Babydaddy chats about new Scissor Sisters tour (From The Bolton News)

Babydaddy chats about new Scissor Sisters tour

11:21am Tuesday 6th July 2010

• Print
• Email

THEY have just played a triumphant gig at Manchester’s Apollo and now Scissor Sisters have announced that they will play a UK arena tour this winter.

Tickets for the gigs go on sale at 10am on Friday, and the band have said that they will be hoping to recreate the intimate but fabulous atmosphere of their Apollo show on the bigger stage.

“We’re already planning the shows,” said Babydaddy on the phone from Amsterdam where the band are continuing their European tour. “It’s going to follow the theme of the album, it will be like our nightclub.

“It’ll be really fun — we get to do all the things that we want to but haven’t had the space. It’ll be a challenge to make it like the Apollo but bigger.”

The multi-instrumentalist says he has happy memories of the former cinema.

“We always remember gigs at the Apollo really clearly,” he said. “I remember once Ana [Matronic, vocalist] licking the stage last time we were there... that’s probably a story we shouldn’t go into.”

The band’s latest album, Night work, went to number two in last week’s album chart, being held off the top spot only by Eminem’s return to form with Recovery.

The album includes the new single, Fire With Fire, and closing track Invisible Light features non other than Lord of the Rings star and former Bolton School pupil Sir Ian McKellen.

“He was wonderful,” Babydaddy said of working with the actor. “He was so cool about it, we went to his dressing room in London while he was appearing in Waiting For Godot and he was just up for anything we wanted to do, it was just perfect.

“When we were writing the song, it was his voice we could hear in our heads.“ Night Work has been hailed as a return to form by the band, who ditched the ballads in favour of evoking the heady days of dance music in the 11970s and early 1980s, before the AIDS crisis wiped out a generation of performers. But Babydaddy is quick to point out that this is not the overdone glitz of Studio 54 referenced by so many other bands.

“We’re like the dingy little basement of Studio 54,” he said.

Singer and co-lyricist Jake Shears found the germ of the album on the dancefloors of Berlin, where he started asking himself, if it were, for example, 1984, what would happen next?

“It made me start thinking about New York and the club scene in New York from the 70s to the 80s,” he said. “So much was progressive and being pushed and something was on fire. And then everybody died. The party stopped in a way that couldn’t have been more dramatic. A whole generation was wiped out.

“And one of the questions I was posing was: where was that music headed? Where was Sylvester, Frankie, all that heading? What if music hadn’t stopped dead in its tracks? What if you could pick up where that left off?

“I wanted to know how music would eventually have sounded.”

From there the comeback started — creatively as well as in the chart sense. And comeback moments don’t come much more dreamlike than euphoric lead single ‘Fire With Fire’, an epic tale of battles lost and won, victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.

“It’s about the horrors that creep into your mind when time’s going along and things seem farther away, and the minutes tick by and things gets worse and worse,” Jake explained. “It’s a rebellion against that self destructive train of thought.

“I know if a song’s really good when I tear up slightly when I hear it, and this one’s made me cry a couple of times. Embarrassingly.

“It’s triumphant, it’s a song for everyone, it’s not subtle in any way and I love it.”

• Scissor Sisters play the MEN Arena, Manchester, on Saturday, December 11. Tickets cost £30 and go on sale at 10am on Friday. To book, visit gigsandtours.com or ring 0844 8110051.