Electric 6 on Talking Heads

“Jeez, there’s so many, we’re really into Pere Ubu, Devo, even Kiss and Led Zep. Then there are also those classic one-off singles like The Knack’s ‘My Sharona’. It’s weird, we’ve almost become kings of the one-off single ourselves! I dunno whether ‘Danger (High Voltage!)’ and ‘Dance Commander’ are ultimately viewed by people as being just novelty tunes, although it probably wouldn’t upset me hugely if they were.
“I suppose if I were to pick a single dynamic or aesthetic that’s most fed into what we do in Electric 6, it would probably be that classic thing of sexually repressed males from the suburbs. I remember reading an essay Lester Bangs wrote that was entirely about the merits of sexual repression! He was talking about old ’60s records and saying that they were – what was it? – “Magnificent tapestries of the most embarrassing and painful situations. And all that pent-up frustration imbued them with an anarchic power which still moves us.” Something like that!
“So that’s kind of a broad influence, but if I had to pick one band I’d definitely go for Talking Heads. I first heard Remain In Light when I was about 15 or 16, and things were never quite the same afterwards. David Byrne was an incredibly perceptive lyricist, but they always backed up the intellectualism with the funkiest grooves. And again, the fact that they never set out to be self-consciously hip was another factor; the geek aesthetic was always real important to us, being a bunch of nerds from suburbia. They were just awesome. I’m telling you dude, if we ever wrote something as good as ‘Once In A Lifetime’, I’d die a contented man, for sure.”