On Saturday 15th December I was fortunate enough to see Electric Six perform at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London. Fortunate as, despite seeing them play a mere five days earlier in Brighton, I was shocked and completely blown away by them.
My good friend Tim spent a bit of time writing a great wee article about their seventh album, Zodiac, and why it (and the rest of their output) is both so exciting and intelligent. Yes! Intelligent! A fan-made video for one of the songs Tim mentions in his article, 'After Hours', is profoundly illustrative at conveying where the band is coming from. It combines footage from the films Metropolis, American Psycho, They Live, Eraserhead and A Night at the Roxbury. Normally, fan videos on youtube make me cringe and feel sorry for the people making them, but in this instance the creator has made something that is generally more fitting than the majority of music videos.
So, these guys aren't just being vulgar, mindless schmucks. There is a point to it all (well, most of it). Swift didn't honestly believe that the Irish should eat the children of the poor in order to ease their economic woes. Satire is a potent tool for criticising social conventions, and when in the disempowered position of the musician, it can be a mightily effective one. I find it hard not to read Electric Six's third album, Switzerland, as being an all out critique of the music industry. Fresh from being dropped by Warner, ultimately ending their mainstream music careers, beneath the comic set pieces and ludicrous imagery lies a powerful bitterness. Without being tempered by comic set pieces and ludicrous imagery, such a powerful bitterness would be a major turn-off for most listeners. With this tempering, the band have created what is widely held by fans as one of their most engrossing albums. Maybe at some point in 2013 I'll write about it a bit more, but for now I'm focusing on a gig they played in 2012 which featured but two songs from that album, and one of these was only part of an acoustic set before everything kicked off!
So, I knew what to expect from the gig, especially as I'd seen them play earlier in the week. The tour was to celebrate the ten year anniversary of their breakthrough album, Fire, the one that carried 'Danger! High Voltage' and 'Gay Bar' into the public consciousness in 2003. As a result, the main set in Brighton and elsewhere on the tour had consisted with the album being played in its entirety, bookended by 'greatest hits' from their other albums. Fire is undoubtedly one of their strongest albums, if not the strongest, and so this worked fine as a set. It was also a wonderful opportunity to hear great songs that are seldom played live nowadays. It was the first time I'd heard the track 'Vengeance in Fashion' in the ten years I've been seeing them live, and it was the first time Tim had heard 'Naked Pictures (Of Your Mother)' since we'd seen them in 2003, despite us having covered this song in our band, Philanthropy, numerous times in the past. This was what I expecting then; the entirety of Fire, with about 7-8 other tracks from their back catalogue, with one or two of these hopefully being different to the ones played in Brighton.
That ain't what happened.
I should have said earlier that myself and my wee brother Ian had got VIP tickets to the gig. This entitled us to a meet and greet session pre-gig, a signed poster and entry to the aftershow party. What I didn't realise was that this would also include a wee pre-gig acoustic set by frontman Dick Valentine. This treated us to a couple of deep cuts from the back catalogue, along with a couple of tracks from his solo and side projects. Cute start. Neat touch. Feeling pretty good about the gig.
Then we find out that there aren't any support acts, and in fact the band are going to be playing two sets. Wowzers. The second of these would be the Fire set. Wowzers.
And then, when the lights cut out, the audience all salivating in eager anticipation, out of the shadows ambles Dick Valentine.
Alone.
Wearing nothing but his boxer shorts.
He then proceeds to play 'Underwear' by the Magnetic Fields.
Then Tait Nucleus? the synthesiser player comes out, carrying a t-shirt for Dick.
They then proceed to play a song, just guitar and synth.
Then Percussion World the drummer comes out, carrying trousers for Dick.
They then proceed to a play song, just guitar, synth and drums.
One by one, the other members coming out, assembling the line-up and Dick's wardrobe one song at a time. It was such a surprising and enthralling way to start a set, and I especially loved it as a homage to Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense performance. The songs they played as part of this initial set were all huge favourites of mine, and I couldn't fault their song choices at all. The crowd also helped make the experience incredible; the level of participation from the audience was the best I'd ever encountered at an E6 gig, and there were no acts of arch-douchebaggery from any audience members that I experienced. The E6 Brighton gig of 2011 had seen me sent flying into one of the pillars in concorde2, hurting my back a fair bit. Sometimes you get meat-headed arch-douchebags in the audience. Not so this year.
For the second set, playing through Fire, the band (barring Tait Nucleus? who opted for some flamboyantly camp waistcoat action) wore white naval captain/dance commander uniforms.
They also found the energy for a two song encore after this second set.
This was the gig that kept on giving. The energy levels from the band rubbed off onto the crowd, whose excitable enthusiasm must have rubbed off on the band, and everyone everywhere in that venue was rubbing off all over the place.
Struggling to write paragraphs longer than a couple of sentences now, such is my excitement in recollecting the gig.
The after party was also quite something. I was lucky enough to have chats with Dick Valentine about life and being an English graduate (Dick don't reference Yeats and Shakespeare for nothin' yo), and Smorgasbord (bassist) about Brighton and how much Ohio sucks (it does a wee bit). Both were very pleasant gentlemen, and I would presume the others chaps in the band are as well. It made me wonder, why don't all bands do it this way? Anyone at that gig could tell just how much the whole occasion meant to the band, they were having the time of their lives. It's these little personal touches, these gestures towards the fanbase that make it so incredibly easy to obsess about bands and want to spread their music to as many people as possible. Dick told me that one of the key things for the band was that they treat being in a band as their job, and this approach seems to me to be the obvious way to go. The more you do for your fanbase, the more they are likely to do for you.
Electric Six have a job. The fans, the crazies, are the people they work for. The crazies help pay the bills. Electric Six's job is to get the crazies to pay the bills. Maintaining the craziness of the crazies is fundamental to this. All bands should understand that one album every two years only keeps a crazy person at a certain level of craziness. Work for the crazies, not just the labels. The labels can turn on you. The label turned on Electric Six. Electric Six turned to the crazies. Electric Six released and toured a new album every year from 2005 to 2011. This kept us crazies pretty damn crazy. The crazies paid the band in both love and money, Eros and Thanatos. Them guys worked hard. They got me wanting to work hard. They got me worshipping them as heroes.
Meeting your heroes can be a very good thing indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment