Snip to be square

"You’re from Ireland?” exclaims Babydaddy excitedly. “Oh my God, are you kidding? I love Ireland.”
Enough with the frivolities. Let’s take the fun out of Scissor Sisters for a moment, shall we? In Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking 1964 essay, Notes On Camp, she suggests that, “Camp (is) a comic vision of the world… not bitter or polemical comedy… If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of detachment.” In that spirit, The Great John Waters once remarked that Myra Hindley would not have served so much prison time, “If only she’d had her roots done that day”. Cruel, bitchy and on the money, now that’s True Camp.
But what then should we make of the Scissor Sisters? Can anything so wildly popular, so amenable, be considered camp? Is camp that knows itself to be camp really camp at all? To such queries we say, well, if Scissor Sisters aren’t as camp as a row of pink tents then we don’t know what’s what.
Named for a favourite lesbian position (condensed down from Lesbian and the Fibrillating Scissor Sisters), there is nothing in their delightfully eccentric art-electronica origins to suggest a master plan for world chart domination. This is, after all, the band who penned ‘Hairbaby’, an ode to partially formed foetuses.
“The early days were horrifying”, laughs Babydaddy. “If you watch our DVD you will see the first show Jake (Shears) and I did. Jake is in a kimono and a leather thong because the theme was Origami Orgy night featuring the bicycle of the devil. I was up there on the laptop in swimming goggles. Oh God. But Jake is from Seattle and I consider his surroundings similar to mine. When we were bonding, electronica was big in America, not burlesque shows. There were some drag shows but we discovered the Warp catalogue and all this strange electronic music. I think that shaped us as much as moving to New York. We realized, ‘Oh, here is a stage and people are doing something different and maybe we should combine all these things.’”
Weirdly, the embryonic Scissor Sisters were formed in Kentucky during 2000 when Jake Shears (aka Jason Sellards) met co-songwriter Babydaddy (aka Scott Hoffman) at college. They soon moved to New York hooking up with Del Marquis (born Derek Gruen) at the strip club where Jake worked and Ana Matronix (born Ana Lynch) at a Halloween party. She was dressed as a dropout from Warhol’s Factory. Jake came as a backstreet alley abortion. It was a meeting of minds.
“I wasn’t at that first historic meeting,” recalls Babydaddy. “I was dressed as Guy At Home Doing Work On His Computer that night.”
We hardly need to mention their subsequent fairytale rise to the top. The newly formed quartet signed to independent label A Touch Of Class and recorded the single ‘Electrobix’ backed by a glammed up cover of ‘Comfortably Numb’. When the B-side was championed by underground DJs in the UK, the British label Polydor muscled in on the act and by the close of 2004, the band had scored five top 20 singles and the best selling UK album of that year.
Since then, Scissor Sisters have regarded the Ireland and the UK as their ‘spiritual home’ and we’re all the better for it. Looking over the dreary list of artists to have sold over 2 million albums since the turn of the century – an MOR roll call including Keane, James Blunt, Robbie Williams, Dido, Coldplay and Norah Jones – it’s clear that there’s a gap in the market for a kitsch New York burlesque act. Their vast popularity only serves to remind us that the chin-strokers who sat around listening to Emerson, Lake and Palmer did not win the rock wars. The people have spoken and they have decided to buy records inspired by the disco tat one might buy on a CD rack in a supermarket. They want Leo Sayer and The Nolan Sisters and ABBA and they want them now.
How odd that an act which can attract girls and their grandmothers, hipsters and squares, gays and straights on this side of the world is still sadly neglected in their homeland.
“It’s such a strange thing,” says Babydaddy. “Partly, it’s to do with how labelled American music is. But I don’t know what it is that Americans are not willing to go for. I don’t think they like fun music, even if that fun music has a dark side. We don’t really know what it is, except that you guys like to party and we like to put on a party. We’re just like heat seeking missiles. We go where we are appreciated.”
Is it, I wonder, just another example of gay culture being plundered by the mainstream? The history of the fashion industry is littered with similarly sorry stories.
“You know what?” asks Babydaddy. “We’ve always wanted a broad audience even though we never imagined it would happen to this extent. In our first bio that we wrote ourselves, we wrote that you could bring your mom to our shows. Scissor Sisters are for everybody. We still hold to that. We are not making music for one specific target audience. We’re a postive experience, one you don’t need to research to get excited about. The NMEs of the world have a problem with that, but we sure don’t.”
Since busting out in the UK, Scissor Sisters have worked with Elton John, written ‘I Believe In You’ for Kylie, performed at Live 8 and earned unlikely tributes from Dave Gilmour, Thom Yorke and Roger Daltrey. Unsurprisingly, they felt the pressure was on for their sophomore offering Ta-Dah. Named for Sally Bowles’ favourite expression, the album, the lack of exclamation point heralds a new world weariness. Fear not, though. Like all good sequels from the New Testament to Henry IV Part II, Ta-Dah translates jadedness into a positive force. The bouncy first hit single ‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancing’, magically transforms post-tour exhaustion into a compelling floor-filler.
“A lot of the new material is dark,” explains Babydaddy. “It’s not dark in the way that a lot of American music is dark and crass and misogynist. But I love layering happy sounds with honest, dark moments. I am perfectly content not having fun. When we making our first album, it did get tough and but it was mixed with the excitement of doing it for the first time. And you know what? We’ve played for Elton John, one of our heroes, and there are always new exciting things for us to do.”
He laughs.
“To be honest though, we were glad to be back in the studio because we couldn’t abuse our bodies as much as we do on tour.”