Though it was afternoon, the shades in the studio were pulled tight, which seemed appropriate for a Scissor Sisters rehearsal. Nighttime suits this band, which got its start playing flamboyant dance-pop at late-late gigs on the Lower East Side and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, always with the idea that the best stuff happens in the wee hours, in the dark, when anything, or anyone, is possible.
And even in rehearsal, Jake Shears, the group’s frontman and chief songwriter, was all slithery animation, two-stepping and hip-shaking his way through the songs from Night Work, the group’s third album. “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you and your mincing dance moves,” his foil and frontwoman, Ana Matronic, said, before joining in to go-go. Cue the disco beat: “You can find your life in the nightlife,” sang the group, which includes the multi-instrumentalist Babydaddy, the bassist Del Marquis and the drummer Randy Real.
Night Work, which goes on release tomorrow, is a return to Scissor Sisters’ dingier clubland roots, before the band became a chart topper in Europe and a cult favorite in the US. The album is driven by dance-floor bass rhythms, a thematic through line and what Shears — born Jason Sellards — called “more brooding and upright and sinister and creepy” songs. It’s still fun, but it’s dirtier fun.
“It’s a nighttime album,” said Babydaddy, ne Scott Hoffman, in a green room after the rehearsal. “We wanted to return to that feeling, what we used to do, which was perform at 2am at Luxx,” a defunct club in Williamsburg that was part of the (equally defunct) electroclash scene. It was from there that the Sisters developed their aesthetic and identity as gay-centric downtown New York performers. They’ve hardly compromised since.
For what began as a niche act, they’ve always had a broad sound. Now, nearly a decade into the band’s career, Downtown, its new label, is hoping that Night Work will be an opportunity for Scissor Sisters to establish themselves for an American audience that so far has viewed them more as a novelty than a stadium filler.
Their self-titled debut album, released by Universal in 2004, drew comparisons to the Bee Gees and Elton John and sold 320,000 copies domestically, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In Britain it was the top album of the year, selling 2.7 million copies and sweeping the Brit Awards. The follow-up, Ta-Dah, spent nearly a year on the charts there, and the Sisters were coveted headliners, known for their over-the-top shows. (They were doing notable nudity and costumes years before Gaga.)
But in the US, Ta-Dah sold only 181,000 copies. “Europe in general is much better for electronic music, it’s much better for flamboyant pop,” said Casey Spooner of Fischerspooner, a friend of Scissor Sisters who emerged from the same scene.
In a telephone interview Elton John, a friend and collaborator, said, “I do believe the gay thing got in the way.”
If Ta-Dah proved creatively unfocused — “It was a brittle record,” Shears said, and his band mates called it “rushed,” “shambolic” and “Muppet-y” — Night Work represents a major shift. It is the first time the Sisters have collaborated with an outside producer, Stuart Price, a Londoner who worked on Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor. Relinquishing production duties, which in the past had fallen to Babydaddy and Shears, was a big deal.
“We always felt really safe” working as a unit, “and I just kept worrying, like, who is this outside person?” said Marquis, 32, born Derek Gruen.
“There’s a certain amount of pride that we had about producing our own records,” Babydaddy said. “The first one was made in my living room.”
But at this stage in their career, Shears said, “we want to upgrade everything.”
“Total evolution,” Babydaddy agreed, completing the thought. (They do that a lot for each other.)
“We’re much better at this,” Matronic added. “We’re better musicians.”
Offstage they have a sharp, familiar camaraderie, born of tour-bus raves — “Someone always brings the sketchiest porn,” Shears said fondly.
Still, creating Night Work was a trial. At home in New York, Shears wrote dozens of songs, but felt unfulfilled. On a whim he went to Berlin to recharge and spent last spring partying there. “I love all-nighters and going out and listening to DJs and staring into strobe lights,” he said, in an interview in his well-appointed TriBeCa loft, loaded with books and records and found art discovered by his boyfriend, an artist. “Club life has really been in my heart. It’s just who I am, and I think where I’d gone astray the last few years was losing that from my life.”
In Berlin he met Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, who suggested Price as a producer. Price, who with his own band had toured with the Sisters, suggested that the band abandon the material it had already written and start fresh.
On a first album an artist often has a lousy job, lives in a lousy building, he said, “you’re maybe in a relationship with someone that you don’t want to be in a relationship with, all these amazing ingredients for writing really good songs.” After the hits, “you’ve got a really nice apartment, you’ve got really great artwork, and you’ve probably had sex with more people than you know what to do with,” he said. “For the Scissor Sisters, at least three out of four of those have got to be true. These are the not the elements to make a great song.”
“What we wanted to do with the third album,” he continued, “was restore some balance to the situation, to not take ourselves too seriously. I think the balance to the Sisters is great songs with a carefree attitude, that make you feel like you’re having a great night out, possibly too drunk, marveling at the great records being played.” There are references to classic disco and classic rock, but also not-so-classic albums, from groups like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and ZZ Top. “We decided to dwell on that side of the taste buds,” Price said.
The result, John said, is reminiscent of 1970s and
1980s disco-pop, “fun all the
way through.”
“This is the album that really symbolizes what they sound like live,” he said.
And though to compete in the post-Gaga age, the Scissors are toning down their look — “Ana is not going to wear a live lobster on her head,” Shears said. There are still the boundary-pushing touches: references to straight “breeders” and crystal meth, and one song, Whole New Way, about anal sex. The pulsing closing track, Invisible Light, features some dark oration by Ian McKellen. “You can’t beat gay-super-club-Ian McKellen-goth,” Spooner said. “That’s like a new facet of homosexuality that we all need.”
For the album cover Shears selected a Robert Mapplethorpe photo of a man’s clenched buttocks, clad in a skintight leotard. (They belong to the ballet dancer Peter Reed, who died of complications from AIDS in 1994.)
“Nobody in my band wanted that album cover,” Shears said. “The label didn’t want that album cover. Management didn’t want that album cover.” It was too stark, too gay and too niche. “I don’t think they did themselves any favors,” John said.
Asked about it, Deutsch of Downtown Records laughed reflexively. “It’s a strong statement,” he said. “It’s provocative.” (For squeamish retailers, there is a version with a card covering the image.) Shears insisted on it, he said, because it symbolized the era the album referenced, and because it represented a certain debauchery in the face of despair — or disadvantage, or daylight — that he witnessed in Berlin and considered universal. In the end the Scissor Sisters embraced the photo, making it the tour poster.
“We don’t think small,” Marquis said.
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
Taiwan, once relegated to the backwaters of international news media and viewed as a subset topic of “greater China,” is now a hot topic. Words associated with Taiwan include “invasion,” “contingency” and, on the more cheerful side, “semiconductors” and “tourism.” It is worth noting that while Taiwanese companies play important roles in the semiconductor industry, there is no such thing as a “Taiwan semiconductor” or a “Taiwan chip.” If crucial suppliers are included, the supply chain is in the thousands and spans the globe. Both of the variants of the so-called “silicon shield” are pure fantasy. There are four primary drivers
RSS