DISCO QUEENS

From New York drag shows to European full houses, they are new icons of flamboyant pop and they're as camp as Christmas. Scissor Sisters really are doing it for themselves, writes Kevin Courtney.

On Christmas Day, after you've stuffed yourself with turkey and plum pud, why not lie back in your Lay-Z-Boy armchair, pour yourself a hand shandy, and settle down to watch The Wizard of Oz. Not the one starring Judy Garland, mind - that's so old tat. No, we suggest you stick on the Scissor Sisters' DVD, We Are Scissor Sisters, And So Are You.

Here's a tale about a group of like-minded people, well-acquainted with Dorothy, who are whisked by a tornado from a tiny New York club, and plonked right into a magical, rock 'n' roll version of Oz, peopled with such colourful characters as Elton John, Kylie Minogue, Duran Duran, Debbie Harry, Julien Temple and Bono.

Scissor Sisters are a (mostly queer) quintet from New York who have made pop music fabulous again, winning over audiences with their flamboyant stage style and seducing record-buyers with their unerring pop instinct. Led by the dungareed, dancing figure of Jake Shears, and backed up by Babydaddy, Ana Matronix, Del Marquis and Paddy Boom, Scissor Sisters first came to our attention with their disco reading of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb, which earned them kudos from clubbers - and death threats from Floyd fans.

But Scissor Sisters were no mere Bee Gees tribute; the hit single, Take Your Mama, was a cool, high-camp take on Honky Chateau-era Elton John, and uncontestibly one of the singles of the year. They played Glastonbury, T in the Park and Oxegen, opened for Reg Dwight from Pinner, met the cheroot-smoking bloke from U2, and wrote a song (I Believe in You) for the Aussie with the famous ass. They end their favourite year with a post-Christmas concert in Dublin's RDS, and if it's anything like their Brighton show from last August, which can be seen in its entirety on the DVD, it'll be a Rocky Horror blizzard of odd.

Also on the DVD is a documentary on the band, directed by Julien Temple, which chronicles many of the earth-shattering events above, and features a 10-minute piece directed by Andy Soup, starring the band dressed as characters from The Wizard of Oz. My word, Dorothy, where on earth did you find friends like these?

As the year comes to a close, Scissor Sisters are ready to click their heels together and cry, "There's no place like home". But before they return to the safety of downtown Manhattan for their Christmas break, the band are en route to Indiana to play a show, and singer Ana Matronic is a little apprehensive. After all, they're coming straight out of the gay clubs of Manhattan and into the kind of places where homos fear to mince.

"Indianapolis is a little scary, it's right in Middle America, and technically this is the Bible Belt," says Ana. "But I think the people who are coming to our shows are there with genuine interest and affection. This is as deep into Middle America as we've gotten, but we've just played Cleveland, Ohio, which is a pretty conservative place, and we didn't have a huge crowd. But the people there were really enthusiastic. Really great and really up for it. I think there are freaks everywhere - there are probably more in Indiana than there are in San Francisco."

Unsurprisingly, Scissor Sisters found a more willing audience in the UK and Europe, where all things glam, arty and ostentatious are enjoying a bit of a renaissance. In fact, they may have helped to kickstart the camp revival themselves.

"All of the initial interest in our music came from across the pond, and I think the reason why it did was because Comfortably Numb was being played in all the dance clubs, and dance culture in Europe, the UK and Ireland is much much bigger, much more pervasive, much younger than over here."

Homophobia wasn't the major hurdle the band had to leap when they arrived in the UK. The initial obstacles were anal-retentive prog-rock purists who were incensed by these New York party-poppers coming on like The Bee Gees performing The Wall.

"Y'know," says Ana, "the only thing I have to say to people is that we're all big Pink Floyd fans and it was done with all the love and respect in the world. But Pink Floyd is probably one of the most sacred cows in the world of rock, and so to even attempt to cover one of their songs, you're already committing blasphemy right there. So it was iconoclastic, definitely, to do what we did to it, yeah, it was definitely thumbing our noses at it. But if you ask me, or if you ask any of us, The Wall has a lot of disco on it. I mean, really, prog and disco are two sides of the same coin as far as I'm concerned."

Before you cry heretic, and demand that Scissor Sisters be burned at the stake, remember that Pink Floyd themselves loved the Sisters' version of Comfortably Numb; and besides, as Ana notes dryly, The Wall itself is as camp as a row of tents, what with all that fascist chic and guys mincing around in capes and jackboots.

Luckily for Scissor Sisters, most everybody liked Take Your Mama and took it to the upper reaches of the charts. Even Elton John, to whose early (i.e. good) work it was often compared, didn't throw a tantrum or a tiara on hearing this back-handed homage, all about bringing your aul' one to a gay bar and getting her fluthered on cheap shampoo.

"Jake was really nervous when he was meeting Elton John," confirms Ana, "but that was just because it was Elton John. We were really curious as to what he'd think about it all. Because though there are similarities, Jake wasn't listening to a lot of Elton John during the making of this record, and he didn't really get into Elton until Babydaddy turned him on. And Jake wrote Take Your Mama after listening to Can't Buy a Thrill by Steely Dan over and over and over again. It's funny, that's just how the song came out.

"Jake, Babydaddy and I all have southern roots, and so we all really love that boogie woogie piano, that honky-tonk sound, and we all sort of grew up with that music around us."

Ana Matronic grew up in Portland, Oregon, and is looking forward to coming back to Dublin because, she says, three of the band have Irish roots. But she won't be looking up the Matronics of Mullingar - her real name is Lynch; her mother, an icon painter obsessed with Russian art and folk culture, named her daughters Catherine and Anna. At 20, young Anna realised she was "a drag queen stuck in a woman's body", and became a performance artist, working as a hostess at a decadent cabaret in downtown Manhattan.

Meanwhile, 19-year-old Jake Shears was go-go dancing at gay bars to save up money to go to college in Europe, and writing debauched disco songs with multi-instumentalist Babydaddy. Ana and Jake met at a Hallowe'en party (she was dressed as a Warhol Factory reject, he was, urm, a back-alley abortion).

Scissor Sisters made their début at Ana's club, but though it was all cool, kitschy, dirty, nasty fun, she never dreamed for a moment that it would turn into a serious band, with hit records and all.

"I just thought it'd be, you know, the three of us messing around in the studio. But then we got a two-single deal through a small label, A Touch of Class, and we thought, wow, people really like our music, and there's a real audience for this kind of thing, maybe this could go somewhere. And we were getting a lot of really good feedback from people who were in the music industry and coming to our shows. And once we got a manager, it was just like, wow, this can go somewhere, and this should be everything we want it to be."

Christmas 2004, and many of Scissor Sisters' dearest wishes have come true with a simple click of the heels. They've sold more than a million copies of the début album in the UK alone, played sell-out concerts from Los Angeles to Moscow, and hung out with all their MTV heroes and heroines. After their Irish shows in Dublin and Belfast, they'll be celebrating Hogmanay with the good people of Edinburgh, then touring the US, Canada and Australia.

Ana, though, is looking forward to being back to NY, and "getting back that semblance of normalcy". Since Scissor Sisters' normal is everybody else's crazy,however, they should have no problem finding material for that difficult second album.

"I think we all want to make a record that's even better than the first one. We just want to get back to our lives in New York, get our feet back on the ground and get back into the studio, because I think what made this record really good was the fact that we were just living our lives and coming into the studio and just putting our everyday lives onto the record."

Scissor Sisters play the RDS Main Hall in Dublin next Tuesday and King's Hall in Belfast on Wednesday.