“It was such an intense moment,” he tells Hot Press. “There was a mom and a dad and the son. 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.”

He also admits he’s a big fan of the iPad. “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.”

There’s been a kerfuffle over the sleeve to the new album, a photograph of a clenched pair of buttocks, widely interpreted as a lewd wink at Springsteen’s Born In The USA. Shears admits, “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.”

But the shot –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.”

Read the full interview with the Scissor Sisters in Hot Press, out on Thursday July 15.