"We're poised to be the gay Matchbox Twenty," Del Marquis, guitarist for the rock band the Scissor Sisters, proclaimed in a phone interview. "It's weird because we're a little bit more of a cult pop act here in the U.K. and Europe, and in the States we're going to be one of those pop acts with a successful single, and then everybody realizes what you look like."
Marquis and his fellow Scissor Sisters, who recently released their debut full-length album, "Scissor Sisters," in May, are on a tour bus on their way to play a music festival in Dublin. The band, which has much more experience touring Europe, has recently begun to pervade the American music consciousness.
Marquis, who cites the Muppets, movie musicals like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and pop acts like the B-52s as his band's primary influences, spoke out against the American critical perception that the Scissor Sisters are basically just a revival of Elton John.
"It's weird because I think nobody could agree on any specific influence when they listened to the album and I think journalists just got lazy and all agreed on Elton John," Marquis explained. "I think that you can certainly hear '70s radio elements on the songs, but I don't think there's much of Elton or Bowie in the songs."
The Elton John comparisons may come from the Sisters' '70s dance-pop sound and their place in the gay sub-culture.
"Most people don't know what [our name] means," Marquis said, noting that the term "scissor sisters" is slang for a lesbian sex act. "It just sounds somewhat cheeky. We have audience members that have no idea what it means."
Audience members may not know what Scissor Sisters references, but they certainly know they like the band's music. Although, as Marquis noted, the band hasn't "really hit the States yet."
"I think we had been beating around the bush in the States and nothing was really coming about and they couldn't make sense of us," Marquis explained. "So we came [to the United Kingdom] and they wanted what we had to give. Once record labels in the States saw the audience reaction - it didn't have anything to do with the music because that never changed - once they saw we were creating this fervor with the audience, then it made sense to them that they could do something with us."
Not only have European audiences embraced the Scissors Sisters' music, but they also embrace musical ideals more aligned to those of Marquis.
"I think [the element of dance] should always be there in rock and pop music, but I think somewhere along the way people lost the idea that you can incorporate rhythm and dance into straight forward rock songs," Marquis said. "That never really got lost on people in the U.K. They always have a love and appreciation for dance culture and in America you might have seen it somewhere in the '80s, and then the whole idea got lost and we're not a culture of dance. Or we see it as a completely separate thing from rock. I don't really see it that way."
In Marquis' mind rock and pop music shouldn't necessarily be so separate.
"Everything is so specific and programming is so streamlined ...you're either part nu-metal or hardcore or if you're pop, you're a female singer," Marquis said. "It's just way too defined and I think we like to think of ourselves as a pop band having nothing to do with these people who stand up alone and sing ballads or tacky pop songs. There was a time when dance and pop was written by bands and people used instruments. People have forgotten that and I think we bring that element back a little bit."
Indeed there has been a recent resurgence of '70s and '80s influenced dance-pop music from bands like Franz Ferdinand, the Killers, Hot Hot Heat! and Ima Robot. The Scissor Sisters, who admire Franz Ferdinand, recently decided to record a cover of Franz's hit single "Take Me Out."
"We've been running around [Europe] and we keep running into them at the same festivals," Marquis said. "We all love the album, we've seen their live show and we think they're great. We thought we could do a new interpretation of the song. It was relevant; it was a song that was in the public consciousness right now."
The Scissor Sisters are planning a nationwide U.S. tour for the fall. For more information on the band, visit www.scissorsisters.com.
