Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on January 2011

Courtesy of Smash

Closing the main stage at Fuji Rock Festival is an honor, but it’s also a slot with a lot riding on it. “We were worried because we were the last band on a Sunday night, and we thought everybody was going to leave to get the train,” says Babydaddy, resident multi-instrumentalist for Scissor Sisters, about their gig at last summer’s FRF. “But everyone stayed. The field was rammed, and we were just beside ourselves. You always hear that Japanese are going to be polite and not move around much, but that wasn’t our experience at all.”

It was another triumphant episode in what may be the unlikeliest success story on the pop scene today. A onetime New York gay novelty act, Scissor Sisters have risen from the city’s “sleazy bars” to achieve nothing less than the proverbial worldwide domination.

When I catch up with Babydaddy (nee Scott Hoffman; far left), the group is in the midst of an arena tour of Britain, the country that first embraced its campy mash-up of disco and glam rock. “We were a club band from the beginning but then started to tour the UK and played Glastonbury,” he recalls. “It was one of our first festivals, and we realized we could do it and are just as suited to a festival crowd.”

To what does he attribute Britain’s quick uptake? “We get asked that question a lot and I’m not sure I have an answer,” he muses. “I think it has something to do with the British sense of songs—not necessarily bands that make tracks, but that make songs that people can sing along to, which we did. I guess we were [also] flamboyant, which the UK seems to embrace more than the US.”

Conceived at a club night called “Berliniamsburg” in the heat of the Brooklyn electroclash movement, Scissors Sisters coalesced out of the friendship between Babydaddy and vocalist Jake Shears (second left), who asked him to write some music for his bar-top go-go boy act.

But it turns out Babydaddy already had some practice leading a crowd, having grown up as one of only a few Jews in the city of Lexington, Kentucky. “There wasn’t a big Jewish community, but a very strong one because of that,” he recalls. “I went to Sunday school and had a bar mitzvah and did the whole thing. It was important to my parents, though eventually it became less important to me. But I did learn to go up on stage and sing in front of people. I had to lead services by the time I was 11 or 12.”

Scissor Sisters’ upcoming visit to Japan sees them winding down the tour for their third album, 2010’s Night Work. The disc brought them together with Madonna producer Stuart Price, who helped them reengage with their dance music roots.

“We were frustrated with each other, so we decided it was time to bring someone in and shake things up a little bit,” Babydaddy says. “Stuart had been in our Rolodex for a long time. He took us on our first UK tour ever. Since then, he was working with Madonna and The Killers, and we thought maybe he was someone who could understand us and get something great out of us.”

The decision obviously paid off: the album shot to No. 2 in the UK and breached the top 20 in the US. It also saw Scissor Sisters become the subject of a mock lawsuit, in which Dave Grohl said he was suing the flamboyant band for “emotional distress after singer Jake Shears exposed one of his testicles at a recent gig” attended by the Foo Fighters frontman.

Despite the hands-in-the-air, dancefloor flavor of Night Work, Scissor Sisters are a fully formed live act, with all the mayhem that an eight-member touring band and entourage entails. “On tour, the instrumentation is quite different,” Babydaddy says. “We have backing singers and we just reinvent it. People get a very different experience when they come to see us live. We have some of Stuart’s loops, but the reality is, we’re mostly a live band, and that’s the way we want to keep it.”

Scissor Sisters
Feb 9, 7pm, ¥6,500. Zepp Tokyo, Aomi. Tel: Smash 03-3444-6751.