Boys Keep Swinging

by Jake Shears

  I ended up in a photo shoot that summed it all up. It was a fashion editorial in Out called “This Is Electroclash.” I arrived on the day without much to wear. Some cool people showed up: the girls from W.I.T., My Robot Friend, some of the Hungry Wives, and Avenue D. Those people made sense, we were all musicians. But I didn’t understand what the extra models were doing there. They were attractive and had asymmetrical haircuts, but when the piece was published, all the artists were standing around in these shots peppered with models. Something was awry.

  When Scott and I got a call from London’s The Face magazine (“Hey, this is Cookie, but playse coll me Cook. I’m cawling from The Fay-ce magazine? It’s The Fay-ce off Lohndon and wey’re doing a HUGE payce on electro-closh. You MUST absolutelay be there, wey loff you . . .”), we sat in the studio, alarmed, listening to this absurd woman yammer on our speakerphone. We told her we’d get right back to her, but it was an easy decision for us to skip the shoot. Our instinct was to sit back and wait, let the media pass over us for now. We knew we had the potential to outlast a genre trend that might be over tomorrow. For now, we could fully take advantage of the stage that the scene was providing us, but we would politely distance ourselves from the bandwagon.

  That proved not difficult to do. Suddenly, our whole next wave of songs were piano- and guitar-based, not straight dance tracks anymore, and had more complex chord progressions and arrangements. Our shows at Luxx were getting bigger, and seemed to delight and confound the crowds we were drawing. “Comfortably Numb” was starting to get played out in clubs frequently, but the new stuff sounded different. We were performing rock-structured songs in an electro club; it didn’t make sense, but people were paying attention. Every time we played, we would experiment with new looks and props. For some reason I don’t recall, we did a show dressed as pirates. I pulled rubber snakes out of a basket wearing a peasant blouse and Ana wore an eye patch. It was a queer Pentecostal revival on the high seas.

  Still, as successful as the shows were, I could feel an invisible wall between me and the crowd. It was as if I resented any expectation the audience had, and my rancor just bounced off of them and reflected back on me. It was like I was reenacting my days of being fifteen years old again at Mountain View High, allowing a roomful of people to watch and observe me, making a spectacle of myself. I was subjecting myself to their judgment and it made me feel like I was wearing a dog’s shock collar that was twisted up to ten. Every joint and muscle in my body seized and twitched, my head swinging all over the place. It must have been exhausting to watch. My friend Tom Donaghy would tell me all the time with a straight face, “You’ve got a lot of rage. If you don’t get famous, you’re going to kill somebody.”

  Scott and I were in the studio now every day. We aimed for at least one new song for every show we played. It kept the performances exciting and unexpected. We never knew how the new material would read. Sometimes when we started playing a new song, we could feel it work right away, or it would sit there like a dud, and we’d never touch it again.

  One of my secret weapons was my friend Martin Pousson, the bartender at Leshko’s. He attended every single show, and had strong critiques and opinions. He adored the music and the band, but I could count on him to dissect the performances. Sometimes it was disheartening. But whether I agreed with Martin’s feedback or not, it was always helpful. He would talk to me about band dynamics onstage, the archetypes we were projecting, body movements, and queer theory. Martin viewed the band through an academic lens that I didn’t feel we were entirely worthy of. Every week, he bought me albums I needed to hear: Make It Big by Wham!, or Dare by the Human League. He fed me a steady diet of brilliant pop, a stream of inspiration.

  Lyrics were coming to me loud and clear. I had recently written the chorus of a song called “Take Your Mama” at my parents’ farm. I’d been listening to Steely Dan’s “Can’t Buy a Thrill” on repeat all morning when I decided to rinse off in the shower. With the water beating down on my head, the words and melody came out of my mouth while I was just standing there, spaced out. I ran naked and wet across my bedroom and recorded it into the voice-mail on my phone. I was doing this now when I had a new idea. If I didn’t record the melody right away, I knew I’d forget it.

