You won’t find Electric 6’s new video on Youtube. The reason for this is that it opens with lead singer Dick Valentine sat in a director’s chair, watching an elderly woman stripping down to her knickers.
The theme of nudity continues throughout the video with boobs of all shapes, sizes, colours and ages getting screen time. Also Valentine bounces across a collection of mamarous mountains, gets soaked with breast milk, and dodges fire shot from penises.
“It was easy to make, it was mostly a green screen video, so I was just kinda in one place all day and the hardest thing I had to do was run on a treadmill.”
Valentine’s co-star in the Bodyshot video is his fake moustache which doesn’t want to stay attached to his face. Fake moustaches have tendency of eorking their way into Electric 6 videos, but Valentine insists it isn’t his idea.
“It’s not me, it’s the directors. The directors are always like “Hey, we wanna make you a sleazy guy” so I just show up and there’s all these moustaches on set. It’s never my idea but it’s funny though ‘cos it gives people the wrong idea about me.”
“People say I’m some sort of sleazeball, and all I’m interested in is dirty, sleazey sex innuendo and that’s just based on the videos.”
Dick experemented with growing his own facial hair last Summer but it didn’t stick. “For the first time in my life, last Summer I grew facial hair and I couldn’t stand it. When you eat you get shit caught in your moustache and your beard and it’s terrible so I will never do that again.”
Electric 6 don’t slouch when it comes to making videos. They planned to make a video for each of the 13 tracks of their Switzerland album. Valentine finds it hard to nail down just one as his favourite.
“I like the Formula 409 video a lot. I do think Bodyshot is a good one, and I like the Radio Gaga video too. We’ve made a few videos now, yeah. They’re fun to make, they’re rewarding. And we have a good time doing them.”
the band don’t hang around when it comes to releasing albums either. They have released 6 albums since Fire, their 2003 debut.
“We have five guys in the band who write songs, and we tour a lot. Touring is a good time to write because there’s a lot of down time when you’re driving, so they just seem to write themselves. We recognise that we probably need to take a break but as long as we have songs and material for albums we just keep putting them out.”
“We just throw it at the wall and see what sticks. We do a lot of garage banding and sending files back and forth to each other. Sometimes we come up with a riff, sometimes we come up with lyrics, there is no one way to do it.”
There have been a lot personel changes since 2003 and dick is the only survivng member of the original band. He thinks the current line up is the stongest to date.
“I think the guys in my band are very talented. Every guy that’s in our line up right now is the best we’ve ever had.”
Fans with tickets for the band’s December 5 show needn’t worry that the new pressence of new members will stop the band from playing hits like Danger: High Voltage and Gay Bar though.
“We play a lot of songs off of Fire ‘cos that’s the one with all the big hits. Then mostly it’s the last two albums; KILL and Flashy, and then we try to do at least one song off all the other ones”
A key element of Electric 6’s live shows, and sound in general, is Valentine’s distinctive voice. The voice was not a gift from God though, it required work.
“It took some honing. I used to have a stranger voice when I was a teenager, in terms of how I used to sing. It was very unusual, I kinda reigned it in. I’m a firm believer that anybody can sing, you just have to be able to be embarrassed by what you’re doing sometimes and work out the kinks as you go.”
It’s hard to describe Electric 6’s unique sound to new listeners. Wikipedia places them under the genres of Alternative rock, Dance-punk, New Wave, and various subgenre. Others have described their sound as garage, metal, and even disco. Valentine is takes a less finicky approach.
“I just think we’re rock and roll. If I have to go further than that I just say we’re nervous dance music but we’re just a rock and roll band doing verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus songs. Nothing too out of the ordinary there.”
Bad Manners
It was a bit of a prerequisit for ska bands of the eighties to have a frontman with personality. Madness had Suggs, The Specials had Terry Hall. But nobody had a bigger personality than Buster Bloodvessel who led the Bad Manners into the charts with hits like Special Brew, Lip Up Fatty and My Girl Lollipop.
Buster’s antics have gotten the band into one or two scrapes in their time and at one stage he got them banned from Top Of The Pops. Buster didn’t let the controversy worry him.
