Throwback Thursday #1 - Electric Six interview
Originally published by SoundProof Magazine in July, 2010
With the help of the Wayback Machine and the fact that I never clean up my email, I managed to find some of my old published work. I’ll be posting them here on the occasional Thursday as a… wait for it…Throwback Thursday post, which I feel was played out so long ago at this point that I’m actually being retro, not hack.
This chat with Dick Valentine of Electric Six from around the time of the release of their album KILL in 2010 is one of my more memorable interviews. He spent most of our time making me laugh rather than giving me actual material for a story, and it shows.
Electric Six never really slowed down or grew complacent in the last fourteen years - sounding vital on their 17th album, last year's Turquoise. As they’ve moved away from a dancier, synth-forward sound, they resemble more and more the “Detroit garage rock continuum” that Valentine claimed his band had nothing to do with in this interview.
The following interview was originally published in 2010.
Detroit’s Electric Six has been perfecting its sound since first making a splash in the UK with the singles “Danger! High Voltage” and “Gay Bar” in 2003. Speaking to singer Dick Valentine during a recent North American tour in support of their latest record, KILL, I took the opportunity to ask the man himself how he would describe their sound.
“I have always referred to our sound as ‘nervous dance’. I also don’t think that we necessarily fit into Detroit from a musical aesthetic. The fact that it had an amazingly supportive local music scene was very helpful, but we didn’t look at ourselves as part of the Detroit garage rock continuum.
“I tend to come from a ‘80s new wave/pop background and that might be the best way to describe how I look at music. So if I write a song on a synthesizer, my guitar players turn it into more of a heavy rock number. That might be where the sound comes from.”
Electric Six are known for having fun live shows, but you wouldn’t know it from Valentine’s description of how the band operates on stage. “We won’t do anything outside the box of just being a band on stage. No pyrotechnics. No costume changes. We just stand... and judge the audience.” Reverse psychology, perhaps? This self-deprecating sense of humour is one of Electric Six’s most endearing attributes, but one should not believe that they don’t take their music seriously just because they don’t take themselves too seriously. This is a band that releases a new album every year without having the songs suffer from sounding rushed. So will Electric Six ever consider slowing down?
“Writing songs comes naturally to all of us. Between the six of us, it’s not hard to come up with an album’s worth of material in a 12 month span. I think we will probably take a break when we look at the album we just did and feel it was rushed or not very good. So far that hasn’t happened… yet.
“We got our ‘break’ in our thirties as opposed to in our twenties, so we have a decade of working day jobs behind us. We were probably more inclined to treat the opportunity as an amazing job to have as opposed to thinking that it’s a guaranteed trajectory to super-stardom, which is frankly how many bands react to getting their first record deal. We were willing to suffer setbacks and keep working, whereas many bands pack in the tent the minute they are faced with adversity.”
In an attempt to clearly sabotage my own interview, and in lieu of asking him a real question I told Valentine that I thought Electric Six naming their new album KILL is symbolic of an increasing directness in their music. This is a silly thing to say, as subtlety has never been what the band is about. I don’t know what I was getting at but he’s a team player and answered me anyway.
“Interesting… I am not sure what you mean by ‘direct’, I feel like we have always been as direct as we are now and that is to say… indirectly direct.”
Fair enough.
Danger danger ⚡ high voltage ⚡