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 outr 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