  The same was true of notebooks, I always had one in my backpack. If I heard something while eavesdropping at a party or a restaurant, I would immediately grab a pen and scribble it down. The previous summer on Fire Island, I’d been drinking a cocktail when I heard some queen I knew behind me talking about Britney Spears: “Well, you can’t see tits on the radio,” he said. There was a song.

  In the back of a cab, staring out the window, I thought of one of my favorite movies as a kid: Return to OZ. The story was so bleak: When Dorothy returned to the Emerald City, it was a decaying shadow of what it had once been. I began to sing a soft melody:

  Is this the return the return to Oz?

  The grass is dead

  The gold is brown

  And the sky has claws.

  What if Oz were a metaphor for some tweakers I’d known on the West Coast? Seattle was the Emerald City. My writing and ideas came out of daydreams, those moments when my eyes glazed and my thoughts wandered. The shower remains one of my favorite places to write. It’s the lack of stimulation, the beating of the water. And besides, everybody sounds better singing in the shower.

  When we performed “Take Your Mama” for the first time, at a Knitting Factory show co-headlining with Hungry Wives, the band reached the chorus and something jelled. In real time, we leveled up. You could feel it in the room, a reveal of where we were going, and the potential for what we could achieve.

  After that night, Ana was pissed off at me for days. “You ignored me onstage,” she said. “You acted like I wasn’t even there.” I was defensive, but when I really considered it, she was right. It wasn’t a conscious thing—I’d just been so amped up and nervous to keep the show moving, lost in my stage hang-ups, that I’d had a hard time bantering or singing together with her. Figuring out how to do it all at once was like rubbing your head and patting your belly. I was learning how to juggle, but sometimes dropping my balls all over the place.

  Ana and I had a certain chemistry onstage—our personalities complemented each other’s. But offstage I got tired of what I perceived to be flakiness. If she was late, it was always the subway’s fault. There were a lot of excuses and finger-pointing.

  The tension would increase when she’d come into the studio and learn that Scott and I had made new stuff. The first time she heard “Take Your Mama,” she grimaced and said: “We can’t do this. It sounds like ‘Loaded’ by Primal Scream. It’s been done.” Or she would listen to a new song and flip through a magazine, feigning being bored. I can see now that she felt left out of the writing process, but I was truly doing my best.

  Solid collaborative relationships are tough to find. It can be just like a marriage, flowering into trust and stability, or it can wilt with a hardheaded approach. Scott and I have always made a wonderful pair, as cohorts as well as friends. There have been both fruitful and dry patches, triumphs and horrific fights. Our differences are the key. We’re almost opposites. He’s the ground that tethers my floating; I’m the whimsy that decorates his technique.

  The dynamic among Scott, Ana, and me vacillated between ease and tension. Ana was hilarious and vicious; in one sentence she could render us crying and out of breath. She was great at improvising, and there was no telling what could come out of her mouth. Her singing voice was limited, but when she got on the microphone, magic was made. There was usually gold in her first takes. Our output was best when we allowed ourselves to be stupid and absurd, concerned only with the joy of writing and having fun.

  The good times inspired the songs. Two words Ana used all the time to describe something were filthy (which was a compliment) and gorgeous. My first idea was to make a record with a song called “Filthy” as the A side and a song called “Gorgeous” as the B side
. But when we started playing with the idea in the studio, it turned out to be just one big song. The lyrics were a psychedelic-sex-work-acid fantasy, the most detailed thing we’d written so far. Once we had the finished demo, we knew it was something special. The story and world we were concocting had just gotten bigger. Not only that, we had a few songs now that were pretty damn good, and they made sense next to each other.

  I thought our productivity had been going great, but Ana came in the studio one afternoon solemn-faced and said, “I need to be a part of making these songs. I’m not just window dressing, you know.” Of course Scott and I didn’t want that, either. She was already far from window dressing, even if she hadn’t been writing many of the songs so far. The flamboyance and energy she was bringing to the shows—and even the studio—were vital. But in that moment, I suddenly felt both guilty and defensive. Scott and I were already a songwriting team by the time we decided to bring more people in. I was happy to collaborate, but I’d made no promises that we’d write everything together. There was some unspoken jealousy there. If Scott and I wrote a song on our own, it could be uncomfortable playing it back for her. I sometimes felt punished for writing good stuff. It was my view that just because a new person had joined the project, it didn’t mean they were entitled to the songwriting.

