Electric Six -

An Interview With Dick Valentine

The second his call is connected, Electric Six lead singer Dick Valentine is ready for action. Or something. “Okay where you at?” he yells in a speedy Detroit accent. In Melbourne, Australia. “You’re where?” Melbourne. Australia. “Oh, Melbourne, yes! Okay, yes. Okay, right.” Okay! “Okay, go ahead. I’m in the United States!” Anywhere in particular? “Yeah, let’s go; let’s kick it off!”

Electric Six: the latest enigma to emerge from the dirty streets of Detroit, Michigan, with irony, solid work ethic, and handclaps intact. Their party-hearty Chic-via-the-MC5 sound has blown away the new rock competition and propelled the band to the top of the charts, leaving the UK music press, predictably, spoofing their pants and foaming with adjectival praise and plenty of bold-type. So what was the genesis of the band? “The genesis of the band?” asks Valentine, already considering his answer. “Uh, the band formed in late-1996, with me and the drummer, M. And we got together and recorded some demos, and I was going away to television weather man school, and then I dropped out, and came back to Detroit, and we got the band going full-time with the other three members. And uh, and uh, that’s how the band was genesissed. Genesized”.

Given the ‘busy meerkat’ countenance of Valentine [he talks as though his mouth will never move as fast as his mind; sentences drop off half way through as better concepts appear] and the staccato tension of Electric Six’s new album Fire, when he is asked to describe the band’s sound his answer is not surprising. “We call it ‘nervous dance’”, Valentine explains. “We’re all nervous individuals, I’m a nervous individual, and it kinda just goes from there. We kinda transmit our nervous energy into the music, throughout the crowd, and at the end of the show everybody feels a lot more anxiety”.

And the name? The band formerly went by the moniker ‘The Wildbunch’, only recently becoming Electric Six. Did the sound evolve along with the name on the door, or was it just a matter of re-printing stationery? “It was merely a name-change, because of the Massive Attack project [that] used the name ‘Wild Bunch’ as well; we had to go with something else. And we came up with this gem of a name that everybody loves so much. Electric Six? Electric Sucks, if you ask me”. It’s not as bad as ‘The Vines’. “Well, yeah, you know…”, he sighs, “I mean, I think we’ve gotta come up with something better. I’m personally pushing really hard for ‘Fuxedo’. Fuxedo’s fantastic. Or The Turkeys I thought would be a great name. But, you know… I don’t know… ehh, we are what we are. We made our bed and now we gotta fuck in it.”

Of course, when the band released their Christmas single Danger! High Voltage, their “gem of a name” was on everyone’s lips, particularly the NME. However, a lot of the attention given to the single was due to the presence of one John S. O’Leary, a guest vocalist who sounds uncannily like Jack White. Did the band feel their spotlight being unfairly stolen by the ‘old friend of the band’? “Uh, that and the sax solo. I think you put the two together: you’ve got a rippin’ sax solo, you have a mystery vocalist… people love a mystery. And you throw it all together, and you come up with a song that everybody… also the fact that it only has like four chords and the same four chords repeat over and over again makes it easy for the majority of people to digest.” Is the saxophone a neglected instrument in rock & roll these days? “Yeah! I mean, we’re guilty of it ourselves, but I’m tired of seeing people travelling without a good three-piece horn section. Horns are really the missing element in rock and roll”.

And where does Valentine see Electric Six as sitting within the current musical landscape? New Rock Explosion? Punk Funk Revolution? “You see, I don’t really worry about it. I don’t think it does me any good to worry about who I’m being compared with. I don’t really own any records or anything, so I’ve never romanticised music like that. I just have a lot of fun writing songs and being in a band, that’s just how I approach it”.

They also have a lot of fun onstage, with a dance style described as ‘Molly Ringwald on crystal meth’. So what is the preferred Molly Movie for those long nights on the Electric Six tour-bus? “Oh… I gotta go with Sixteen Candles, I think. Yeah, she’s really good in that , and you’ve got the Farmer Ted, John Cusack in an unheralded role, you got the Donger… so I mean, the thing is, everything kinda works in that movie.” And if Electric Six were to have a dance-off with any other band, who would it be? “I guess you’d want a girl band, now, wouldn’t you. Ah, let’s go with… The Ramones! Yeah.” Er, yeah. When asked what’s on the agenda for the immediate future, Valentine thinks for a moment before exclaiming, “Oh yeah! Thursday night we’re opening up for Joan Jett in Philadelphia, how about that! She’d be a good one to dance with”. And when asked how that billing came about, Valentine eschews the usual ‘she-was-given-our-demo-by-the-plumber’ rock mythology in favour of the pragmatic: “We got a phenomenal booking agent”.

Valentine, one time meteorology school dropout, sees synchronicity between his weatherman school escapades and his current life in Electric Six… or something. “I’d like to say that I learned something there [at weather-man school], but I’ve always had a knack for public speaking; I don’t think I learned it in weather-man school. If anything, people think about doing things, all the time, they never follow through. I know a lot of people who think about moving out of their parents’ house, and never even make an attempt, but at the end of the day, I thought about being a TV weatherman, and I took a crack at it. I’m a doer!”

Electric Six: coming soon to a motivational forum near you, and playing the disco party afterwards. Everything you want in a band, really.

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