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

Danger! Danger! Electric Six have fired up their disco-rock chariot and they’d like to take you on a little ride.  So climb aboard, strap in and set controls to “festive”… 

It’s 30 January 2003, the day on which winter weather paralyses the whole eastern side of Britain.  Endless sheets of snow speed horizontally across the Brighton seafront.  The town’s Palace Pier – the one that hasn’t started slipping into the sea, though four days later will be crippled by fire – feels like it too may soon be heading for a watery grave.

Understandably, given that it’s a bitter Thursday afternoon, the amusement arcades at the pier’s end are only sparsely attended.  Manning the bubbling, fizzing, crashing and crunching games machines are strange individuals indulging in some desolate gambling…and Electric Six.

Beginning their first ever UK tour, the off-beam, louche Detroit riff-rockers with names you will never see in any phonebook have been persuaded to partake in a photoshoot at this funfair a few hundred metres out into the murky English Channel.

Taking temporary refuge from the painful wind in a video arcade, woolly-hatted singer Dick Valentine and debonair drummer M (their real names are not for disclosure) are dispensing with assorted zombie attackers on the gory House Of The Dead 2.

Across the domed hall, bearded guitarist Rock ‘N’ Roll Indian is bobbing around taking on virtual waves aboard the surfing simulator, while bass player Disco – with shades and centre-parted curtain hair – is methodically slotting pennies into a coin-shove machine bearing the slogan “Rock ‘N’ Roll”. 

Mute keyboard player Tait Nucleus, a recent addition to the line-up, takes armfuls of paper token winnings up to the counter marked “Prizes” expecting some major cuddly toy action.  The Eastern European till operator hands over two backpacks stuffed with plastic Rugrats toys.

Lead guitarist Surge Joebot – who has the ability to smoke cigarettes while doing anything – is gleefully ranging round a digital Los Angeles slaughtering hostage takers on Silent Scope.  Leaving the rifle swinging, he jubilantly discovers The Addams Family Electric Shock Machine (“Not recommended for anyone with heart or skin ailments”).  With the game’s bald-headed Uncle Fester picture uncannily matching his own features, Joebot grasps the game’s metal handles to let the electric currents pass through his body.  Obviously, it’s a massively appropriate scene, although electricity is only a fairly recent band obsession.

“We used to be into robots, clones, technology,” he explains.

“And maths and dancing,” concludes M.

Electric Six have concocted the year’s most exciting single so far in the brain-smelting punk disco of Danger! High Voltage, which railroaded into the charts at Number 2 in January.  And to prove that they’re not a one-trick novelty act, they’re likely to repeat the chart-blitzing feat with the surf thrash of follow-up record, Gay Bar, due in May (chorus: “I’ve got something to put in you / in the gay bar, gay bar, gay bar!).  The song is inspired by Dick Valentine’s ex-girlfriend.  “I wrote it after finding her in bed with someone else.  A woman,” he sighs.

Of course, Electric Six’s story doesn’t simply begin with them scoring a hit record.  A lot of people had to go insane on the road, get held up at gunpoint and train to be weathermen first. 

The various members played in local bands during the early 1990s, before first performing together as a five-piece (plus a revolving cast of keyboard players, until Nucleus joined) in late 1996.  Various tales, some more likely than others, emerge about what happened next.  Among them the one about Valentine leaving to attend weatherman school but pining to play with Electric Six and soon returning to the fold. 

In ’99 they broke up temporarily when Valentine’s job in PR was relocated to Los Angeles.  But after 18 months they re-formed, and were joined on Danger! High Voltage by a “mechanic” called John S O’Leary, whose camp vocals sound suspiciously like The White Stripes’ Jack White (the band strongly deny their fellow Detroiters had any involvement in the record, as does White).  Oh, and Bill Clinton played saxophone on the track.  Apparently.

Danger! High Voltage was first released on garage-punk label Flying Bomb, who promptly received hate mail from their purist customer base, offended at the song’s disco grooves.  “Flying Bomb said, Guys, we like you but we can’t release any more of your stuff,” says M.