  Her dissatisfaction was the spore for a subtle, sour dynamic that grew between us. I cultivated a defensive air and refused to hold myself accountable for anyone else’s creativity. I thought resting her creative output on my shoulders was a cop-out. As much as I tried to include her, it wasn’t my sole responsibility.

  But whether we knew it or not, each of us was bringing something invaluable to the table. If you took away any of the elements we were bringing individually, it wouldn’t have been working to the extent that it was. As high as tensions could be sometimes, generally we were close friends, confided in one another, and cared for one another’s well-being.

  Tony Moxham, a friend of Ana’s, was one of the editors at Interview and got us a full page in the magazine. At the shoot there was a stylist for us, and we played dress-up for the first time in designer clothes. The final shot they used looked strange. You can see a band still trying to figure out who we were. I wore a sparkly sequined top and Scott was in a Battlestar Galactica–style square-shouldered vest. Ana looked extreme in huge platforms and vertical-striped tights. A big black wig was perched on her head and thick black makeup was slathered over her eyes: She’d become skilled at applying it after all those years in the drag clubs. I was happy to have the piece in Interview, but I didn’t think it really looked like us yet.

  I hadn’t had a boyfriend since Dominick, and though I hooked up frequently, I didn’t feel a strong pull to have one. I had everything I needed in my own neighborhood. The proximity of my apartment to the Cock made it easy to meet somebody and then dip back to mine. I was there often, and it was a convenient spot to do impromptu Scissor gigs when Mistress Formika was hosting. If I was drunk enough, I would just hop on the bar and sing one of our songs.

  Though we’d achieved local notoriety, there was no money yet coming in from Scissors. In fact, Neil Harris was fronting us money, with faith that we would eventually make enough to pay him back. So I got an extra job bartending a block away at a tiny movie theater called Cinema Classics, which would show Fassbinder movies and things like The Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon as the soundtrack, a personal favorite. One night, we played a gig in front of the movie screen there. The crowd were just people from the neighborhood, I wore an orange sarong I’d bought in Greece and a tie-dyed Pink Floyd Division Bell tank top. Afterward we packed up our equipment, walked down the street to change clothes at my apartment, and then went and played a four-song set on a row of boxes at the Cock.

  Our future guitar player, Derek Gruen, was there that night. “I was like, ‘Ugh, I hate this stuff,’ ” he told me later, tuning his guitar in Scott’s apartment studio. He was a handsome, steely-eyed cutie with good blue-collar style and drove around a shoddy van that he kept in Brooklyn. We’d found him through this guy I had been dating off and on named David Russell.

  When I was still dancing, David was the only guy I ever picked up and took home from the job. He was a huge music fan, obsessed with Belinda Carlisle and Kylie Minogue, and was on the management team for Robbie Williams. We started hanging out regularly, often just strolling and talking music. “My best friend plays guitar,” he told me one night. That’s how we met Derek.

  It turned out that the moment I ran home to get our record when I was waiting tables at Leshko’s had paid off. The label head from City Rockers liked our stuff and flew back to New York to listen to our songs in the studio. “Comfortably Numb” had well taken off at this point, especially after its first radio play on Pete Tong’s BBC One radio show. He introduced the song saying we were “cross-dressers from Japan.” This would be the start of the insidious phobia that permeated much of our media coverage.

  Once we acquired Neil Harris as a manager, he started steering the ship with purpose, and the fallout with A Touch of Class records was immense. Scott and I hadn’t been trusting ATOC for a while. They sat us down and wanted us to sign the full-length album over to them. The conversation was peppered with calculated nuggets, them saying they wanted to take us “to the next level.” But the contract they offered was laughable, attempting to take a huge slice of our publishing basically for nothing. Neil had been consulting for A Touch of Class on some other business. But he saw more potential in us than they did, so we both gave them the finger and split ways.

