Jake Shears is hungover. The night before our interview in the bar of a fancy west London hotel, the former frontman of the multi-million-selling glam-pop practitioners Scissor Sisters, performed his first UK solo show at nightclub Heaven. He stayed up until 3am, knocking out renditions of his former band’s hits at a piano bar he can’t remember the name of with some friends he’d probably struggle to pick out of a lineup. It’s 4pm now but his eyes suggest he’s not been up long. “I’ll have a Negroni with vodka, please,” he says to the waiter with a smile.
The previous night’s show was in support of new single Creep City, a 70s-inspired rock stomp and taster of his solo debut album next year. It marks his first proper release – beyond the occasional collaboration – since Magic Hour, the last Scissor Sisters record before their amicable split in 2012.
The as-yet-untitled album was recorded in New Orleans and Kentucky, which might explain today’s outfit choice of puffed gilet, plaid shirt and trucker cap. “I’ve come dressed as Kentucky!” he snorts. It’s also an album he didn’t think he’d ever make. He originally worried that releasing a solo album would be “cheesy”. So what changed? “What did change?” he asks, following a pause so long I fear he’s asleep. “I think I stopped worrying. I decided to just be me.”
Before that realisation, though, Shears had to readjust to post-band life. After Scissor Sisters parted ways, Shears moved from New York to Los Angeles. “I felt lost. There were a couple of years where I don’t know what happened.” During one particularly lonely night he was rescued by Cher. “I was scrolling through Twitter – I only follow a thousand people – and I stopped at one of Cher’s all-caps tweets and it said: “JAKE, I’VE BEEN SEARCHING FOR YOUR NUMBER, PLEASE GET HOLD OF ME’. It was so random I even saw the thing – she didn’t @ me in it.” Two days later, he was recording their almost illegally camp 2013 duet Take It Like a Man with her in Malibu.
Following his collaborations with both Cher and Kylie Minogue (on 2004’s exquisite I Believe in You) we discuss whether or not he’s reached gay pop nirvana, before Shears drops a bombshell. “I just found out I’m related to Dolly Parton!” he honks, suddenly lurching forward in his chair. It turns out his cousin is a fan of family trees and uncovered they share a distant grandfather from the 1800s. “Isn’t that amazing?”
Shears’s artistic existence wasn’t always so glamorous, however. In 1999, at the age of 21, he moved to New York from Seattle. To make ends meet he waited tables, wrote for Paper magazine and was a go-go dancer at a gay strip bar called IC Guys. “I wanted to perform,” he remembers. “I also wanted to go to Europe so I needed money. I had shoeboxes under my bed that I’d fill up with all my stripper cash. It was great.” Eventually, however, he got bored (“I was like: ‘Should I be a singing go-go dancer?’”), choosing to focus on the music project – originally named Dead Lesbian, later Scissor Sisters – he’d started with Scott “Babydaddy” Hoffman. “It was a week after 9/11 and we just decided to perform these silly songs we’d been working on. I came out in a kimono, super stupid, and people loved it.”
That was Scissor Sisters’s MO: big, smile-inducing performances of smile-inducing songs that felt universal. Having acquired some more members and some better songs, including the bouncy Laura, the band steamrollered their way to success. Their self-titled debut in 2004 – which finished ahead of Keane’s MOR Hopes & Fears as that year’s biggest-selling album in the UK – was like a vomit of rainbow-coloured glitter across beige-pop’s boringness. It was followed by Ta-Dah and the UK No 1 single I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’, which sounded like Leo Sayer and was a massive cry for help. “The pressure was so hard,” he says. “I suddenly had all these major responsibilities, with people counting on me from all sides.”
Worried the band were becoming a caricature, Shears swapped the camp, more straight-friendly eccentricity of the first two albums for 2010’s sweaty, Berlin-inspired Night Work (by this point they’d given up on breaking their more conservative homeland, with their debut banned by supermarket chain Walmart for featuring “a snarling, swaggering attack on conservatism” in the shape of song Tits on the Radio). For its cover, Shears used a Robert Mapplethorpe photo: a closeup of dancer Peter Reed’s clenched buttocks that friend Elton John suggested they avoid. “He was supportive but he knew it was going to make it harder for us,” says Shears. “But the great place to reach is where you don’t care.”
New perspectives and Parton family reunions aside, 2018 is going to be a busy year for Shears. As well as the album, he’ll star in Kinky Boots on Broadway and has just finished his memoir. “I didn’t want to write it with my parents still on this earth because I’d feel so bad with my mum reading it,” he explains. “But I did it anyway. It’s not graphic, but it definitely spills some tea.” Despite his fuzzy head, he seems ludicrously happy. “I think this could be a special record for a lot of people,” he smiles. “It’s the closest to the first Scissors album in a way; I haven’t had to filter it through anyone else.” He orders a celebratory rosé. “I call the shots now.”
Creep City is out now
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