Still, the 7-inch was picked up by John Peel and Belgian bootleg champs Soulwax who included it on last year’s crucial soundclash album, 2 Many DJs, melding it with The Cramps’ punkabilly classic, Human Fly.

As a result, XL promptly signed them up and months of pre-release airplay for Danger! High Voltage paid off with that impressive chart entry. 

The video – featuring unknown actress Tina Kanarek as an elderly punk girl in a flashing bra snogging the supercamp Dick Valentine, himself sporting an illuminated cod-piece – caused a bit of a stir too.  Kanarek answered the Electric Six’s call for a “70-year-old punk rocker” and as a result, says Valentine (possibly disingenuously), became his girlfriend, due to his penchant for the “mature type”.  The relationship apparently fell apart due to “incompatibility issues”.

Tonight’s show, just over the road from Brighton beach at Concorde 2, suggests their forthcoming debut album, Fire, due on 19 May, will be a gloriously varied affair, veering from the disco fever of the singles to a camp cover of Queen’s Radio Ga Ga, complete with audience hand claps.

Given Electric Six’s current anonymity at home, Europe will be their playground for much of the year.  Certainly, during their last schlep around continental parts, they had to learn some lessons the hard way.  “We really don’t know how to treat ourselves on the road yet,” muses Joebot, as band members huddle around the venue’s only heater after the gig.  “This is our first major jaunt – we’re just getting used to what we can and can’t do.”

“Everybody lost their mind at one pint or another,” says Rock ‘N’ Roll Indian.

So what have you learned?

“I don’t know from personal experience,” says Joebot coyly, “but I’ve heard that eating a ball of hash won’t take the edge off Valium.  There’s no edge on Valium to begin with – so you just put yourself further and further into the red.”

“Your mind starts playing games with you,” nods Disco.

“This was after they made the decision to snort the Valium,” says Valentine.

“It’s not hitting us quick enough! Let’s snort it!” recalls Joebot.

“In Hamburg I thought I was never coming back,” says Rock ‘N’ Roll Indian.

“They thought it would be funny to put us in a hotel right on the Reeperbahn,” says Disco. 

“Ha ha,” Joebot adds, sarcastically.

So what happened?

“Coke on the road, man,” Rock ‘N’ Roll Indian whispers.

“And you can definitely quote him on that,” adds M.

“Keep in mind we only went out there for a week,” says Valentine.

This is their second photo session of the day: the first, in London, was conducted by renowned “beautiful people” snapper Mario Testino for Vogue.  With their secondhand lounge-lizard suits and non-model physiques, they’re hardly standard fashion shoot material.  (Testino told Disco: “You know who you remind me of? Meat Loaf….”) Earlier this month, in Paris, they found themselves attending Naomi Campbell’s private loft party.  “We ended up meeting a lot of Paris fashionistas after the show,” sighs Joebot.  “And they dragged us along to Naomi’s place for a few drinks.  I suppose you could say that was a little strange.”

This new found glamorous lifestyle has come as something of a shock and they miss home.  Detroit might have guns, inner city decay and sub-zero temperatures, but it’s where the heart is.  

“On New Year’s Eve in Detroit, there’s always random gunfire into the skies,” Disco says.  “Hundreds of shots – Uzis, machine guns, shotguns, everything.”

But it’s not all fun and games.  The Rock ‘N’ Roll Indian once nearly found himself on the harsh end of this firepower while doing “bad stuff” with someone else in a car outside a party at M’s house.

“I wasn’t being smart,” he says.  “I thought these homeless guys were after a cigarette so I rolled down my window.  Instead, he stuck a shotgun in my chest.  The guy who had the bad stuff ran out of the car and they shot him in the ass.  I’m still sitting there with my hands up saying, Dude, please don’t shoot!”

“In a lot of ways it’s fun,” says Joebot.

Gunshot wounds permitting, what would they like to achieve by the end of the year? 

“Survival is a major ambition,” says Disco.

“We are organisms after all,” says Valentine.

“And if we’re still bipedal, then we’ll have won,” nods M.

At last, a band ready to risk life and limb for rock ‘n’ roll.

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