Scissor Sisters
Spot the difference:
I saw them both this weekend. Liccy and Robin kindly put me and James up at their flat after watching the Scissor Sisters in concert. And my oh my, what a concert! Without doubt, the best concert I have seen this year; and a million miles better than the Madonna concert we saw at the same venue and four times the price a few months ago. I was on my feet from the start to the finish, singing along at the top of my voice and generally having a whale of a time. I turned into one of those ‘concert geeks’ who assess how far through their musical catalogue we are and what songs we can expect next. They did not disappoint: all their hits from both albums were there, and all the best album tracks too. The only thing I would change about it would be the tickets. We were seated; next time I would get standing and force my way to the stage-front.
The Scissor Sisters are HUGE in the UK - their most recent album, Ta Dah went straight into the charts at Number One - and yet their success in the US has been somewhat muted: the same album peaked at number nineteen in their home country. There’s no denying their style is heavily influenced by some of the greatest British artists (Elton John played piano on their last single, “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing”; they claim Duran Duran are “the reason we got into music”) but it does seem as though there’s something about them that the British seem to love, that Americans either don’t seem to get, or just don’t want to. After all, Elton John is just as huge in the US as he is over here; David Bowie, Supertramp, Bee Gees and Queen: all household names and yet the Scissor Sisters languish just inside the top twenty. What’s gone wrong?
Firstly, and not to be overlooked: they’re a very young band. They only formed in 2000, so to have achieved such a devout following (and in the UK, ‘devout’ would be the right word) in such a short time is remarkable, especially in the fickle world of twenty-first century pop. America is a notoriously tough market to crack, especially for a British artist (cough Robbie Williams cough), so this might go some way to explain why they are not the luminaries in America that one might think. I’m not sold on this as an explanation, although it might go some way to explaining it.
Secondly, they rely on the quality of their music to support them. This is a dangerous thing to try in the contemporary market, especially if you are any good, since the money seems to be channelled towards Pop Idol winners and sparkly young things with a shelf-life inversely proportional to their age. Whilst these ‘everyman luminaries’ are being propelled at light speed towards a chart hit and a year in rehab, bands like the Scissor Sisters are struggling away doing gigs in pokey places and living real lives that fuel their creativity. When was the last time an X Factor graduate sang about drug abuse in the gay community, or love and dismemberment? Now, I enjoy a bit of plastic pop as much as the next man (“a bit?!” I hear you cry; but hear me out) but no one sits at home listening to Steps on a Saturday afternoon, nor N*Sync over an evening meal. At the end of the day, you can dance to any old shit, but you only want to listen to something that’s actually any good. Perhaps I should be rejoicing that the Scissor Sisters have had it hard, in that it has helped produce such amazing work, but it does grate somewhat that we have to abide the Gareth Gates and the Shayne Wards of the world when there are others more able and deserving of fame and, by extension (this is the C21st after all), respect.
I would love to blame their tepid American reception on conservative (read ‘religious’) reservations about their sexuality, brash style, or contentious, provocative and often offensive lyrics. I don’t imagine that their political leanings go down well in the midwest (they dedicated “Laura” to Mrs. Bush for her poor taste in husbands; they gloated over the Rev. Haggard’s spectacular implosion before preaching “Everybody Wants The Same Thing” to him in absentia. You have to love that story). Thirty-two states have laws that would deny members of the band the same rights as straight people; it follows logically that the same states would not appear on their list of ‘strong supporters by location’. They come down on the wrong side of every social argument (I am using the Wikipedia view of right and wrong sides here: majority rules) in the world today, which probably doesn’t help record sales in a country where 50% of the population votes for a liberal government, but 80% votes for banning same-sex marriage (the great white horse of liberalism is a bluff - some of those blue voters have a red lining). But here in the UK we’re having our own social problems which could scupper them just as easily. So why does Britain love them whilst America is thinking “meh, not so much”?
The answer, I suspect, is a little bit of all the above. Judging success by country is a bit of a misleading argument since countries are just blocks of individuals, each of whom is capable of navigating iTunes according to their own preference. But I do think there is an Atlantic divide that Scissor Sisters symptomise: a reminder that we aren’t the 51st state after all. Strange that it should take an American band to do it, but I suppose when you have a music industry swamped with manufactured pop and guitar bands in knitted sweaters and crying out for a bit of semi-subversive glam rock, beggars can’t be choosers!
Next week: Uni re-union in Winchester for a christmas shopping extravaganza! Only twenty-eight days to go!
