SHEARS CLASS
FORMER SCISSOR SISTERS FRONT-MAN JAKE SHEARS IS BACK ON STAGE AND COMING TO PRIDE THIS WEEKEND
EX-SCISSOR SISTER TAKES THE STAGE AT PRIDE:
IT’S no surprise that Jake Shears – the former frontman of Scissor Sisters – should decide to launch his career as a solo artist here in Britain. The Arizonaborn singer may hold an American passport, but his heart firmly belongs to us Brits.
“It feels like home every time I come back here,” Shears enthuses.
“Britain is the place where we (the Scissor Sisters) signed our first record deal. I love how you have this real appetite for alternative music here. Given the size of your country, there’s such an amazing diversity of taste. The UK will always be my artistic home.”
Shears’ affection for this country, it’s safe to say, is most certainly reciprocated. When Scissor Sisters first emerged in 2003, they were a revelation, a band whose music combined 70s disco-pop sparkle with the sort of joyful flamboyance befitting their origins on New York’s gay nightclub scene.
If the band’s rather conservative homeland proved a tougher market to crack (their 2004 debut album was famously banned by the US supermarket chain Walmart for its lyrical content), Scissor Sisters enjoyed a much more receptive audience here on UK soil. Their self-titled debut LP was the biggest-selling album of 2004, and they picked up three gongs at the 2005 Brit Awards for Best International Album, Group and Breakthrough Artist.
So the UK seemed an obvious place for Shears to launch his long-awaited solo career, six years after Scissor Sisters went on their ‘indefinite hiatus.’
Having already played a string of intimate, sold-out shows across the country, Shears is now gearing up for his biggest live show this summer: an appearance on Manchester Pride’s Main Stage this weekend.
“It’s weird,” he said, “but I’ve never been to Manchester Pride before. It’s one of my favourite cities. Whenever Scissor Sisters played Manchester, I’d always visit Canal Street. So it’s great that I’m finally playing Pride this year. I’m looking forward to meeting all my LGBT brothers and sisters and performing for them.”
A desire to perform again, it transpires, was the main motivating reason behind Jake
Shears’ comeback. In the wake of Scissor Sisters (entirely amicable) split in 2012, the 39-year-old singer admits to feeling, he says, “really lost. I wasn’t feeling very inspired. After four albums, I felt like I’d said everything I needed to say with that band. We’d done everything that we set out to do.”
Shears’ misery was compounded by the breakdown of his 11-year relationship with his boyfriend. Desperately needing a change of scenery, Shears moved from his Los Angeles base to New Orleans and began plotting his musical comeback. Yet despite nursing a broken heart, the very last thing that Shears wanted to make was an introspective break-up album. Rather, he was more concerned with, he says, “making music that I’d enjoy performing on stage. I was really missing the thrill of performing to a live audience. If I was gonna come back, I wanted to have fun on stage.”
‘Fun’ is a most accurate description of Jake Shears’ new self-titled debut LP, a collection of uplifting pop songs bursting with jubilant fantasy and escapism. Freed from the shackles of Scissor Sisters, Shears sounds like an artist – and man – happily reborn.
“It was really liberating making all the decisions myself,” he explains. “Making a solo record, I think the biggest difference is how I didn’t have to do as much overanalysing. A lot of the decisions were made on instinct. In that sense, it feels very much like how we made the first Scissor Sisters record. It’s very similar.”
Of course, Jake Shears’ solo album isn’t the only big project occupying his time of late. Back in February, he published an autobiography, the strikingly candid Boys Keep Swinging. He also recently finished a fourmonth stint on Broadway, making his stage debut in the Tonywinning musical Kinky Boots.
Although he’s currently busy resuming his pop career, Shears is already planning a return to the world of musical theatre.
“I’d love to do it again,” he says. “Getting ready to perform on Broadway was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but also the most rewarding. The standard was so high. I put real pressure on myself; I worked for months and months to make sure I was ready for that opening night. And it was all worth it in the end. I’m just one of those people who loves to bite off more than they can chew.”