Free Scissor Sisters podcast

Ta-Dah
Polydor

Don’t expect Scissor Sisters to thank you if you float the idea that they might be the flagship band of the Guilty Pleasures generation. In this week’s Sounds podcast, Jake Shears makes no attempt to conceal his revulsion at the notion of a guilty pleasure. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt embarrassed about liking a record in my life,” he hisses.

It’s a fair point. If guilt loomed large in Shears’s psychological make-up, you imagine he would have dealt with it before the release of Scissor Sisters’ eponymous 2004 debut — maybe in the years when he used to earn his living as a stripper. Or it might even have come into play when he and Babydaddy formed the band’s first incarnation, a club act called Dead Lesbian and the Fibrillating Scissor Sisters — in which Shears would sometimes dress up as a back-alley abortion.

Not for Scissor Sisters then the idea of apologising for your record collection. If Ta-Dah comes with a mission statement attached, it’s quite simply that life is too short for all that nonsense. Underpinning many of the songs here is the recognition that there’s probably more untapped inspiration lurking in Paul McCartney’s middle period than the Beatles. The phlegmatic elasticated pop of The Other Side speaks of several turntable miles travelled with Wings’ later albums. And yes, there’s even a song called Paul McCartney — based on a dream in which Macca told Shears: “It’s the music that connects me to you” — that sounds like Say Say Say with an urgent appointment to keep.

As with their first album, however, Elton John remains the sun around which Scissor Sisters merrily orbit. Far from being put out by the relentless comparisons, Shears has dealt with the situation by becoming mates with Elton and getting him to appear on two songs. That’s his joyous plonking you can hear on the nourishing pop manna of the current single, I Don’t Feel Like Dancing. You might reasonably guess that he had some direct involvement with She’s My Man, such is its proximity to Elton’s I’m Still Standing; or Land of a Thousand Words — which mainlines that panoramic sense of yearning that once came as standard on early John/Taupin compositions. In fact, his co-writing credit can be found on a snappy mid-album rag called Intermission which appears to have been siphoned straight out of Rufus Wainwright’s brain.

If Scissor Sisters have felt any kind of pressure to extend the run of hits spawned by their first album, you wouldn’t know it by listening to this guileless, celebratory record. Might Tell You Tonight is a cry for a home where new love waits for the first time, allied to an industrially adhesive chorus.

Though the group’s female figurehead Ana Matronic is a relatively low-key presence on Ta-Dah, she’s centre-stage on Kiss You Off — on which strident power chords and a blinding Studio 54 disco sheen make it a sure contender for airplay ubiquity.

In Britain we expect a certain amount of camp from our entertainers — and yet it’s hard to imagine that there might have been a British Scissor Sisters, a band who understood the straight-up disco potential in covering Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb for their debut single. Being out about your sexuality is one thing, but such is the lingering tribalism left by punk’s year-zero approach, that being out about the unholy triumvirate of 1970s genres — soft-rock, beard-rock and disco — is another thing entirely. But, of course, Scissor Sisters come from a place where there was no year zero. So much, then, for guilty pleasures. Their world has no need of a pop quarantine for old songs awaiting formal reappraisal. “It’s a bitch convincing people to like you,” sings Shears on the feline vaudevillian pizzazz of I Can’t Decide. His solution — why try?

PETE PAPHIDES

Free Scissor Sisters podcast