Scissor Sisters Credit Pet Shop Boys Singer for Saving 'Night Work'

In late 2007, Scissor Sisters main man Jake Shears was busy gearing up for a holiday dinner with friends and his mom when he took a little time away from the preparations to enthuse about work on his band's third album with Spinner.

The record was still in its early stages, but the singer was excited while discussing an unusual cover the band were working on and noting that a song he'd recently penned with Sisters guitarist Babydaddy for Kylie Minogue was going to instead stay with his own outfit. At some point later, the album was finished and the Scissor Sisters played it for some friends. It was then that they got the bad news.

"We were excited about new directions and new things and we took the music to one of our friends that we have entrusted our music to in the past and it was sort of met with a resounding, 'Weh, it's all right,'" Sisters matriarch Ana Matronic tells Spinner. "When you get a tepid reaction like that, it definitely makes you examine what you've been doing and scratch your head a little bit."

Shears didn't have a lot of time for scratching his head. He'd already been pulling double duty, working on the SS album and a musical version of Armistead Maupin's 'Tales of the City.' The answer was to find himself, again, by getting out of town.

"He was really locked into a routine of waking up in the morning and going to the gym, going to the studio, going back home, making dinner and going to sleep. When you're not really inspired by your surroundings and you're sort of stuck in a routine, it's pretty easy to lose you, as it were," Matronic says of Shears' mindset at the time. "So he just had to get out and Berlin was the best thing for him to do, really. And it ended up being the best thing for the band."

While Shears was cutting loose in Germany, he found what he needed to reignite his creativity after a conversation with sometime Berlin resident Neil Tennant. The Pet Shop Boys singer suggested Shears call up the band's old pal -- and Madonna producer -- Stuart Price.

"Neil said, 'Why don't you just call Stuart and see what's going on?' At that point, I think Jake was just looking for a really good friend and a good sounding board to bounce off ideas," Matronic says.

A short while later, Shears called up Matronic in New York to tell her the good news.

"[Jake] was so excited and Stuart was so excited. Stuart said to Jake, 'I would drop everything to make a record with you guys.' So that next weekend, Stuart and Babydaddy were out in Berlin and then a week or two after that, I went to London to work in the studio with them," she explains of the writing sessions that resulted in their real third album, 'Night Works,' which is due June 29. "It was all just this great creative explosion, all caused by Neil Tennant."

The new version of the album, a glittering, 80's-influenced dance-floor pop explosion sat more than well with the friends they played the first version to.

"People jumped up and down and clapped like little kids," Matronic says, laughing. "[It] was really exciting."