Electric Six Bring Their Greatest Hits Chaos Back To Adelaide

The Disco-Punk band at the end of the world… ELECTRIC SIX return to Adelaide for The Greatest Hits Tour. After sold out tours in both 2023 AND 2024… NOTHING CAN STOP Electric Six!!! An ELECTRIC SIX show – outrageous, irreverent, decadent, bizarre and a lot of fun! A spectacle where rock, disco, funk, and raw absurdity collide in a neon-lit frenzy. Expect a full-throttle blitz through their Greatest Hits – Danger! High Voltage, Gay Bar, Down at McDonaldz, Dance Commander, Synthesizer, I Buy the Drugs and more! Dick Valentine talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

A concert, a theatrical experience, and an art exhibit all in one! Three decades in and they’re still the most unpredictable party in town. No overthinking, no pretension – just a raucous romp. If you’re ready to dance, shout, and get weird…this is a night that you won’t forget anytime soon…

Looking forward to coming back to Adelaide for another Greatest Hits Tour?
It’s always the greatest hits tour, because every song is a hit. So it doesn’t matter what songs we play, it’s going to be the greatest hits. The hits are going to be great.

You’ve been coming to Australia a few times now. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about playing in Australia?
That you guys have a grid system of your roads, just like us, and that a lot of the street names are very similar. You might have Smith Street or Main Street, and so that’s very similar to the way we do it in the States. When you go to Europe or the UK, it’s Codlington Muse and Roundabout Close. And so when I come to Australia, you can be on 4th Street, you can be on 5th Street, it’s very similar to the way we do it. Plus, the food is made out of the same materials.

What’s changed the most for you about the relationship you have with Australian crowds over the years?
The relationship, I feel like all around the world, our crowd just keeps getting younger. We keep getting older, the crowd keeps getting younger. There is no precedent for this. A band that becomes older and more tired and more drunk and more out of shape, and yet the crowd is more energetic and looser and younger. It’s never been done before.

What do you put that down to with the younger crowds?
Just the fact that maybe they’re making a terrible mistake.

Are there any particular cities or venues that have weird or wonderful memories you reflect on?
Well, the one in Adelaide — what is that, The Gov? It’s such a weird‑shaped room, it’s one of the weirdest‑shaped venues there is. It’s like you’re kind of at the… it’s like a V, right? And I can’t get my head around where I’m supposed to look. I stand there like a cornered animal, trying to figure out who I’m supposed to look at, and if I step two inches in either direction, I’m going to be in the crowd. I am at my wit’s end, but in a great way, because the crowd is so welcoming. And also, getting back to the food — the food at The Gov is just fantastic. So I come up there, I’m bloated, I’ve eaten too much, and it’s just a wonderful feeling.

I did see a message on Facebook where you said you needed the crowd to balance both sides of the room out, having that fulcrum.
It’s true, it’s a fulcrum. I need everyone listening to be part of the fulcrum. Otherwise… I don’t know what would happen, but I’m willing to learn. If it’s a sell out, if it’s not a sell out, if one person shows up, eight hundred people show up, we’re still going to give it our all, because we’ve signed a contract.

I know it’s a long‑haul flight. What makes the trip worth it for Electric Six?
Oh, getting the miles. Each mile that you’re in a metal tube, sailing over the Pacific Ocean — or in some of our cases, connecting through the Arabian Peninsula. That’s exciting. I’ll get to have a layover in Qatar and breathe the Arabian air for the first time. I’m really looking forward to that.

What’s the secret to keeping that intensity in the performance night after night?
I got my record deal when I was thirty one years old, so looking back at all the horrible jobs I had in my twenties, I don’t ever want to go back to that. So every night I give it my all, because I don’t want to go back to those horrible, horrible jobs.

When you look at the Electric Six back catalogue, especially the ones you play live, have there been any that surprised you by being more popular in Australia than anywhere else?
You’re talking about songs from our back catalogue? Oh, I don’t know. I think the Australian crowd is welcoming, wonderful, engaged. But when you have fifteen albums and there’s sixteen songs on each album — you do the math — you’re looking at nine thousand songs. So for us, we just pump out the songs we feel like playing that night, and then we all go to bed.

If you could curate a setlist based on your own personal favourites, what would you change?
Oh, I have a lot of deep cuts that the band’s never done before. There’s songs off Turquoise that I’d love to do — Turquoise is our latest album — like the last song, The Wheel Finds a Way. Everyone keeps asking us to do that one. We might actually bust it out in Australia, we’re this close to doing it. Plus the first song on that record, Take Me to the Sugar. The first and last songs off the new album we haven’t done before, so I’d love to do that. But there’s only so much time, and you got to play Gay Bar, and usually Gay Bar Part 2, and then you start to run out of time.

The milestones keep coming for Electric Six — I think it’s twenty years for Switzerland?
Yeah, I guess it would be, right? I didn’t think about that. Yeah, it is crazy. It’s absolutely crazy to think that that was twenty years ago. When you tour as much as we do, time just moves very, very quickly, and the fact that Switzerland is now twenty years old is… yeah, you just said it, I didn’t think about it, but it’s true. My mind is now officially blown.

After the milestones, do you take much time to reflect on those, or do you just keep the Electric Six juggernaut rolling?
Yeah, just keep it going. I mean, Fire, the first record, is the one we’ve done tenth anniversary, twentieth anniversary tours for. But like you say, Switzerland’s coming up on twenty — I didn’t even think about that. Yeah, it’s crazy. I can’t get my head around it.

Are there plans for new music for Electric Six?
Yeah, slow but sure, we’re demoing new songs. I think at the end of this month I’m going back to Detroit to lay down a few more songs, and just keep hacking away at it. We all have kids, it’s much harder to get together to record, so when we do, we try to make it productive, and the album will come out when it comes out.

Is there anything creatively you want to explore that you haven’t done before?
I mean, the other day I was thinking it would be great to do a full‑blown yacht rock record. We’ve done a few yacht rock covers, like Eye in the Sky, and I think there was another one we did, but if we could just do original yacht rock songs, I think that’d be good for people our age. So that’s not going to be this record — we’re already too deep into this. We’re just making a regular Electric Six record at this point. But maybe the next record could be a yacht rock record.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Electric Six on the following dates, tickets from Metropolis Touring…