Daily Mail Interview with Ana

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

Guardian Interview

Scissor Sisters were interviewed recently by the Guardian. Check it out below!

Jake Shears pokes distractedly at his iPad and lets out a sigh. "If everything goes according to plan over the coming year," he says, a little ruefully, "I'm going to be totally screwed. You come and see me again in six months' time, and I'm not going to be looking so cute."

Across the table, his co-vocalist and long-term on-stage foil Ana Lynch nods sympathetically. "Baby's going to be busy," she says, from beneath a hairstyle so elaborate it looks like it required not a stylist, but a team of structural engineers and a quantity surveyor.

The issue isn't really the third Scissor Sisters album, Night Work, which has finally arrived after a gestation period so lengthy and torturous that a despondent Shears literally disappeared midway through its making, not even telling his partner where he was going. Nor is it the accompanying world tour on which, Shears suggests – not entirely convincingly, and apparently to the bemusement of Lynch – that Scissor Sisters will present themselves in a way that's "a little more grown up, a little less ramshackle Muppet-fest". The problem is that the Scissor Sisters have somehow contrived to launch an album and a world tour at the same time as their frontman's first musical goes into production: an adaptation of Armistead Maupin's Tales From the City he's written in collaboration with the team behind the smash Broadway Muppet-fest Avenue Q. It's scheduled to open next spring in San Fransisco after three years in development. "The money's come to the table, so now it's real. It's getting serious, which is actually kind of frightening. It's a musical musical. It's not a rock musical. I haven't approached it like a pop star. This isn't" – he wrinkles his nose – "U2 writing a Spider-Man musical. I think the best thing about it is that it's got all my leanings towards musical theatre out."

"And I can't thank you enough for letting all your musical theatre out there, rather than on the new album," says Lynch heavily. This is, it turns out, a pretty representative exchange between the two. A decade on from their legendary first meeting in a New York gay club on Halloween (Lynch in fancy dress modelled on the "superstars" of indeterminate talent who populated Andy Warhol's Factory in the 60s; Shears – then a stripper at a bar called IC Guys – as "a late-term back-alley abortion"), their conversation is somewhere between that of a long married couple and a vaudeville cross-talk act: they bicker about the band's stage show, their history, the history of New York. And, today at least, they make for a striking visual study in contrasts. Shears, extremely handsome in a very clean-cut, all-American way, is dressed down in jeans. Lynch, on the other hand, is resplendent in designer dress, false lashes you could comfortably land a helicopter on, eyeliner out to here and heels down to there, a look which has earned her her own following of lovestruck admirers – who refer to themselves as Anasexuals – within the band's pantheon of fans. Although she's keen to point out that she only looks like this because of an imminent photoshoot and is perfectly capable of walking around Glastonbury with her husband unnoticed – "If I don't want to be recognised, I will not be recognised, I am that powerful a witch" – their appearances seem to reflect their personalities, at least while the Dictaphone is on. While you're clearly never going to get him mixed up with a former member of Oasis, Shears is less camp and more earnest than you might expect of a man who recently posed for a magazine photoshoot naked save for a sailor's cap. Lynch, on the other hand, has the unmistakable high-speed wisecracking speech patterns of a woman who has spent a lot of time hanging around gay men: in the past, she has described her immersion in gay culture as an attempt to understand her father, who came out when she was a toddler and died of an Aids-related illness when she was 15. If you search the internet, you can find a website that collects her more memorable outbursts: "Stop booing the heteros," she told one audience, "if it wasn't for them, your gay asses wouldn't be here." She has a propensity to puncture some of Shears's more sober pronouncements with one-liners.

Three albums in, they still make being in a multimillion-selling pop band seem like incredible fun, which is a rarer state of affairs than you might expect: they don't complain about the workload, or the pressures of fame, or any of the things pop bands past a certain point tend to make heavy weather of. No, they're not bothered about Scissor Sisters' failure to replicate their European success in America. "I always say that our success in America is ordinary, and our success everywhere else is extraordinary, because it feels that way," offers Lynch. No, they don't put said failure down to homophobia or a prevalent feeling among US rock audiences that disco still sucks: "Dave Grohl really likes us!"

