Interview: Adalita on Inland, creative blocks and Magic Dirt’s ongoing appeal
Adalita Srsen, the frontwoman of 1990s rock outfit Magic Dirt, opens up about the torture she endured to birth her third solo album.
Backstage at the Spring Loaded festival series, where many of the stars of the Australian 1990s alternative rock scene mingle, the sharp elbows that drove the likes of Grinspoon, You Am I, Regurgitator, Jebediah and Magic Dirt to compete with one another have long since been replaced by warm hugs.
Although a healthy sense of competition still drives each band to try and blow their peers off the stage, the between-set vibe is one of mutual respect, according to Magic Dirt frontwoman Adalita Srsen.
“We have a laugh about the same old stuff: ‘No, I can’t remember anything from the ’90s’ and ‘I’m too old for this!’,” she says, smiling. “But we love it, and we’re all really grateful that we can do this, and people actually want to see us still play.”
The crowd of about 35,000 people that gathered at various Spring Loaded events this year isn’t entirely made up of those who grew up immersed in the alt-rock scene propelled by national youth broadcaster Triple J, either.
“I’ve noticed that the demographic is more varied; I thought it’d just be all of us middle-aged rockers, but there’s a lot of young people there,” Srsen says. “There are quite a few kids I’ve met whose parents were into ‘grunge’ back in the ’90s. I remember seeing tears from these young people meeting their grunge heroes for the first time; they’ve only heard them on records, and when they’re finally able to get to a show, they’re just over the moon.”
Led by Srsen’s formidable vocals and striking look, Magic Dirt released six albums between 1996 and 2008. Early on, the Geelong band became known for its wall-of-sound guitars, punk attitude and mastery of both distortion and feedback, as best heard on early tracks Ice and Sparrow.
In an essay published as the prologue for a recently released book titled Sound As Ever – so named after a 19,000 strong Facebook group celebrating Australian music of the 1990s – You Am I frontman Tim Rogers wrote of sitting open-jawed in an Albury hotel room and watching the music video for the former track for the first time, recalling its “syncopated, hypnotic rhythm, mellifluous bass line and coiled guitars that then strike like a f..kin’ cobra.”
Ice, wrote Rogers, “caused me to spill not only my beer but all previous expectations of what was going on in music from this country. It remains my favourite single of these decades. If there is a word for the feeling of being simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt (any German compounds?) it happened in that hotel room.”
Magic Dirt’s biggest hits arrived in the early 2000s, as Srsen and her bandmates took a poppier, more accessible songwriting turn on singles Dirty Jeans, Plastic Loveless Letter and Pace It. After founding bassist Dean Turner died in 2009 from a rare form of tissue cancer, aged 37, the band went on hiatus following the 2010 Big Day Out tour.
Like several of her fellow singers on the Spring Loaded line-up, Srsen has pursued a solo career: her self-titled debut in 2011 was well-received, and included a win for best independent album at the 2011 AIR Awards for independent record labels.
Its sparse arrangements foregrounded her vocals and looped, fuzzy guitar tones, while a 2013 follow-up, titled All Day Venus, saw a return to a band dynamic as she was joined by a bassist and drummer.
When Review last spoke with Srsen in the context of All Day Venus, there were no plans afoot for Magic Dirt to reconvene, although that second album saw the singer-songwriter working again with producer Lindsay Gravina, with whom she worked on several of the band’s albums. “I’ve never met anyone so patient as Lindsay,” she told music writer Iain Shedden in 2013. “He doesn’t let me get away with anything. He always pushes me, even though we’re mates. It was a very intimate working relationship.”
Both the full-band approach and her relationship with Gravina endures on Inland, her upcoming third album, which features musicians including Mick Harvey (ex-Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds) and Marty Brown (Art of Fighting).
With nine years between releases, Inland marks an unusually long time away from new music for someone who was previously prolific in her output. Part of the reason was that, after about 30 years as a professional musician, she opted to step up to oversee the entire project.
“I’ve always produced and co-produced Magic Dirt records, and for my solo records I’ve been in there, right at the helm,” Srsen, 51, tells Review on a video call in early November. “But this was the first time I had to oversee everything, and be a proper producer: picking the players, the studios, and being the arranger of the songs. I think I did a good job overall, but there was definitely ‘producer’s block’ on a couple of tracks.”
Thorny matters of tempo, songwriting and production became unsolvable quandaries, such that she felt lost in the mire and had to shelve working on certain songs, particularly third track Dazzling, which was the biggest puzzle of all. At times, the weight of expectation was felt heavily by the artist, who knew her fans were keen to hear new work.
“For about five years, I was in hell,” Srsen says. “I had this unfinished record with songs that were giving me big issues, a lot of grief, and I had to go out (on tour) and earn a crust.
“People were like, ‘Where’s the record? We want the record!’, and I’d say, ‘I know; it’s not ready; I’m getting there’. I didn’t want to bang on about how hard it was, but it was really f..king hard. At one point towards the end, I just accepted that it was going to take a long time, and it’ll be ready when it was ready.”
That acceptance didn’t come without a fight, though. The inner turmoil of those years greatly affected Srsen’s mental and physical health; with hindsight, she describes it as a “clusterf..k” of a time.
If this all sounds like an artist tortured by too long spent immersed in a single set of songs, Srsen hastens to add the following qualifier: “I’ve learned a lot from the process, and I don’t regret one single moment of how it all unfolded,” she says. “There’s a balance: you have to make yourself amenable to what the music wants, so you have to be a bit of a slave to it – but then you also have to be the master, as well.”
This time, Gravina helped in a different way, at the end of the process, with the pair holed up at his studio near the top of a tall building on St Kilda Road, overlooking Port Phillip Bay – a space she describes as her “haven, sanctuary, palace and paradise”, as the pair of night owls would work through to 5am.
“Mixing the record with Lindsay was such a joy, and such a great breakthrough time, because it meant that the songs were finished,” she says with a smile. “I could never see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I couldn’t imagine mixing the record – but when it got to that point, I can’t tell you how joyous it felt.”
Through it all, from Magic Dirt’s beginnings and into her solo career, Srsen has been a devotedly loyal player of Gibson SG electric guitars. One instrument, in particular, is a 1970-era model that has been by her side for decades. “I can’t believe it’s still hanging in there; it’s been smashed a couple of times and glued back together,” she says. “At a tiny music store in Geelong, I picked it off the rack and said, ‘I want that one’. I had no idea it was (AC/DC co-founder) Angus Young’s signature guitar or anything like that; I just loved it.”
To keep it company, she bought another Gibson SG last year; a tribute model based on the one she’s played on stages around the nation many times. “It’s already got some dents in it, which is great: I don’t like the look of a new guitar,” she says with a laugh. “That’s getting nice and worn-in.”
Just like those new songs, then, which will get an airing at two upcoming album launch shows, where Srsen will perform to her patient and adoring fans – and then she’ll do something she’s been waiting to do for a long time.
A while back, a dear friend gifted her an expensive bottle of champagne. It’s been sitting in her fridge, waiting for just the right moment, but Srsen now knows exactly when she’ll pop it: after her show in Melbourne, on album release day, where the master will finally raise a glass in triumphant relief.
Inland is released on December 2 via Liberation Records. Adalita performs at The Vanguard in Sydney on December 1, followed by the Brunswick Ballroom in Melbourne on
December 2.
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