Interview: Electric Six
After introducing myself to Electric Six’s frontman, Dick Valentine, there is a lengthy silence. So lengthy that I suddenly desperately want to slam the phone down and email his manager saying it was all just a joke. No one was supposed to get hurt. I giggle nervously. His Detroitian drawl finally reaches my ears.“Oh sorry, I’m uh, getting inundated with all kinds of uh, UK press at the moment” This is a bit uncomfortable.
Dick Valentine, or as his mother calls him, Tyler Spencer (which is actually quite a cool name – like a boxing champion, or a slightly intimating but an essentially friendly dog) is charmingly carefree and blunt. Like Dick, the rest of the band brandish equally fitting stage names – The Colonel, Johnny Na$hinal, Smorgasbord, Tait Nucleus? and Percussion World. Ironically, Dick seems to care little for personas and while I admire his bluntness, it also makes me want to apologise for calling. Instead, I decide to ask about the latest album, which was released this October. “It’s very user friendly, you know, it lets you in and won’t let you go until the final note.”
“Constantly improving, constantly evolving. We’re becoming deities.”
As for the majority of the UK, Electric Six will forever remain the Gay Bar band.“I’d never been to the UK when I wrote Gay Bar. I just thought it was a funny one and half minute song with a repetitive riff,” Dick informs me. “I don’t think I ever would try write a hit. I’m not that person. Generally anyone I’ve ever met who says ‘oh this is gonna be a hit’ are assholes, so I try not to be like them”.Trying to veer away from the unexpected success of Gay Bar and Danger! High Voltage, I decide to educate myself pre-interview with a militant listening of their seven albums since Fire (2003). However, I found that the latest offering Heartbeats and Brainwaves, with its slightly intergalactic ambience and daring (if not slightly random) layering and intersecting of different genres, took a little longer to engage with.Valentine cuts me off. “Well that could just be your opinion.” Awkwardness levels peaking… “I just know once I started listening I couldn’t stop. I continued listening over and over again. I didn’t feed the cats, they died, my wife left me. I was just sitting in the chair listening over and over again”.
Ah. This is the kind of Electric Six frontman I wanted – irreverent, insincere and cheeky. However little or much respect you have for Electric Six, there is little mystery and pretension around their style—pleasurably silly, dance inducing alt rock—and with eight studio albums in the space of nine years, it’s no mystery that they work hard either. After their 2003 moment in the limelight, three members left the band, leaving only two original members.
“Every line-up change has generally been to improve the band”, Dick insists.
So you’re actively improving yourselves?
“Constantly improving, constantly evolving. We’re becoming deities.”Despite Dick’s joking, their dedication and perseverance in spite of these obstacles (including being dropped from their American label on the eve of the release of second album Señor Smoke and pissing off Queen drummer, Roger Taylor, with the video for their cover of Radio Ga Ga) is commendable. Marvelling at this ostensibly effortless musical endurance, I question their creative ease.“I vomit songs?” Why did I ask that?“Oh! Oh no, we have six people in the band, everyone contributes their own yknow. It’s actually easy when you’re motivated to keep doing it, when you’re desperate not to go back to the factory,” Dick clarifies, luckily catching my inarticulate drift. “It’s just rock n roll music – it’s not the hardest thing. We always approach it like that. I think a lot of bands get into trouble thinking rock n roll music means more than it does.”
Art for art’s sake! It means what it says! As Dick points out – “the songs don’t necessarily need to make sense, just add up and gets where it needs to go. It doesn’t have to mean anything; it doesn’t have to have a point.” There’s no issue in offering fans some auditory escapism from the difficult issues that often figure lyrically in music (like sourcing a shag now you’re single or reiterating the weighty responsibilities of a Friday). Still, if this kind of dismissal is just blasé arrogance on his behalf then really, really why do they bother?Pushing it, I decide to underline the slightly ridiculous vein of Electric Six’s mainstream success. I ask Dick how he feels knowing that the most career-defining and iconic image of the band’s success is of him donning a chin strap, top hat and bulging in spandex panties: The ‘Gaybraham’ Lincoln.
“It feels okay” Dick responds nonchalantly. “I don’t really care how I’m being iconised”—not entirely sure if the insincerity was detected or if his humour is especially arid—“maybe that’s what people think the band is about but if you’re home and your kitchen like I am now, and the sun is coming through your window you know that none of that really matters.” This is surreal. “That you are who you are, and as long as keep putting one foot in front of the other, nobody is gonna take that away from you”.After this strikingly sincere comment, I’m left feeling confused. It’s difficult to determine what exactly is arrogance or parody with Electric Six. It’s probably this tension that has given them the cult following they have, also being aided greatly by their constant touring and infamous high-energy live shows.
“We are a rock n roll band that plays rock n roll songs, and we are very good at mingling after the show and making new friends. If you have a financial problem or you need advice, we can give you money or some advice,” Dick says earnestly. “We have a new song, It Gets Hot, that comes across really well live,” he continues. “Really gets you wet with anticipation”.
But are you equally, uh… wet, with the idea of constantly ploughing on like this?
“That’s the best term I can think of, ploughing on. For no other reason we can’t help but to plough on. To rub some dirt in its face,” Dick states. “It’s our factory. I was institutionalised – this has been a substitute.”
Self-deprecating, sarcastic and contradictory – that’s what the Electric Six frontman is. I have spent the past thirty odd minutes feeling reasonably uncomfortable and disappointed that I didn’t warm to what I assumed to be a friendly and quirky band, but then again Electric Six aren’t ever logical. In fact, they’re just doing what they like to do – ploughing on. Like Dick says – “It just needs to go somewhere, it doesn’t need to logical place[...] it just needs to go somewhere”.
3 responses below. Comments are open.
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Alex Swadling
Music Editor
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Dick is God.
This interview is so difficult to read, your layout is impossible to follow. Start a new line every time a different person talks. Also, making tiny comments after every line of dialogue is just confusing, we can think for ourselves and we don’t need you to break down every aspect of what he says.
Just have an intro and then copy the interview word for word. Some friendly criticism.
Admin – thanks. Changed
Electric Six are the best band on earth.