They don't even make the recording of Night Work sound that tough, although it clearly was. Midway through the sessions, with an album "I didn't feel was both right or very good" nearly completed, Shears elected to vanish to Berlin in what he calls "a symbolic move", neglecting to tell anyone where he was going. "I ran out of New York before anybody knew I was gone, which was very exciting. I felt bad for my boyfriend. Poor Chris, everybody thought I'd left him, which was sad for him, but he was very supportive. I just had a really great time. I met a lot of musicians I love, I made a lot of new friends, I went out a lot and just partied. I felt like a kid again. In New York, I'd started to feel like an old lady. I was doing the same routine every day, living in TriBeCa, which is mommy central with financial analysts around you at all times. I knew Berlin was a place where I could go out dancing and hear good techno and get up to whatever it was I felt like getting up to at any particular time of day."

While in Berlin, he came up with an entirely new concept for the album, based around the music that predominated in early 80s clubland, and, in Britain at least, the charts. 1984 was the year when the top 40 went howlingly, unrepentantly gay in a way never seen before or since: the big new artists were Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Bronski Beat; the hot new indie band was the Smiths; an array of high-energy records – Where Is My Man? (sung by, of all people, Eartha Kitt), So Many Men, So Little Time, I Need a Man, It's Raining Men, Searchin' (I Gotta Find a Man), You Think You're a Man – shifted vast quantities. "That music worked universally. I think the trick is that sexuality, whether it's gay sexuality or not, is a universal thing. I mean, everyone gets horny. I don't think it really matters what kind of sex is being sung about because I think it still applies to everyone. It's as if the party kind of stopped, and it's no coincidence that happened hand in hand with Aids. It set back the gay rights movement in a major way. I think we're just moving past this 25-year setback. It placed a big judgment call on [the gay club scene]. Suddenly, there was a big, 'Oh, you had it coming.' I just started wondering where music was headed, where dance music would have headed, where all that would have gone. And Night Work is my hypothesis."

The result is a noticeably harder and darker album than the family-friendly dancefloor euphoria associated with Scissor Sisters. It arrives wrapped in a sleeve featuring a taut pair of male buttocks, features a demonic Frankie-style voiceover from Sir Ian McKellen ("Did he nail it straightaway? Oh, yeah. You know what, even if he wouldn't have, what are you going to say? Sorry, you need to do that again?") and, in a metaphor you hardly need a degree in the semiotics of rock lyrics to decode, a song in which a serial killer stalks the dancefloor.

With its fixation on clubland and hymning of a mythic, lost past, it's tempting to view Night Work as the product of a stadium-filling band pining for a time before the platinum records and Brits appearances, when they were famed only as a fixture in New York's more outré gay clubs, but Lynch looks a bit horrified at the suggestion: "Do I miss being a club band in New York? No! Fuck, no! We had a problem in New York that was very similar to the problems we had in America subsequently. The electroclash scene was going on, and we were a unicorn. It was all, like, 'Who is this weird band playing guitars?'"

"We were busting out this, like, honky-tonk music," nods Shears. He thinks for a moment. "Actually, I do miss those days."

Lynch frowns. "I would say we look back fondly, but not wistfully. Not in the slightest."

"It was fun!" protests Shears.

"It was a lot of fun," concedes Lynch, after a pause. "I haven't had a drink poured down my pants while I was on stage since."

Talk turns to their forthcoming world tour, but that just seems to set them off arguing again. Lynch has already had ideas for elaborate staging – "the first time I heard Invisible Light, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to have happen in one part of the song" – and responds to a question about whether they'd like to perform without the associated glitz and razzmatazz with a baffled "pardon me?"

Shears, on the other hand, insists "we've never been outrageous on stage", which, with the best will in the world, seems a slightly odd conclusion to draw, given his costumes and Lynch's between-song banter collected at the aforementioned website: "There aren't a lot of tits on the radio, but there's certainly a lot of cunts!"

"I mean, we've always had big shows or whatever," Shears says, perhaps noticing my confused expression, "but we've never had …"

"It's never been about dancers or choreography," says Lynch. "Or pyrotechnics."

"And I hope it never will be." He frowns. "Actually, there may be some pyrotechnics."

"There will definitely be some pyrotechnics," nods Lynch.

Shears exhales. "I'm less compelled at the moment to, like, be crazy on stage, seeing as everybody else is now."

"Yeah, well," snorts Lynch, "thanks to us."

"I just wore jeans in our first video for this record," says Shears. "And it was fucking awesome. I'm wearing a lot of denim."

Lynch looks mortified. "I am not," she says firmly, "going to wear jeans.

Night Work is released on Polydor on 28 June.