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

Electric Six are possibly the freakiest bunch of misfits ever to invade the UK charts.  Must we fling this perverted disco-punk filth at our pop kids? Oh yes…

It’s Saturday morning on London’s South Bank, and while the rest of the capital sleeps off its hangover, outside the studios of ITV chart show ‘CD:UK’ gaggles of ticket-less teenage girls wait in the freezing cold, heavily made-up faces pressed to the gates, hoping to catch a single glimpse of the ‘talent’.  Inside, the scene is only marginally less pitiful, as those lucky enough to have bagged studio tickets are taught, performing seal-style, exactly how to clap and whoop on command by an unnecessarily excitable floor manager.

In the studio’s unfussy café British R&B star Craig David strokes his immaculately-groomed chinstrap beard as he poses for photos with adoring fans.  Destiny’s Child vocalist Kelly Rowland sweeps, diva-like, through the room with her extensive entourage on her way to run through her performance.  The corridor leading to the dressing-rooms – lined with framed photographs of Kylie Minogue, Kermit the Frog, and various GMTV presenters – is cluttered with skimpily-attired dancers practising their routines, oblivious to the six curious looking characters occupying the dressing room opposite Geri Halliwell’s personal cubby hole.

These misfits are Detroit ‘disco-punks’ Electric Six.  If this isn’t their natural habitat, then the signs are they’re adjusting well.  For, fresh from their first British TV performance on Channel 4’s ‘Born Sloppy’ a couple of nights ago, the Six are clearly getting used to the idea of making unreasonable – or at least unexpected – demands. 

“Can we get some cucumbers?” drawls bassist Disco.  “Whole ones?” 

One look at the smirks on the faces of the Electric Six suggests that these vegetables are not destined to form part of a new Hollywood fad diet.  Which only leaves one other option – phallic enhancement.  Now this is exactly why the Electric Six are rock’s weapon against the faceless, soulless pop mainstream.

“This,” says moustachioed drummer M with a devilish smile, studying a plasma TV screen where Girls Aloud, the UK’s incumbent chart-toppers are staking their claim to the, ahem, ‘Sound Of The Underground’, “is the most ironic thing I have ever seen.”

And this could be fun.

“Hello British kids!”

Cutting quite a dash with his pencil moustache carefully drawn on in black eye liner, Electric Six frontman Dick Valentine couldn’t look happier if he was twins.  As the rest of his band line up to mime ‘Danger! High Voltage’ – a stomping disco-rock monster with a thudding bassline that could kill a cow at 20 paces – Valentine launches excitedly into the frantic, dirty chorus and starts to dance like no-one is watching.  Or rather, like everyone is watching him show off and he knows he’s going to get away with it.  It’s simply a great TV moment.  The youthful audience – all exposed bra straps and foundation-heavy faces – look bemused, but whoop and holler appreciatively nonetheless.  Just as they’ve been taught.  You might think that the Electric Six would sneer at the gesture.  Not for the first time with this ban, you’d be wrong.

“I have a lot of appreciation for music that is ‘manufactured’,” Valentine claims afterwards, looking a little less sharp now that half his moustache is smudged across his face.  “All music is manufactured, no matter what anyone wants to think, even how this song is put together.  So why not celebrate that and do what you can with it? I had a blast on this show, it was great.”

At this point you should note that Electric Six shouldn’t really work.  They have nothing in common, but this is why they’re so heart-stoppingly fantastic, because it means they feel the need to prove anything to one another and can just get on with the task of mashing their disparate personalities for a very, very long time.  Officially the Electric Six number five, with peripheral member and “human distillery”, the quietly intelligent ‘synthist’ Tait Nucleus, stepping in today on sax duties.  All come from ostensibly opposing musical backgrounds.  Guitarist and Bulldog from ‘Frasier’ lookalike Surge Joebot is the metal faction, convinced that the band are the reincarnation of Guns N’Roses at their peak.  He also, incidentally, believes that the real Axl Rose “seems to have been replaced by some sort of insectoid Axl robot”.  Imposing but friendly co-guitarist the Rock And Roll Indian goes for the hot new bands.  Easy-going bassist Disco is into bubblegum pop, and drummer M, the motivational force who brought the band together, just goes with whatever he thinks is cool.  Which in itself is very cool.

The wilfully enigmatic Dick Valentine, with his love of  ’80s pop, is – like a microcosm of the band he fronts – a mass of contradictions.  His early ambitions were contrary.  On the one hand he wanted to help people, and spent a small amount of time studying to be a doctor.  On the other hand, he wanted to be a TV weatherman, so that people would know who he was.

“I think it was for the fame aspect and the type of fame that it brings,” he says.  “Because it’s a really limited, focused, concentrated kind of fame.  People in the town will know you.  And just the mystique, I think, of being a weatherman.”

But even fame is something that has Valentine in two minds.  He wants to be a star – he’s desperate to spread his acting wings after his granny-snogging, moose-riding, crotch-glowing stint in the painfully funny ‘Danger! High Voltage’ video, and is trying to get a part in a film version of satirical American website The Onion as Herbert Cornfield, an office worker who thinks he’s black – yet he can’t understand hero-worship.

“Even the bands that I really like, and I listen to over and over again,” he says.  “I can’t imagine thinking those people deserved any more than anybody else, it’s retarded.  I don’t romanticise music at all and it makes it easier to write music.” 

When M first went to see his future bandmate performing at an acoustic night in a Detroit café, he walked into the venue to find it in complete silence, with the stunned crowd watching the singer do a push-up solo in the middle of the floor.  Generally, though, he’s in bed with a good book by 11pm.  He wants the world to dance to Electric Six, but he says his ultimate idea of success is to be able to open his very own kennels.

“Did you ever see ‘Gladiator’?” he asks.  “That’s what I want out of life.  At the end of the day when you’ve been in the arena, I just want a family.  I want a house and a family.  But the rest of these guys want dancers.” 

Of course, anything these people say must be taken with a mountain of salt, for Electric Six, like all great bands, have a gift for self-mythologising – harsher minds might use the word ‘bullshit’.  After all, they’re still denying the fact that The White Stripes frontman Jack White provided his distinctive yowl for their single.  They also claimed that, when the band had an eight-month break from each other, they were actually cryogenically frozen until the future was ready for them.  Well, if they’re sticking by that story, then the time for the big thaw would appear to have arrived today.

It’s the day after the sextet’s triumphant invasion of ‘CD:UK’, and the clock is ticking down the minutes until the chart position of ‘Danger! High Voltage’ is announced.  All of the band bar Dick and Tait are feeling a little fragile, as they sink into the sofas of a plush suite in West London’s suitably-named Electric Cinema – hired for them by the expectant record company – clutching glasses of champagne as if they were filled with Alka Seltzer.

News | Meet | Media | Email | Mailing List | Links | Shop

(c) 2004 Electric Six - Constructed and hosted by Juicy Creations Ltd.