GIG REVIEWS

Electric Six
@ Leeds Rios
18.02.08
www.vanguard-online.co.uk


I’ve not seen Leeds’ Rios as full as this ever and people are here to party. One group has neon face paint, another has glow-sticks, another has red garlands. A couple circulate through the crowd selling shots of Jaegermeister – usually an indication that ‘the management’ are after the pissed and happy student effect. In the toilets a clearly straight lad is shouting about how he “loves cock”, seeming to have misunderstood whatever Gay Bar was on about. Apropos of nothing, a woman turns to me and says “it’s going to be really good”. Looks like people are hyped for the band’s reputation.

Playing British Nu-Rave bands at their own game, Electric Six’s James Brown riff, ‘Showtime’, replete with caped frontman is four to the floor and real. Follow-up, ‘Mr President I Don’t Like You / Evil Generation’ is powerful funk with confident fronting. Then back to power chords and floor-stompy beats. This is a band flying in all sorts of directions at once, refusing to be pigeon-holed, unless it is in a “self-consciously clever but hedonistic” box. The band are dressed in corporate double-breasted suits, projecting a consummately ironic image. There is an intelligence at work here, belied by the itinerant Jaegermeister peddlers.

Playing a schtick between songs, we are advised that
“the record company says we have to play a song off the new record”.
“We were supposed to start the tour in London but we said ‘no, we want to start somewhere real, Sunderland’. Then they said ‘if you go to Sunderland you will die’. So we compromised and here we are in Leeds.”

The drummer provides a consistent floor-filler beat while the rest of the band know how to make colour and tone. Dicky Valentine provides a postmodern meta-narrative, breaking into chats within songs. He drops in quotes from elsewhere to songs (“everything counts in large amounts”, “dance like nobody’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt”). He mugs at the crowd and waves and grins with a cheeky awareness of the game. Gay Bar is used as an excuse to break it down and show off wall-of-sound guitar histrionics, which is plenty of fun before the 4-song encore:
“We are legends with 4 records – and we’re going to play one from each.”
Shortly it’s all over and 80 minutes have passed in a flash. Electric Six had worked us over expertly but there’s a lot to be said for a room full of people willing themselves to have a good time….

Ross McGibbon