
The subject of album artwork has been on Shears’ mind a great deal lately. There was a minor kerfuffle over the sleeve to Scissor Sisters’ just released third album, Night Work: a black and white photograph of a clenched pair of buttocks, widely interpreted as a lewd wink at Springsteen’s Born In The USA.
“There are a lot of similarities to Born In The USA and also Sticky Fingers by The Rolling Stones. That’s not why we chose the cover. But we were aware of it. While it might sound weird, I see parallels between us and Springsteen. Definitely, he is someone who writes about his life and times in a straightforward way.”
Ultimately, though, the shot – a detail from a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe – was picked for strictly aesthetic reasons.
“What I love about that photograph,” says Shears, “is that your eyes are automatically drawn towards it. There’s a playfulness and a sexiness that really represents the album. It’s a picture of a ballet dancer. Part of me thinks about how hard a dancer has to work to have an ass like that. I relate to that. I feel we are a very dedicated band. We believe 100 per cent in what we do.”
That’s probably just as well. Four years since second LP Ta-Dah topped the charts, the New York disco bunnies – essentially a five-person Gay Pride march with quality tunes – return from something of a wilderness period. Fearing they were in danger of slipping into feather-boa-fluttering self-parody, Shears and co-songwriter Ana Matronic had decided to radically re-tool their sound. The problem was that, initially at least, they were bereft of ideas. With the very future of the group in doubt, Shears decided extreme measures were required – and promptly hot-footed it to Berlin, leaving most of his acquaintances in New York (including his boyfriend) wondering where the hell he was.
“I went really quickly. I decided I was going... couple of days later, bam, I was gone. There were plenty of people I didn’t tell. As a result, I think some people thought I was having some sort of meltdown. That I had lost the plot and abandoned New York.”
In a sense he had. Swapping the gentrified staidness of his Tribeca neighbourhood, he threw himself into Berlin’s club scene, desperate for something, anything, to trigger his creative impulses.
“Definitely I needed some realness,” he says. “It was the perfect place for me. I had no agenda. There was no schedule. Nobody was looking over my shoulder. It was a great moment to be solitary.”
Out of Shears' lost summer of hedonism came Night Work, perhaps the most multi-faceted album Scissor Sisters have yet recorded. A full-on party LP, it is, nonetheless, imbued with an air of 3am melancholy. Relentlessly upbeat and timelessly sad in the same heartbeat, the record is a paean of sorts to the lost generation of gay men struck down by AIDS in the mid ‘80s.
“It’s a nod to all the people from that time. Those who lived through it and those that died,” says Shears. “I was a kid then. One of my first memories was sitting in my mom and dad’s car, asking who Liberace was. And hearing he was a man who had AIDS and that his lover had died. That was the first time I had ever heard about a gay person. For a little kid, equating death with sexuality – it’s kind of a heavy thing.”
Though Scissor Sisters aren’t the only musicians to address this period in gay culture – the Pet Shop Boys did so in ‘Being Boring’ – the band believe that it's only now that sufficient time has passed for the community to truly take stock of what it went through.
“Queer culture is starting to recognise its history,” says guitarist Del Marquis, sitting beside Shears in the bowels of Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. “What’s come before is very important. Musically, it’s good to look back into the vault and discover people who have influenced you. I think it’s the same for gay people. There are things we need to reflect on.”
In the years they’ve been away, the pop scene has changed drastically. No longer a quirky novelty, Scissor Sisters’ gay disco sound has gone fully mainstream, thanks not least to Lady Gaga. When they see her mugging her way through ‘Poker Face’, do Shears and company feel a stab of resentment? She has, after all, appropriated their best ideas.
Marquis clears his throat: “I think at the time we came out, we set an example apart from a lot of the indie guitar bands of the time, people such as The Strokes. There was all this uniformity of style. We were a weird beacon in the middle of all that. You could say that what we did has been picked up and carried on by someone like Lady Gaga, whether she’s referencing coming to our shows, which she did, or talking about being inspired by David Bowie. At the same time, we have definitely taken a step back and focused on the areas we can do better. The song-writing and the performance – we’re removing the peacock vibe a little bit. We have no interest in impersonating what we looked and sounded like three years ago. We’ve moved on.”
Night Work’s closing track, ‘Invisible Light’, features a spoken-word cameo from Lord Of The Rings actor Ian McKellen. A celebrity gay rights activist before such a thing really existed, McKellen has long been a hero of Shears’. Meeting him for the first time a few years was, he recalls, both thrilling and terrifying.
“He is one of the best actors alive. He has a voice that could read a shopping list. And, to give him his due, he’s been out for a long, long time. I think he’s a very handsome man. I hope when I’m his age I look that good. He’s definitely got sex appeal.”
Not that McKellen was exactly dapper when Scissor Sisters called to see him in London to record his vocals. Recalls Shears: “He was doing Waiting For Godot and he had a really long beard. When we pulled up at the theatre he was outside smoking a cigarette and we didn’t recognise him. He looked like a street person. They took the show to Australia and apparently he was sitting outside and someone walked up and gave him five dollars.”
Before the rest of the world fell for Scissor Sisters, they were huge in Ireland and are on record that many of their most memorable shows were here. However, there has been the occasional uncomfortable moment too. Shears, far less camp in person than his stage persona would have you believe, turns visibly antsy when relating a run-in with a homophobic father backstage at Landsdowne Road in 2004.
“It was such an intense moment,” he says. “There was a mom and a dad and the song. The kid wanted a picture with me. I was making small talk. And, as an aside, I said something about my boyfriend. Suddenly the dad said, ‘not in front of the boy’. I was so incensed. I just dug into them. I told the kid, ‘Your dad has no idea what he is talking about; never listen to him in that regard'. It’s like, you just came and saw our show. We’re gay. There’s nothing wrong with that. It was really, really intense.”

Night Work is out now