  Now, City Rockers wanted us in London, and had offered to fly us there to play a couple shows, spend a week in the city, and let them convince us to sign a deal with them. London was a go, but we needed one more person. We needed an extra guitar. So when David introduced us to Derek, it seemed serendipitous.

  Derek was a slightly nervous person, but I thought he was cute and had a fairly controlled crush on him. He had never been in a band but had been shredding in front of his bedroom mirror for years. A huge fan of the Cure and the Cult, he had a playing style at that time that was big and brash; he’d never really played rhythm guitar. Sonically he wasn’t a perfect fit for the music we were making, but I didn’t really care: He had a thing, and was handsome and odd. He confessed that he didn’t initially like Scissor Sisters that much, but he seemed enthusiastic and available to go to London, so we brought him on and continued rehearsing in Scott’s apartment.

  That London schedule was bursting: We had three gigs lined up around town, and there was no downtime, but I was just stoked anybody cared enough to fly us out. We stayed at a hotel called the Columbia right on Hyde Park that was legendary for its cheap rooms and was where all the bands stayed. On any given night, you would go down to the bar and hang out with Franz Ferdinand, the Rapture, or whoever else was in town. The Columbia would become one of our second homes for the next couple of years. Scott and Ana split one room while Derek and I shared another.

  The first gig we had was at a party called the Cock (unrelated to the bar in NYC), which was at Ghetto, behind the Astoria Theatre, the same space in which they were throwing Nag Nag Nag, an oven-like gay electro party that everyone was in a flutter about. A kind, burly guy named Jim Stanton, who would go on to cofound Horsemeat Disco, set it up and had a tiny stage prepared for us. I had a bad cold, probably brought on from anxiety over the shows, and wasn’t feeling well. The place was teeming with surly drag queens, gays in ripped tops, and coked-up club freaks. It was a memorable first show; we received an extremely warm welcome and, from that night on, felt London embrace us as its own.

  The second show we played was at DJ Erol Alkan’s party Trash. It was a mad, eclectic free-for-all where Erol was touting his own movement, a mix of New York electro-rock, ’80s classics, and left-field deep cuts. The Trash gig turned out to be in the lobby of the club and not in the main room itself, and Scott forgot our minidisc player back at our hotel, so it almost didn’t
happen. While we performed, people half paid attention, but it wasn’t at all terrible. From the combination of my cold and the late night at the Cock, I lost my voice and could barely talk. But Neil assured me that my adrenaline would kick in, and I was able to pull off the show.

  The third gig we intended to do was for the City Rockers label, but it never got off the ground. Probably a hint of things to come with the label itself. We set up and did a sound check, but come time to play the set, the PA wasn’t working and the sound guy never got it running. So finally we gave up. I just took a hit of ecstasy and milled about, disappointed that the main gig we had flown there for had never even happened.

  That night, Derek and I returned to our dilapidated hotel room. I was still fucked-up, but it was late and we had nowhere to go. “I don’t even know what the fuck this is or what I’m doing,” he said.

  “Do you need to know?” I didn’t see the point of worrying about it.

  “It’s like—I can just strap on a guitar right now and play along with these songs, but what is this anyway?” There was an old hurt in his voice. “I feel like we’re gonna end up back in New York, and this will all just be some bullshit thing I did.”

  “But for now, this is great, no?”

  “If I can just pretend to be what you want, it is.”

  We needed some press pictures and a shot for a sidebar in Mixmag, but were so unprepared, still having no solid idea of what the hell we were supposed to look like. I was by no means a clotheshorse; style was last on the list of stuff that I gave a shit about. I ended up in a sleeveless Jimi Hendrix shirt and 501s, as well as my janky white Skechers. We looked so ramshackle. But for the moment, fashion was the least of our worries. We needed a record deal.