ELECTRIC LUST
THE STORY

BEFORE THE STRIP

Jackson Henry Valentine was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1960. His birth certificate listed no father. He wouldn't remember Portland. When Jack was still a baby, his mother packed everything they owned into a car and drove south to Los Angeles. She found work as a waitress and raised him alone in a succession of small apartments scattered across the city.

Money was tight. She worked late. Jack learned to take care of himself. He also learned how to get into trouble. By his teenage years, he was restless, confrontational and increasingly uninterested in anything resembling authority. School offered him very little.

Music was different. Jack spent whatever money he could find on second-hand records. He listened to late-night radio beneath his sheets and became fascinated by the other Los Angeles — the city that seemed to begin after everyone else went to sleep. Neon signs. Cheap motels.

Empty boulevards. Rock clubs. People disappearing into the night. Then he met Johnny, Danny and Roxy.

And everything changed.

THE FOUR

They met in high school. Johnny was quiet, disciplined and already obsessed with the guitar. Danny was the opposite. He could find a party anywhere in Los Angeles, knew people nobody remembered introducing him to, and had an extraordinary ability to disappear whenever trouble arrived.

Roxy was the one person capable of keeping the other three under some form of control. Usually. She played drums with a violence completely at odds with her personality and developed an early fascination with synthesizers, horror films and strange electronic movie scores. And Jack?

Jack couldn't play anything particularly well. So naturally, he became the singer. By sixteen, the four were almost inseparable. They skipped school together.

Went to concerts together. Got thrown out of places together. Spent entire nights driving around Los Angeles without knowing where they were going. And somewhere along the way, they started making music.

The first rehearsals were terrible. The friendship survived. So did the band.

LOS ANGELES

They spent the next several years playing anywhere that would let them through the door. Garages. Parties. Half-empty bars.

Clubs where nobody knew their name. They changed band names. They changed equipment. They changed girlfriends, apartments and jobs. They never changed the lineup. By the early 1980s, Los Angeles was changing with them.

The Sunset Strip was getting louder. The clubs were filling up. The hair was getting longer. The amplifiers were getting bigger.

And the four kids who had spent years watching Hollywood from the outside suddenly found themselves becoming part of it. But sometime around 1985, something else began to change. Jack started writing about a woman.

THE NEON ANGEL

At first, nobody paid much attention. Jack was a songwriter. Songwriters invented people. He described seeing the same young woman repeatedly around Los Angeles after midnight.

Under a neon motel sign. Across the street from a club. Standing beside a highway. Once, according to Jack, sitting in the back seat of his car when he looked into the rear-view mirror.

When he turned around, nobody was there. He never learned her name. He started calling her The Neon Angel. Roxy thought Jack was turning insomnia into lyrics.

Johnny refused to discuss it. Danny claimed he'd met her. Nobody believed Danny. Then she started appearing in photographs.

At least, someone did. A woman in the background. Always slightly out of focus. Always difficult to identify.

Sometimes months separated the photographs. Her clothes never seemed to change. Neither did she. The band laughed about it.

Mostly.

ELECTRIC LUST

By 1986, their music had changed. Johnny's guitars became heavier and more melodic. Roxy began introducing the cold synthesizer sounds she loved from late-night horror movies. Danny gave the songs a dirty, unpredictable groove.

And Jack's lyrics became increasingly obsessed with Los Angeles after dark. One night after rehearsal, two words appeared in pink paint across an old amplifier:

ELECTRIC LUST

Nobody remembers who wrote them. All four later claimed they did. The name stayed. So did the crowds.

By the end of 1986, Electric Lust had become a regular presence on the Los Angeles club circuit. Their shows were loud, chaotic and increasingly difficult to ignore. Jack Valentine commanded the stage. Johnny Chrome barely spoke and let his guitar do it for him.

Roxy Black played like she was trying to destroy her drum kit. Danny Vex somehow knew everybody in the building. And almost ten years after first meeting at school, the four of them were still together. Then Midnight Vice Records came calling.

1987

Electric Lust signed with Midnight Vice Records in early 1987. For the first time, they had a real studio. A producer. A recording budget.

And someone asking when the album would actually be finished. The sessions produced songs including:

NEON ANGEL

LAST EXIT SUNSET

IF WE MAKE IT HOME

NO SAINTS TONIGHT

Some songs captured the band everyone knew. Four lifelong friends. Motorcycles. Girls.

Bars. Gasoline. Bad decisions. Los Angeles at four in the morning.

Others were different. Especially Neon Angel. During those sessions, Jack became increasingly convinced that the woman from his songs was real. Then strange things began appearing around the recordings.

A voice nobody remembered recording. A photograph nobody remembered taking. Several seconds of unidentified audio at the end of a master tape. And a sentence written across one studio sheet:

DON'T FOLLOW HER.

Nobody recognized the handwriting.

OCTOBER

By October 1987, the Electric Lust album was almost finished. Then the Midnight Vice archive becomes difficult to reconstruct.

OCTOBER 3, 1987

Studio session. Nothing unusual reported.

OCTOBER 11

Jack fails to appear for a scheduled recording session. It is apparently the first session he ever missed.

OCTOBER 16

Midnight Vice accounting records show payment for a recording session beginning at 2:13 A.M. No engineer remembers conducting it. No session tape has been found.

OCTOBER 21

The last confirmed photograph of all four members of Electric Lust together is taken in Los Angeles.

OCTOBER 27

A handwritten note appears in the Midnight Vice production files. Only four words are legible:

JACK SAYS HE FOUND HER.

Then comes October 31.

OCTOBER 31, 1987

[ RECORDS MISSING ]

No Electric Lust album was released. No tour followed. Midnight Vice Records ceased operations. The tapes disappeared.

For thirty-nine years, that was where the story ended. Until 2026.

THE TAPES

A collection of recordings carrying the Midnight Vice Records name resurfaced in Los Angeles. Among them was a master tape. The handwriting on the box read:

ELECTRIC LUST
NEON ANGEL
MASTER
1987

The tape still played. So did the others. Electric Lust had finally been found. But something about the recovered material doesn't make sense.

Some recordings contain sounds not listed on the original session sheets. Some photographs don't match their dates. And at least one piece of footage recovered with the tapes appears to have been recorded decades after Midnight Vice Records disappeared. No explanation has been found.

The archive is still being reconstructed. More tapes remain unopened.