Scissor Sisters interview: ‘Gay is not a genre of music'
The Scissor Sisters are recalling the first time they played Glastonbury Festival, back in 2004.
'I remember everything about the day so clearly,' says frontman Jake Shears. 'I was falling in love, on a second date, and we played the Pyramid stage in the daytime, which was great, and then the Dance Tent that night, which was one of my favourite gigs ever. It really felt, on that day, like something had switched for us.'
'Yep,' chimes in the multi-instrumentalist Babydaddy, 'there's a special kind of energy on that land.'
It's an energy that the band will be tapping back into this year. 21 years after their debut – and a dozen or so years after they 'hit pause' – the Sisters are back, celebrating the more-or-less 20 th anniversary of their titular debut album with a run of British shows culminating in an appearance at Worthy Farm in a coveted Saturday evening slot.
Their debut remains the 38 th best-selling album of all time (a record unlikely ever to be broken in the streaming era), spawning hits like Take Your Mama, Mary, and Filthy/Gorgeous. It showcased the band's catholic embrace of genres as diverse as dance-pop, glam, disco, electroclash and even yacht-rock, performed with primary-coloured brio and vivacious camp. In an era of normcore, they stood out like, in the words of Del Marquis, 'a weird shining gemstone'. But then, they've always been somewhat outré. After all, they spent their formative days as a raggedy performance art collective known as Dead Lesbian and the Fibrillating Scissor Sisters, regaling club kids in New York while dressed as a back-alley abortion (Shears) or the morning-after pill (Babydaddy).
Their radiance is dialled down just a little for today's Zoom call, with Del Marquis (aka Derek Gruen) appearing in front of a wall of guitars. (His preparations for the tour, he says, have included stocking up on custom straps and X-raying his joints to ensure he can put in the hours in heeled boots) and Babydaddy (aka Scott Hoffman) emphasising his boffin-ish bona fides in what looks like a miked-up studio setting. Both gently rib Jason 'Jake' Shears, who fidgets on a sofa in a London rehearsal room.
While they're adamant there were no Liam/Noel-style flame-outs or hatchets to bury, it's notable that Ana 'Matronic' Lynch is sitting this particular rodeo out. She's said her focus is on her Good Time Sallies series of history podcasts, supplanting any urge to dive back into the glitter and sequins. The remaining Sisters insist that they're on good terms, though perhaps residual tensions linger – Lynch, after all, made no secret of her displeasure at the timing of the original hiatus.
Meanwhile Shears, in his memoir Boys Keep Swinging, has admitted that he behaved, during the band's imperial phase, like an 'absolute monster'. ('A regular monster,' Babydaddy clarifies, with an arched eyebrow). People have also pointed out that Shears hasn't let his own podcast (Queer the Music, which celebrates LGBTQ anthems and those who created them) get in the way of the reunion.
The tour, says Babydaddy, is 'a chance to celebrate the wider, world-building aspect of Scissor Sisters. We kind of created a fantasia for people, and it'll be fun to revisit that.'
A key part of that 'fantasia' was, of course, its queer-friendliness. The band have never not been out, and drew like minds to them. These included Elton John, who, blown away by their debut, took them under his wing, booking them as support on a tour and co-writing a bunch of songs on their second album Ta-Dah (including I Don't Feel Like Dancin', a UK No.1 which spent almost a year in the charts). Their 'world-building' also paved the way for contemporary LGBTQ stars like Lil Nas X and Chappell Roan, though they gently pushed back against the label of 'gay band' back in the day.
'There was a time when the term 'gay artist' kind of implied that you made music for gay people only,' says Shears. 'We always wanted to be more broad church than that.'
Del Marquis: ''Gay' is not a genre of music. We're gay men, we let everybody know we are, we're not coming out with girlfriends any time soon, but now can we please get beyond that?'
'It was a funny paradox,' says Babydaddy. 'Journalists used to try to trap us into a 'gotcha' moment – 'Look how openly gay you are, yet you say you're not a gay band.' It wasn't a contradiction to say that we're open about who we are but we make music that hopefully transcends who we're dating.'
The UK 'got' Scissor Sisters' left-field charms first, hence its pole position for the reunion. It was some time before America capitulated – their network TV appearances, with Shears in, say, scarlet leather chaps and matching angel wings, would regularly cause fits of conniption in the heartland. Ironically, it was 2012's Let's Have A Kiki, one of the band's swishiest songs, inspired by drag-ball culture (with a video featuring a vogue-ing Shears in an orange codpiece) that eventually brought them massive success in their homeland. Yet when Sarah Jessica Parker did a version of the song on Glee, it proved, for Shears, something of an apotheosis: 'There was a sense in myself that, with this, we did what we set out to do, our work here is done.' The band went on hiatus shortly afterwards.
In the interim, they've been far from idle. Del Marquis reverted to his original vocation of furniture designer, as well as touring with a new band, Slow Knights. Babydaddy has been writing graphic novels (his Nostalgia series melds noir and cyberpunk) as well as songwriting and producing for the likes of Kylie and Ladyhawke; and Shears has become what he calls 'a theatre person,' starring in Kinky Boots on Broadway and playing the MC in Cabaret in the West End, as well as collaborating with perennial bestie Elton and playwright James Graham on the ill-fated Tammy Faye musical.
Today, some of their breezier offerings now seem like relics from a less turbulent epoch. But others have only gained in relevance. T-ts On The Radio, for instance, is a sharp indictment of the commodification of subcultures. 'Is there still room for an underground scene like the one we got our start in?' ponders Babydaddy. 'You can bet that something's happening under some rocks in New York that it's not even our place to turn over'.
Meanwhile, the band's other hits have been embraced by the TikTok generation. 'There's a deep cut called I Can't Decide, from Ta-Dah,' says Shears, 'that's got a whole new life in memes, I think, because the line 'I can't decide whether you should live or die' has been adopted by the gaming community, for obvious reasons.'
Perspective, says Shears, is a wonderful thing. 'It's so cool that we've all got our different accomplishments, and they can be fed back into what we're doing with the band,' he says. 'That's something I'm really excited about.'
An American tour with Kesha is set to follow the UK jaunt. Yet, in the era of Trump 2.0, Shears expresses equal parts trepidation and defiance about the prospect.
'Hard-won freedoms can be eroded, or even revoked,' he notes. 'So visibility is more important than ever, bringing your queer faggot power into a large space, and claiming it as your own.'
All of which begs the question: how long will the kiki last this time round?
'Let's see how the shows go,' cautions Babydaddy. 'Then we'll talk again.'
Shears: 'Maybe we can let it go to our heads a bit this time?'
'Well, you like some attention of course, but we also remember where we came from,' Babydaddy deadpans. 'It's an important part of who we are. From dive bars to Glastonbury and beyond – it's quite the odyssey.'
Scissor Sisters' UK tour starts at Nottingham Motorpoint Arena on May 16. They play Glastonbury on Saturday June 28
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