Media: Press

Murder on the Dancefloor
Bang, November 2003

Interview with Bizarre
Bizarre, February 2003

Keep It Surreal
Daily Telegraph, 23rd August 2003

Our Friends Electric
Guardian, 29th January 2003

Shock To The System
Kerrang!! 25th January 2003

Ire In The Disco
NME, 24th May 2003

Hold Tight!
Q, April 2003

Chancers in the nicest possible way
Scotland on Sunday, 26th January 2003

interview with Time Out
Time Out, 8th January 2003

Rock the Gaybah
X-Ray, May 2003

Detroit’s finest have disco hair, funky riffs and a grounding in weather forecasting.  Steven Poole can’t resist Electric Six

Outside the toilets of a small Brussels club, a cheery bouncer is speaking in Flemish on his mobile phone.  “Electric Six!” he tells his friend.  Blank incomprehension clearly reigns at the other end of the line.  So he sings a snatch: “Fire in the disco! Danger, danger!” Now the friend obviously gets it: laughter ensues.  The Detroit rockers Electric Six may not be a household name, but the lascivious strains of their monster hit Danger! High Voltage have become common European currency.  With its insistent funky guitar riff, swelling metal chords and camply pseudo-German vocals, all set to an irresistible boom-tish disco beat, the record crashed into the UK charts at number two a fortnight ago.

Inside the tiny bar-venue, the band is delivering a hugely energetic and eclectic set.  Each musician has a distinct, carefully wrought visual personality, as well as a proper stage name.  Keyboard player Tait Nucleus? (yes, he has a question mark in his name) sports an anvil-shaped pile of curly locks and tight waistcoat, and looks like a high-school genius in charge of a home-built particle accelerator.  M, the drummer, has a trimmed porn-star moustache and a beige suit.  Louche bass player disco is the amiable character in a sci-fi movie who gets killed at the end of the first reel.  The two guitarists puff out blasts of cigarette smoke from the corners of their lips while swaggering to their riffs; hirsute Rock’n’Roll Indian wears a baby-blue suit, and Surge Joebot, with his gleaming bald head and mirrored aviator sunglasses, looks like Kojak after a master class with Joe Perry.

Frontman Dick Valentine, meanwhile, struts around the stage like an adrenaline-boosted amalgam of Frasier Crane and David Byrne, howling in a soulful grunge voice, summoning sweet falsetto lines from the lighting rig with an outstretched arm, breaking into fist-clenched slow-motion running, and barking orders in a dominating baritone.

The music is a feast of implacably kinetic riffing, swirly dance synth effects, big singalong tunes, and apocalyptic lyrical concerns about fires, nuclear wars, radio messages from space, electric demons of love, and “Improper Dancing in the Middle of the Street”.  For an encore the band play Queen’s Radio Ga-Ga, reinvented as a tragic disco-metal torch song.  The Belgian audience seems pleasurably confused.

Afterwards, in the dressing room, band and crew are cracking jokes and gathering suitcases for the tour bus’s 3am departure to Paris.  How did they feel when they learned they were in a number two in the UK charts? “It was like, the good news is your single’s number two, but the bad news is you’re still completely broke,” says Joebot, who talks like Beavis’s cleverer older brother.  The single was within a few thousand sales of toppling Girls Aloud from the number one spot.  Did that hurt? “I don’t wanna diss teen pop,” Valentine begins gently from under a multi-coloured woolly hat.  “I’m a fan of the Backstreet Boys and Disco’s a fan of the Sugababes…” And then he adds: “But that is a really bad song.”

How does it feel for an American band to find success in Europe first? “It’s such an eye-opener dealing with our people here compared to the people we were dealing with in Los Angeles and stuff,” Joebot offers.  “In America it’s just a nightmare.  All the people who work in the record industry are not just non-human but, like, anti-human.” 

Electric Six’s likeably deadpan style has convinced previous journalists that they are lying all the time.  Valentine insists, though, that he really did go to weatherman school.  “It had nothing to do with weather, it had to do with being famous.”  But the golden age of forecasting pedagogy, apparently, has passed.  “Now they study meteorology, and everything has to be, you know, like, accurate – you have to know something about weather,” he says, in possibly simulated disbelief.  Instead, he became a bus driver.  “Yeah, I drove a bus about a month ago, right before I came over here,” Valentine says.  “It’s a Travis Bickle kind of thing.  I do a lot of my driving at night, you know, kinda watch people.”  Disco giggles.  “Yeah, it’s like the movie.  Bus Drivere.”

The Rock’n’Roll Indian comes over and starts flailing his limbs.  “I’m doing a monkey dance,” he explains helpfully.  Meanwhile, Disco tells how the Indian and he used to work as landscape gardeners.  Maybe making an album is like making a beautiful garden? Joebot pounces: “Yeah! Your back hedgerow, that’s like your rhythm section, and then your perennials, that’s like your keyboards and effects, and your guitars which are….”  “Trees?” Disco offers, to general snorting.

The band claim they used to be technology-obsessed “paranoid white men”, and they are still fooling around with electronica.  “Yeah, we cut a new track called Dense, it’s really gonna hit the clubs,” says Disco, to an outburst of manic giggling.  Their album comes out in the spring, and meanwhile they are working on a promotional videogame, complete with retro beepy music.  “I always thought Joe was an idiot,” Disco says generously, “but I heard what he did for this videogame soundtrack and I thought, ‘You’re a fucking genius.’”  Meanwhile, Valentine explains that the band also has an interest in film-making.  “We’ve done a couple of videos and documentaries on our own – hopefully we’ll have more time to do those at some point..”

These guys clearly like to keep busy.  What do they see themselves doing in 10 years’ time? Almost imperceptibly, the band switch into fabulist mode.  Joebot received an acre of moon property for his birthday, so “I’d like to be up there, building a geodesic dome.” Disco wants to start a hamburger chain called Burger Lord, staffed by women in fur bikinis.  “Burger Kings are nice, but Burger Lords are superior,” he elaborates.  And Valentine? “I’d like to go back to weatherman school, but it’s getting so technical, and more and more women are going…I don’t know what kind of future I’d have there.” 

On this strangely touching note, everyone repairs to Café Central.  While the band raucously compare the merits of various dark Belgian beers, one gets the feeling that Paris doesn’t quite know what is about to hit it.

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