Words: James Lo

James Lo chatted to Del Marquis, lead guitarist from the Scissor Sisters, about their third album Night Work, which was released on the 28th June.

DS: First off, congratulations on your Glastonbury gig and your new album. So where are you now?

Del: We’re in London right now in the middle of a couple months of promotion and touring.

DS: You released a number of solo EPs last year– what motivated you to branch out by yourself?

Del: I don’t write the music for the Scissor Sisters so it was an exercise for me to work on my arrangement, lyric writing and production. It was something I had to do, before I reprised my role in this band as the guitar player, which I love, but there’s a part of my ego which really needed to flesh something out. I was really happy with that process and with those songs. I think the production’s great, and I’m probably going to do another one when this tour is done.

DS: The sound on Night Work seems to pick up a lot of the same darker 80s electro references that informed your EPs.

Del: We collectively feel so comfortable with how it sounds. The 80s references are disguised or adapted well to sound like a Scissors record. There is a lot of Frankie in there and Trevor Horn and things that I really identify with. Even some of the guitar riffs are things that I don’t think I’d have been allowed to do or wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing on our debut album. It felt really natural this time around. We brought in an outside producer, Stuart Price, and fleshed out the sound. There’s a lot more muscle behind the sound itself. We were less afraid and in some ways it’s almost the album we should have made the second time around.

DS: Were you dissatisfied with your second album, Ta-Dah!, despite its success?

Del: There were songs that should have made it onto that album, but after listening to some opinions (whether the record label or whoever) they didn’t make it. I think it was a very reactionary record and I don’t know if that gets you the best results, so looking back on it I regret certain things about it. I do think it’s a really strong album on its own, but it could have been better. But we’re just so happy with this new album. We’re playing the entire album in our set, which is kind of unheard of. Some people shy away from playing a new album for fear of losing an audience, but we’re getting a really good reaction from playing half a set of new songs.

DS: I understand you scrapped an entire album last year & started again from scratch– why was that?

Del: We are writing the whole time, and it’s a constant struggle to find the heart of an album. What is the reason for it to be an album rather than just a collection of songs? At the end of the day we had some demos, but it just didn’t feel like the statement that we wanted to make as the band. That’s really important because you have to think of the band as your baby. You’re not going to trot an album around the world unless everyone’s really happy with the finished product. That was the moment when Jake said he needed to take a break, so he went to Berlin and found himself again. He just started living life, garnering new experiences and new points of view and then he said this is the album we have to make. And that’s when we started on Night Work and those songs happened really quickly. The songs that we’d written before are really good, but I don’t know when people will hear them. There are so many songs in the Scissors vault that we could release 8 albums of lost tracks. But sometimes you just have to sacrifice those songs for the greater good of the next song.

DS: Jake has mentioned that one of the concepts behind the new album is ‘where 80s music would have gone if AIDS hadn’t happened’– what do you understand by that?

Del: In the early 80s, there was a certain liberation in pop music as far as there were gay-identified artists in the pop mainstream such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Pet Shop Boys, and Culture Club. And it was a safe zone and it was really unprecedented. But then all of a sudden the AIDS epidemic made everybody take a step back and everything got very dark. For Jake, it’s a reprisal of how would we be celebrating today if that had never happened.

DS: There is still a dark edge to the new album – it’s not entirely celebratory and upbeat.

Del: But it’s still about getting your kicks. It’s not melancholy, it’s not depressing. For me, the album is about everything and anything that you would get up to under the cover of night and the kind of things that people allow themselves to get away with, and the limits that they push whether it’s romance, love, lust, fear or violence. You know it’s kind of every human emotion under the cover of night, the good and the bad.

DS: You claim that you aren’t a ‘gay band’ but given how your lyrics and imagery seem to draw so much from the gay world, do you think the band gives off a mixed message?

Del: It’s a catch-22 situation. If you’re in a band and your singer’s straight and sings about having sex with women, are you going to tag the band as being a straight band? Of course, Jake is not going to write about having sex with women, but I don’t play ‘gay’ guitar. That said, I think we’re a queer band– I think we definitely queer-identify. But that’s less about sexuality, it’s more inclusive. We have a woman in our band, we have a straight drummer and a straight keyboard player. But a lot of our ideology is queer, which to me is somewhat different than gay. It’s less about identifying a sexuality than about openness: we’re unafraid, we’re unapologetic. We can identify with a lot of different people, I just don’t think ‘gay’ is really the right word.

DS: But in the past there has been discussion about whether the US mainstream music scene was too straight for you?

Del: I think it used to be, but I don’t think it is now. The pop landscape has changed. We were referencing 1983-1985 and the acceptance of so many of these overtly queer acts hitting the mainstream. Then suddenly that disappears and it becomes a boy’s club of rock. Now you’re seeing a lot of artists playing with identity in a way that I haven’t seen since my childhood and I think it’s really healthy. And I don’t think anyone’s coming out and saying they identify strictly in one category or another. There’s a fluidity to the kind of expressive sexuality that I think will make it a lot easier for us this time around. For instance, having Lady Gaga as a number one artist is I think going to open doors for us as a band.

DS: I’ve read that there was a lot of discussion over the cover of your new album. Was the image considered too controversial for the US market?

Del: The basic facts are it’s a black and white photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe from the early 80s of a ballet dancer. It’s not a naked photo. It’s almost like a litmus test: someone could look at that image and say it’s a gorgeous, artistic photo. Someone else could look at it and say it’s too queer, that it’s offensive. And yet the person isn’t even naked. What we see is this person who has put so much work into their body. And the amount of work and athleticism that went into sculpting this body is kind of how we feel about the work that we put into our music and the dedication that we have for our band. So we enjoy provoking the response because it’s almost like a psychological evaluation depending on who’s looking at it.

DS: And finally, since it’s our sex issue– where’s the weirdest place you’ve had sex?

Del: I think it was the first time I had sex– it was on the banks of the Tiber river in Rome. I was eighteen years old and I was deflowered. It was a pretty amazing deflowering experience.