Dirty Three’s Love Changes Everything: Warren Ellis on 30 years of a magical mystery tour
Ahead of Dirty Three’s ninth album and a national tour, violinist Warren Ellis – Nick Cave’s closest creative collaborator – reflects on the instrumental band’s long, strange trip.
For the first decade of his career as a professional musician, violinist Warren Ellis didn’t have much time for the recording studio. His natural home was plugged in on stage with Dirty Three, the livewire instrumental trio he formed in Melbourne in 1992 with guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White.
For Ellis, performing gave him a jolt of electricity akin to pure inspiration. Recording? Less so.
“The studio was a foreign place that I didn’t really like being in because it was putting something that was instinctive and unfettered under a microscope,” Ellis, 59, tells Review.
“That went against what I thought making music was about: I didn’t want to listen to it and hear that it wasn’t what I was hearing in my head. On the stage was really where it all happened as far as I was concerned.”
Early on, in lieu of rehearsals, the musicians instead would roughly sketch out song ideas in Ellis’s kitchen on a Friday afternoon, then try them out that night while playing to audiences for three hours at a stretch.
Consequently, their unique chemistry and predilection for extended improvisation meant the stage was chiefly where Dirty Three’s real work was done – and then carried into the studio, to try to re-create what took place in the live room.
Across three decades, Ellis’s attitude towards recording has softened somewhat, by necessity. “I get why we made records, and that’s changed,” he says from his home in Paris, accompanied by a smile.
“That’s shifted in me now: I enjoy being in the studio and I enjoy making things.”
It helps, too, that he has built a reputation for being rather good at making things – mostly sound-related, though he also made his literary debut in 2021 with a memorable book named Nina Simone’s Gum, wherein he blended prose, text message conversations, phone photographs, interview transcripts and journal entries.
Though a cult act through and through – “Clearly, we didn’t go in with a vision of looking for some sort of commercial success,” Ellis notes – Dirty Three remains a strong live draw on those rare occasions when the trio’s schedules align. They did in 2019, when the group marked the 25th anniversary of its self-titled debut album by reprising it in full at the Sydney Opera House during Vivid Live, at the request of the Cure frontman Robert Smith, followed by two concerts at Dark Mofo in Hobart.
But for much of the past 30 years Ballarat-born Ellis has become much better known for his association with Nick Cave: first as a session violinist in Cave’s rock band the Bad Seeds from 1994, then as Cave’s closest creative collaborator on projects including film score compositions, a co-writer of the three most recent Bad Seeds albums and their own duo album in 2021, titled Carnage.
In box-office terms, the two acts are leagues apart. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds now regularly fill arenas worldwide, whereas the trio’s upcoming Australian tour – its first extensive run since 2012 – will play in theatres, just as the band’s ninth album is released, first on vinyl and CD, followed by a digital release a fortnight later.
According to Ellis, though, his first band is just as important to him as the one he joined a couple of years later.
“That we still play together I think is a statement of the band’s intent, and what it’s about,” he says of Dirty Three. “It’s not like a comeback or anything. It’s more like we found the time; life just got busier and busier.”
With its rather earnest title, Love Changes Everything, the ninth Dirty Three album arrives 12 years after its last collection, 2012’s Toward the Low Sun.
Stylistically, its six tracks – whose titles are differentiated by Roman numerals – tend to fall towards the more plaintive, delicate and ponderous end of the band’s violin-drums-guitar combination, although the 10-minute album closer builds towards a gorgeously interwoven finale coloured by a crescendo of piano notes.
Across nine albums and 32 years the group has amassed a stunning catalogue of singular, moving music, almost all of which is instrumental (but for a few songs on 2005 album Cinder).
To the uninitiated, a fine point of entry is its 1996 release Horse Stories, which was nominated by Review last year as one of 52 flawless albums; we noted it captured the band “alternately smouldering and at full conflagration, sometimes within the space of a single wordless song”.
Ellis’s good mate Cave, by the way, is a major fan. “Dirty Three are my favourite live band. No contest,” he wrote in an essay that appeared in a 2017 book titled The 110 Best Australian Albums.
“I could write an entire album listening to a Dirty Three concert,” wrote Cave. “They become the catalyst for our own flights of imagination … They work the heart and the mind like no other band around and their generosity of spirit ignites something deep inside. They are the true meaning of the word ‘inspirational’. They inspire. They heal. They give it away. They are transcendent. Spiritual, in the best possible way. And, of course, they blow your f..king doors off.”
Asked whether playing with Turner and White again allows him to access parts of his musicianship that his other projects do not, Ellis gives a long, thoughtful response that contains layers, much like the band’s music.
“Everything you’ve learned from playing with people, you take in with other people,” he replies. “It’s like dead people: they’re not really gone, they’re kind of with you, in a way, as long as you keep the memory alive. The spirits of the people that you play with are with you.”
“I mean, Mick and Jim, there’s something about them that’s probably in everything else that I’ve done, with them not there,” he continues.
“Because it’s there that I did my apprenticeship and learned my trade; I guess the blueprint of how I approached playing was put in place. It was really free, and taking risks, and trust was really quickly established with us. We had to trust each other when we were playing, and trust is a precious thing when you’re playing music.”
“I believe that they’re there, in the same [way] as working with Nick [Cave] for all these years.
“When I step outside of that, he’s there, because anyone I worked with has a big influence on me, in that they let me go, and they rein me in, and they allow me to hopefully do the best that I can, in that situation.”
As the band’s default frontman in the live setting, Ellis is prone to giving long, fantastical monologues while introducing each song, while his colleagues look on, bemused.
His penchant for boisterous articulation has become a curious and much-loved aspect of Dirty Three’s live presentation, as the hirsute, high-kicking violinist pulls focus in a way that often elevates its concerts towards the sublime.
This sort of late-career showmanship – last on display at Dark Mofo five years ago – is a far cry from the somewhat directionless former teacher and busker who first plugged in with Turner and White, and promptly stopped wondering what he was doing with his life.
The answer, it turned out, was making music with other people, and that fascination remains.
“If you’re trying to evolve as an artist, or as a creative, you have to put yourself in risky places each time you step in to create,” he says. “That may sound like an obvious thing and an easy thing, but it’s not. Because often now I go in, and I hear things that I know we’ve done before – and when you get that feeling, you know they’re the things to step away from.
“The more you do this, the concern I have – and I’ve always had – is: will I be able to step into that uncomfortable zone again?” says Ellis. “I know that, in the last 30 years, I’ve found ways to navigate situations. There’s some aspects that I maybe understand a bit better, but I still don’t get it. There’s a mystery about it, and I’m curious about that.
“As long as I have that, then I want to be creating stuff.”
Love Changes Everything will be released physically on June 14 and digitally on June 28. Dirty Three’s 11-date national tour begins at Melbourne’s Rising festival (June 14-16) and ends in Byron Bay (June 29).
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