Feature:

Scissor Sisters

Ta-Dah! The Scissor Sisters just got a little bit gayer (if that was possible).

They were the darlings of the homo-chic resurgence a few years back, an extremely camp act whose appeal lay in their pure and unadulterated love of naughtiness. Although they could have followed up their self-titled debut with a Led Zep-like numbering system, instead they decided to up the camp-o-meter even more. So here it is, Ta-dah!

“We wanted to make the rocky stuff rockier.” Baby Daddy, the Sister's co-founder and co-writer told Bent during a whirl-wind album preview recently. “I think we've been on the road for a while as a rock and roll band, which was untrue of the first album. There's certainly rockiness to the new album, so I don't see it as a club album as much but I've heard people call it a dance album, so I don't know.”

Although a little tired and emotional (we spoke to Baby Daddy and Paddy Boom the morning after the night before's huge gig at Luna Park in Sydney ), the boys have regained their sheen nicely. So, will there be any big rock clichés, a drum solo perhaps? “Well I'm the only one in the band who has a true solo moment. It's short enough not to bore people but long enough to perhaps inspire another musician, drummer, with the nuances of my soul,” Paddy says as living proof that Americans are getting better at irony. “But you know, it's clear there's not too much free-forming in the middle of songs, it sort of book ends the song. Any noodling happens succinctly. It's not as if we're doing any 20 minute jam versions of ‘Laura' or ‘Take Your Mama'.” “We couldn't if we tried,” adds Baby with conviction. Poor Jake and all that falsetto.

Rock pig-dom has not taken the SS over completely however, with songs like ‘She's Your Man' and ‘Kiss You Off' still showing their rainbow stripes, as does a little cameo by the self-proclaimed bitch, Elton John, and the queen, Judy Garland. “It was a long process but it came down to Lorna Luft Judy's daughter, she controls the estate and she very happily allowed us to do it. We knew how we wanted to use it and we were sweating in anticipation, because it was so important to the song,” confirmed Baby.

Would they have used a Judy impersonator if they couldn't get clearance for the real thing? “That was a recording that was caught in a very intense moment, so to use an impersonator would have been cheating. But we have a friend who could have taken very good care of it, the friend who actually gave us the recordings to begin with,” he continued. Just like any good friend of Dorothy should.