Monday 29/11/04 Electric Six @ Rock City, Nottingham

December 01, 2004 by Simon Ward

There were few more amusing sights at last years festivals than seeing the mid-set mass exodus after these Detroit jokesters had played THAT tune. So perhaps wary of this they kept the audience waiting tonight, not playingm 'Gay Bar' until the encore.

In fact it was not until the last two songs of the main set that the half-empty Nottingham crowd were treated to any of Electric Six's singles. All of which meant that for the majority of tonight’s show they were left wondering quite what they were doing here.

The rather indifferent audience seemed to be made up of students with nothing better to do on a Monday night, rockers who couldn’t get tickets for the Darkness and a number of rather scary older couples who looked like they may well be swingers. They were quite clearly only here for two reasons (okay, at a push three for the Queen fans).

Dick Valentine and his five stooges proceeded to plough through a rather joyless set of the filler tracks off their debut album ‘Fire’ and some mediocre new songs which all sounded like a pretty poor Bon Jovi pastiche. Admittedly Bon Jovi never had the redeeming factor of giving their songs’ titles like ‘Electric Demons in Love’ or ‘Naked Pictures of Your Mother’. But unfortunately none of the quirkiness displayed in Valentine’s juvenile, but occasionally funny, lyrics was reflected in the leaden 80’s stadium rock

stylings of his band.

Valentine himself failed to live up to the promise of the charismatic frontman you might expect from their videos. With his new short receeding hair and poorly tailored suit he looked curiously like Jack Dee’s scruffy younger brother, and seemed just as out of place fronting a rock band.

But then, preceded, rather bizarrely, by an acapella rendition of Keane’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ the disco beat and inimitable riff of breakthrough hit ‘Danger! High Voltage’ kicked in and all was forgiven. It seemed hard to believe that they were the same band. Like a cross between the Stones, Iggy Pop and a splash of Saturday Night Fever, it truly is one of the great singles of the 21st century. The band even seemed to enjoy it as much as

their fans.

The fact that this was followed by the somewhat inferior ‘Dance Commander’ didn’t seem to matter as ‘Gay Bar’ was only just round the corner, followed by a very camp ‘Radio Ga Ga’, handclaps and all. So all in all then, the crowd went home happy and the band got to keep an audience for a whole gig. Result. Just steer clear of that second album…

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