Ana Matronic: The Sister Sisters star on gaining a husband and losing two stone
The Ana Matronic who curls up on the couch for a chat is not the Ana Matronic you might know from those gaudy queens of camp pop the Scissor Sisters. As one of the Sisters, and the only girl among four men (three of them gay), she is the very spirit of dirty disco, belting out anthems like ‘Take Your Mama’ or ‘Filthy/Gorgeous’ that leave little room for misinterpretation. As she says, ‘Our new album is an absolute testament to being turned on.’
But away from the stage and the songs and the boys, you get a different Ana (pronounced Arna). Gone is the trademark flame-red bouffant (it’s still red, but less so, and there’s less of it), the high-gloss lippie, the outrageous get-up. Gone too, since their last album four years ago, is two stone of weight, taking her from plus-size poster girl to almost pixie-ish popette. The ballsy broad who dares us to ‘take me, any which way you can’ on the Sisters’ new album Night Work doesn’t seem much like the Ana, 36, who is telling me how she and her new husband have been lovingly renovating their Brooklyn home (and how they discovered, dash it, that they’ve been using the wrong mortar for their kitchen floor tiles).
As if to emphasise that there are two Anas, at this year’s Glastonbury Festival the Sisters received a rapturous welcome back to the Pyramid Stage (it’s been four years since their last album, Ta-Dah, and to mark the occasion HRH Kylie Minogue joined them on stage for a knees-up). You would have thought Ana would be mobbed. But she says that afterwards, with the crowd still buzzing, she was able to walk around Worthy Farm just about unnoticed. ‘If people are looking for me, they’re looking for big red air, lots of make-up and sequins. If I don’t have red hair, lots of make-up and sequins, they don’t see Scissor Sisters. I’m fortunate in that I can hide easily if I want to.’
It’s not so easy, she says, for the band’s lead singer Jake Shears to blend in, but then again, of all the Scissor Sisters, Jake is the least likely to opt for understatement. This year’s performance drew complaints from BBC viewers thanks to Shears’ final costume change, which left him with little more than a few pieces of string laddered over his impeccably peachy bottom.
Ana laughs it off. ‘It’s so silly. Name the female pop icon of your choice and her butt cheeks are hanging out, so it’s nothing new. It’s just not the girl doing it this time.’ And even with her new body, for Ana and the Scissor Sisters, that’s how it’s going to stay. ‘I’m comfortable showing a little bit more, but I’ve never been really into putting on a big skin show. I just feel there’s enough of that. I feel like women are still equating their worth with how attractive they are to men, and that’s not the statement I want to make, personally.
‘You know what? I just get tired of seeing yet another actress or pop star with their clothes off. It seems that these days, to achieve a certain level of success as a female performer, you have to get your kit off. The exceptions are very, very few: Susan Boyle, Taylor Swift – they’re like the only ones. And one of them you don’t really want to see naked, while for the other it doesn’t seem age-appropriate.’
Ana Matronic, it’s clear, is a woman who says it like she sees it. And all power to her elbow for that. But it does mean that I approach a slight contradiction in the Matronic credo with caution. When the Scissor Sisters exploded on to the scene in 2004 with their eponymous debut album, Ana was held up as something of an icon for larger women. Back then she said that she accepted her body as it was, curves and all. Does she feel that she has gone back on that by slimming down so drastically?
‘I guess if you want to look at it that way…but I’m still fat by Hollywood standards: if I walked into a casting for a part in a movie they’d probably tell me to lose 30 more pounds, so in that respect I don’t believe I’m letting the sisterhood down. And in another respect I believe I’m providing a really good role model for people who do want to change. It is possible.’
Her motive, she says, wasn’t to fit in with the size zeros: ‘I started going to the gym because I wanted to be healthy. I was on a tour [for Ta-Dah] where I was really feeling my body’s limits. I had reached a certain age; I was starting to see the first inklings of physical limitation. I thought, “I’ve got to change something here to be able to do what I’ve always done.” Which is perform. Once I got into that mindset, the weight started coming off.’ There was no big goal, she says: ‘I don’t weigh myself, I don’t judge myself by a number on a tag or a label on a pair of jeans.’
So no fad diets, mung-bean shakes or personal trainers. Ana simply started eating better, hitting the gym and cutting out the booze.‘Once you start drinking and you’re on a tour bus, after a couple of hours you’re like, “Where’s the chocolate?” I am still
a chocoholic, but I don’t drink as much, and I go to the gym the next day.’
