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The New Glam

They're the New York band deemed “too gay” for America , who are currently taking Europe by storm. Introducing the ‘Scissor Sisters'…

All of a sudden, pop music has gone decadent. Just when you thought that the charts were being swamped by oh-so-serious acts of the likes of Dido, Coldplay or Travis, earnestly insisting that ‘It's all about the music', along come a group like the Scissor Sisters and blow everything out of the water.

It's not that the New-York based five piece don't make great tunes – they do. In fact they're so in demand as music producers that artists are queuing up to have songs written by them. Diminutive pop princess Kylie is just one of the lucky recipients of the Scissors' song-writing talents – her recent single “I Believe In You” was in fact penned by the band. However, with an act as flamboyant as the Scissors, the music often takes second place to their larger-than life stage persona's and Studio 54 style decadence.

To look at the band, you can quickly appreciate the fact that they earned their stripes in the seedy world of New York cabaret. Their front-woman, Ana Matronic (not her real name, obviously), was previously a hostess of a decadent cabaret show in the Lower East Side, and before that had been learning similarly outrageous tricks in the San Francisco club scene. The group debuted at the club, and the seedy ambiance of cabaret seems never to have left their act. Performing live, the band take to the stage like an unruly gang of six-year olds with Attention Deficit Disorder who've raided the dressing-up box - something which has made their shows legendary.

It's the Europeans who have taken to the Scissor Sisters much faster than their native America . This month they scooped three “Brit Awards” in the UK (for best group, best album and best newcomers), a country where their self-titled debut LP was the biggest selling album of 2004. In America, by contrast, the group's refusal to make a secret of their sexuality is proving to be more of a problem – three out of the five band members are gay, and their on-stage show is more high-camp than one of Elton John's garden parties. The group have in fact spoken out about the large numbers of Stars who refuse to ‘come out' about their sexuality. "There have been loads of gay bands in the US ," singer Babydaddy (again, not his real name) recently told The Sun newspaper in Britain . "It's just that we're not closet cases like everyone else. If you want me to name names, I will. Robbie Williams is a gay man. Just look at him."

Controversial stuff indeed. Showbiz history might well be full of closet gay men performing for straight audiences, but the double standards of the industry mean that this is something that many people don't want to be reminded of. Especially if you want to make it in a country like America , where the issue of homosexuality (and gay marriage in particular) has literally divided the nation into two warring sides. Remember that this is a country where the most listened to radio talk-show is hosted by a man who likes to claim that openly gay students ‘encourage descent' in colleges, and targets homosexuals, along with other minorities, in his shows. Rush Limbaugh, the celebrity in question, has an weekly audience that exceeds 20 million listeners. It's reassuring, then, that the act have found a home on the other side of the Atlantic .

Musically, the group are a cut-and-paste approach to pop history, taking in everything from punk to pop, electro to rock. They first attracted attention with a suitably raucous disco cover of the classic Pink Floyd progressive-rock track, ‘Comfortably Numb', thus managing to fuse together two seemingly opposed musical genres. Pink Floyd sung in an outrageous falsetto style simply shouldn't work. But it does.

Novelty cover-versions like these, together with the band's suitably raucous on-stage personas might lead one to the conclusion that they're just another novelty act. However, listen more carefully and you'll see that the Scissors fit into a much more sober tradition, drawing inspiration from more serious singer-songwriter artists like Elton John. Band member Jake (presumably his real name) is a creative writing university graduate, and it shows – their songs are often lovingly constructed narratives that provide some serious substance to their undeniable style.

However, if there's one musical past that the Scissor Sisters can said to be most in the thrall of, then it's the ‘70s ‘Glam Rock' movement, of the likes of T-Rex, David Bowie, Alvin Stardust and Roxy Music. Glam Rock mostly involved rather uninteresting straight men applying eye-liner, stretching into spandex leotards and flirting with the notion of ‘sexual ambiguity' in a desperate bid to pick up girls. This was of course the period when Bowie gave his career a boost by declaring his supposed ‘bisexuality'. By contrast, Scissor Sisters less like imitators and more like the real thing. For once, we don't have to suffer a gay act pretending to be straight, or a straight act pretending to be gay.