“It affected us, no doubt about that, but we wasn’t that bothered. It was a mistake that I painted my head red, and they took offence to it and said “That’s it. You’ll never play Top Of The Pops again” so we said “Fair enough, we won’t””
It certainly didn’t curb his enthusiasm for putting on a show as he managed to get the band banned from Italian TV as well.
“That was ‘cos I dropped my trousers on one of their shows, and exposed my bottom.”
Buster brings his bombastic behaviour to the Academy in Dublin on the 13th of December, and he’s certainly a fan of Irish fans.
“Dublin’s always been one of my favourite places to play, you know, we do it virtually every Christmas and it always goes down very very well. The Dublin crowd have always been a ska orientated crowd and I know that there’s still a big scene for it in Ireland. We do a christmas tour and Dublin always wants the Christmas tour.”
Buster enjoys his time in Ireland but his biggest show of the year is Badfest, the ska and alternative music festival that he runs. Last year it attracted 3,500 punters. This year just an intimate 500 will be attending, but only because Buster have changed the location to his personal island in London.
“”It’s got camping and it’s in the middle of London and I can make as much noise as I want ‘cos it’s got no neighbours ‘cos it’s in an industrial area.”
“It’s called the London Amphitheatre ‘cos I built an amphitheatre on this little plot of land I’ve got. It was just a wasteland that I bought, and it floods every now and again, so that makes it an island. I throw up a few little lights into the trees and it looks like a million dollars”
Don’t expect Buster to park up in an ivory tower just because he’s the promoter/headline act. He camps on the grounds along with the great unwashed.
“That’s the other beauty of it, people come along and see me, and talk to me, buy me a drink, and I get extremely drunk. 500 drinks takes a bit of doing over the course of a weekend.”
Buster is a real ambassador for ska, and reckons its key is its infectiosness
“It don’t really matter what sort of music you’re into, if you come along to a ska gig, as soon as you hear the sounds, you know, people just get into it. You can’t help yourself.”
The idea of a big white guy doing Jamaican music may seem odd but came perfectly natural to Buster
“When I was a little lad, lots of West Indian migrants had moved into the area and so
they brought with them their style of music which I just thought was brilliant. And every Sunday they would have these parties and it was always ska music, so I just fell in love with it. And when it got to the point when we was at school and people was playing in bands, and I sort of started saying we’re going to form a band and it’s going to be a ska band, they were all going “nobody plays ska”, I said “No, but we will”. And we have ever since.”
His love for the genre comes across when I ask him about up and coming ska bands. He is still plugged into the scene nearly thirty years after its peak.
“There’s loads, it all depends on what style of ska you like. For me there’s a band called Too Many Crooks from Brighton that are really good songwriters. I really like a band called Intensified, there’sanother band called Kingsize Ska which is quite traditional sounding ska, and another brilliant band called Ghost Masters Allstars. There a very traditional sounding ska band.”
Although he’s a fan of modern ska bands, he’s not very optimistic about their prospects in the pop charts.
“People use ska music for adverts and things like that but they don’t actually play it on the radio. There’s still a reluctance from main stream radio for ska music. There is reggae stations that play ska but there usually pirate stations or community radio.”
Buster’s weight has always been a on of his defining characteristics. He is a larger than life character in more ways than one (he even ran a hotel for plus sized gentlemen called Fatty Towers), but in 2004 he took drastic action and underwent gastric bypass surgery.
“I used to 32 stone and I went down to 12 stone and I’m now about 15 to 16 stone. I still perform just as well if not better than I ever have.”
Buster has been the lead singer with Bad Manners for about 30 years, but he himself has been the victim of bad manners.
“Keith Richards stuck plastic roses in my nose. He asked me to smell them. I nearly got banned for punching his fucking lights out. I had to be restrained. It was the closing scene of the television sow that we’d just done together, and he came up, and as the bloke was saying “Goodbye”, and he went “Smell them” and I smelt them, and he shoved them straight in to me face. There was plastic with metal rods sticking them up, which went straight into me face, one into me eye. So I really did get fucking annoyed with Keith.”
Tickets are on sale now for Bad Manners’ gig at the Academy on December 13.
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