Scissor Sisters axed entire album

By Ian Youngs BBC News music reporter

The Scissor Sisters' first two albums sold three million copies in the UK

Pop band The Scissor Sisters have revealed they scrapped an album they had been working on for 18 months.

Singer Jake Shears said they ditched songs destined for their third album last summer and started from scratch.

He said: "If it wasn't something we could fully get behind and believe in, I think the band was going to be over.

"If we put out anything sub-standard it was curtains for Scissor Sisters." They have written a completely new album, Night Shift, which is out in June.

Their new single, Fire With Fire, a slow-building, 70s-style pop anthem, premiered on Radio One on Friday morning.

Shears said: "We worked on a record for about a year and a half but we shelved it. We shelved it about a year ago.

"I ended up moving to Berlin for a couple of months and we decided to start a new record from scratch, and we started it last June. So this record was written very quickly."

Referring to the collection of songs originally intended for the third album, Shears said: "In my heart I knew it wasn't right, I didn't really know what it was trying to say. It left me a little bit cold."