Electric Six

Rock fact number 54: it is all too easy to become a victim of your own success.

Much as every band slogging around the toilet circuit dreams of filling Wembley (any band who tells you otherwise is a big fat liar) some bands just work better in a smaller setting: see Belle and Sebastian, The Darkness, and, we’ve learnt, Electric Six.

Over the last two summers, Electric Six have played huge, sold-out shows all over the UK and big tents at the big festivals. And they were... okay. Tonight, however, at the tiny Metro Club they are spectacular. Songs like 'Naked Pictures (Of Your Mother)' in a large setting sound faintly embarrassing and make Dick Valentine and his cohorts come across like a better-dressed Beavis and Butthead. In the tiny Metro however, the joke becomes somehow more subtle, a twinkle in the eye as opposed to a rubber chicken up the arse. Dick’s awful spasmodic moves which from the other side of a field just looked like terrible dancing suddenly morph into... terrible dancing but with flair. Songs like 'Gay Bar' are never going to sound gently ironic but when you learn that the band are friends with Peaches, who covers the song (in return Electric Six have covered Peaches’ track 'Rock Show'. A big gigantic cock show, indeed), its heavy-handed humour becomes a lot more palatable. And songs like 'Danger! High Voltage' are still ridiculous no matter what the setting, but they are eminently danceable and catchy as hell.

New song_ 'Vibrator'_ demonstrates that Electric Six are continuing along a now familiar route, but perhaps now more people will get the jokes; Electric Six are laughing with you as well as_ at_ you and also, a little bit, at themselves. But perhaps after tonight’s revelation it should be hoped that less people will be into them, so that everyone can experience the joy of seeing the whites of the band’s eyes in a tiny venue like this.

Electric Six: catch them when they’re tiny.