Dirt music endures for 25 years

Musical adventure is at the heart of everything Dirty Three does.

Warren Ellis, Mick Turner and Jim White will perform their eponymous debut album in Sydney and Hobart. Picture: Aaron Francis

Few bands in the history of recorded music have opted for the unusual configuration of violin, drums and guitar. Fewer still have attracted anything that may resemble a popular following, and a tiny number has managed to exist for 25 years while regularly playing to large crowds in theatres and at festivals throughout the world.

In fact, there may be only one such band with these unique qualifications, and its name is Dirty Three.

Since its first performances at a Melbourne bar in 1992, where the trio was tasked with playing three hour-long sets each Friday night — in return for $50 apiece — the group has held a preference for writing long compositions that ebb and flow like the tides.

They didn’t rehearse back then, in part because each of them — guitarist Mick Turner, drummer Jim White and violinist Warren Ellis — already had to do plenty of that in their other bands.

Instead, playing at the Baker’s Arms worked as a kind of live rehearsal, where they could try out ideas and occasionally glance into the room to see what was attracting audience interest.

More important, however, was pleasing themselves.

“Our approach has always been improvisation and playing with dynamics and tensions,” says Turner. “That’s pretty much our schtick. That comes very naturally with us. I think we’re lucky. That’s why this band has worked so well, for so long.”

From those early bar-room performances emerged a set of songs that they recorded at an ABC studio, in a vast room full of orchestral instruments in their cases, and released as a self-titled debut album in 1994.

Starting on Sunday, the three musicians will celebrate its 25th anniversary by performing that album in full on three occasions: once in Sydney for Vivid Live, and twice in Hobart during the Dark Mofo festival.

Ahead of rehearsals, they’ve been revisiting the work laid down by their younger selves. What do they hear?

“Mistakes,” Turner replies with a laugh, speaking with The Australian from his combined art and music studio in Brunswick.

“When I got the record out and had a listen, it all came back to me quite quickly and very clearly. The year this record came out, we played about 150 shows, and the year after that too. We’ve played a lot of these songs a lot of times. I know it pretty well; it’s like riding a bike, but this will be the first time playing some of these songs for probably 20 years.”

Dirty Three was recorded live in two days, with engineering handled by Phil McKellar. Its seven songs capture the trio in full flight, without overdubs, moving from slow-burning, 10-minute opener Indian Love Song to the thrilling album closer, Dirty Equation.

Though primarily described as an instrumental trio, Dirty Three’s alignment to the world of rock ’n’ roll comes not from Turner’s guitar playing — which, unusually, tends to direct the rhythm more so than White’s drumming — but from Ellis’s early decision to attach a guitar pick-up to his viol­in. As a result, his sawing offers not only the driving melody of each arrange­ment but plenty of distorted feedback during moments of high drama.

While it has never been the sort of group to trouble the pointy end of the ARIA charts, the trio has slowly developed a reputation as one of Australia’s most unique and enduring independent musical exports.

“Dirty Three are my favourite live band — no contest,” songwriter Nick Cave said in the 2010 book 100 Best Australian Albums. “When I watch them, they ignite something, I start having grand plans and hundreds of lyrics leap into my head.”

Since the band’s self-titled debut, it has produced eight albums, the most recent being 2012’s Toward the Low Sun.

These shows won’t be the first time Dirty Three has performed an entire album in concert. In 2010, the trio toured a series of shows where 1998’s Ocean Songs was played front to back, while in 2009 a small crowd at a bar inside an English holiday resort was treated to an impromptu decision to attempt to play 1996’s Horse Stories, with Ellis memorably holding an audience member’s iPod up to the microphone while trying to remember long-forgotten songs.

It has been about three years since the musicians last performed together, according to Turner, as each has their own artistic pursuits: Ellis lives in Paris and is a long-term collaborator with Cave as a Bad Seeds band member and film score composer; White lives in New York and plays drums with acts such as Xylouris White and Cat Power; and Melbourne-based Turner is a solo musician with a healthy sideline in painting. It’s his artwork that has appeared on the cover of each of the band’s albums.

That time apart is part of the reason the trio has endured, in a similar way to how fellow Australian instrumental trio the Necks has thrived despite time and distance apart.

“We still have a strong bond,” says Turner. “We’ve had some rough spots, for sure, but we’ve managed to stay together as an entity and not have a major fallout or anything. I’ve always appreciated their skill, and I think we’ve all gotten a lot better. The thing that makes it good between us is still there — the interplay, that sense of musical adventure.”

Central to the appeal of the music is the chemistry the players share, which has been evident since those first shows.

“Really early on I felt the group was something special,” Turner says. “I’m not surprised that people like it as much as they do because I felt like it was something quite original and very affecting. You’re never sure what people are going to like; I just keep doing it.

“I actually find it a bit strange that we can still sell out the Sydney Opera House. We’re not putting out records. We haven’t played in three years. Even over the last 10 years we haven’t played that much. I wonder where that’s come from?” There’s something strangely reassuring about a musician continuing to find popularity a bit of a mystery, even after 25 years and hundreds of shows.

Turner’s distinctive guitar playing was once described by singer Bobby Gillespie, of Scottish rock band Primal Scream, as “the way that stars are spaced out in the sky”. That element of otherworldliness has long been at play in Dirty Three’s music, and when the group takes the stage again for these three upcoming concerts, it’ll be on display once again.

The album runs for 49 minutes — not including Ellis’s live preference for delivering amusing monologues between songs — so perhaps the trio will make the time for a few other compositions as a reward for its patient fan base.

Dirty Three performs at Vivid Live in Sydney on Sunday, with Darcy Maine’s documentary about the band screening at the Utzon Room on the same day. It also performs two shows at Dark Mofo in Hobart on June 16.