If we were feeling mischievous, we might put the weight loss down to her wedding in April to lighting designer Seth Kirby…except that she’s been with him for seven years now, so it wasn’t exactly a whirlwind romance.
‘We got married because...OK, I should back up a little bit. Seth does lights and visuals for bands and he works with this man Josh White, who did the visuals at Woodstock. Josh has been married to his wife Alice for 32 years, and Josh and Seth had just done a gig and it came out that Seth and I weren’t officially married. Josh and Alice couldn’t believe it, because we had been referring to each other as husband and wife for years.
Seth came home and said, “God, I just got an earful from Josh and Alice,” and we were just talking about it over the next few days and then it was like, “Yeah, yeah, we should do it, we should do it.” I was on the computer and I looked down and he was on his knees and he said, “Will you marry me?” and I said yes and he said, “Will you fill out the paperwork and we’ll go right now?” So we went to City Hall that day, got the paperwork, then waited six days and did it officially.’ Josh White, Seth’s sister Kate and their housemate Joe were witnesses, and they’ll be having a party and a honeymoon once the upcoming tour is over.
It must be said that there is still a certain glow to Miss Matronic – now Mrs Kirby, although unlikely to refer to herself as such. ‘Marriage? It’s just better and deeper. It’s like the difference between dating someone and dating someone you’re in love with. It’s that next logical step.’
And children? ‘I love the idea. There are a lot of idiots having children in the world these days, so we should probably put a good one out there!’ However many mini Matronics may emerge in the next few years, it’s unlikely they’ll have a childhood like Ana’s. She was born in 1974 to mother Sherry, a painter, and father Robert, an art director, in Portland, Oregon. The family soon moved to San Francisco, and when Ana was only three her parents divorced – her father had been disappearing at nights and, when her mother confronted him, he admitted that he was gay. He left home that evening, leaving Ana and her older sister Kate with her mother. Ana found out why he had gone three years later, when one day in the car her sister asked about their parents getting back together.
‘Mum said, “We can’t get back together, because Dad is gay.” It wasn’t said in a brutal or shocking way. Although I was young, I knew Dad now felt about men the way that he had once felt about my mother. Basically, I understood this meant they’d never be together – and at six, that sucked.’ Ana’s mother remarried and Ana took her stepfather’s name, Lynch. By the time she was 14, and back in Portland, her father had contracted HIV. A year later he was dead.
The simple Freudian line is that Ana gravitated towards the San Francisco gay scene after dropping out of college, performing as a (straight, female) drag queen and ending up in a band with three gay men, in a bid to understand her absent father and the choice he made. ‘I may have chosen that path subconsciously, but I didn’t think, “Right, life mission: I’m going to understand what it’s like to be a gay man.” I’ve always been a very flamboyant person and I think I would have ended up there anyway. I was born and raised in a very artistic household. I went to drama classes at school. My mother is an incredibly artistic woman. She lives to paint. That’s her great love in life and to be raised by a very, very passionate artist is really great as a child. I think that regardless of whether or not my father was gay, I would have sought out creatively passionate people.’
She says that she doesn’t think about people in terms of gender anyway: ‘I’ve always felt as if I was kind of a masculine woman. I don’t identify with stereotypical notions of femininity. I don’t think that women should be treated any differently than men. Women are human beings. I don’t really think about people in terms of masculine or feminine, but in terms of active or receptive. Receptive would be feminine in times past, but I just think of them as more receptive people. Then there are people who act out more and I’m certainly one of those. But I really try not to think about putting people in boxes.’
Which may explain why in person Ana Matronic is so unboxable herself. There’s drag queen Ana, there’s practical homebody Ana, and there’s Scissor Sister Ana – big red hair, make-up and sequins, as she puts it. It all depends on what face she’s wearing, but as she slips away to get into make-up and costume for the shoot, I tell her how great she looks simply as herself: no slap, hair back, free of all the glitzy impediments of being Ana Matronic.
‘Well, I’m about to be caked in slap, but thank you. For the most part, if I don’t have to get dolled up, I don’t. But I enjoy having a job that I can dress up for. I like the extremes, but there are degrees of it. So there’s the casual, there’s the half fabulous, there’s the three-quarters fabulous and then there’s the full drag. And you’re about
to get the full drag, baby.’
Scissor Sisters’ new single ‘Any Which Way’ will be released on 20 September. Their album Night Work is out now
