WARREN ELLIS - how are you?

"Ah, not bad for an old bloke - 35 y'know?!"

You're looking good on it.

"I'm lookin' dangerous, man!"

Dirty Three mainman Warren Ellis has a newfound lust for life. It suits him. Actually, I shouldn't say "newfound" - there's always been a Van Gogh-meets-Iggy Pop element to his music. Indeed the Dirty Three are one of those life or death musical experiences: the first time this writer heard the trio, I figured them the ideal band for a wake, with tunes like 'Authentic Celestial Music' and 'Sue's Last Ride' giving off just the right degree of sadness, anger, and exasperated what-the-fuck. Only problem was, at that point, the chances of Warren Ellis outliving anyone else on the planet looked increasingly slim.

All that's changed now, for a variety of reasons, many of which the fiddler is happy to discuss mano a mano, but requests stricken from the public record - Ellis does not want his dirty linen distracting from his band's fifth opus Whatever You Love, You Are. Which is fair enough, because it's probably their finest 48 minutes to date.

Ellis' violin now speaks in a variety of tongues, the most intriguing being the minimalist crystal arpeggios of the 12-minute/three-part symphony 'I Offered It Up To The Stars & The Night Sky'. True, between 'Some Summers They Drop Like Flys' and the closing 'Lullabye For Christie', there's still that everpresent sense of absence, loss and confusion, but this time out it all sounds just a little more beatific, a little clearer of vision.

Music found Warren Ellis when, as an 11-year-old boy fond of prowling around the local rubbish dump, he found an accordion amongst the trash. Some time later, when a violin teacher went around his school offering lessons, the young Ellis noted that a lot of girls had put their hands up and did likewise. However, when he attended his first lesson the talent was nowhere to be seen, "so now I was stuck with this fuckin' thing!"

Through the encouragement of his father, a country and western singer, Ellis became interested in bluegrass, then spent the best part of a decade playing in orchestras. Following that, he busked his way around in Scotland, Ireland, and Hungary before returning home to Melbourne.

When Warren formed the Dirty Three in a Melbourne bar with drummer Jim White and guitarist Mick Turner in the early '90s, they had no ambitions other than to feed and water themselves.

However, the trio soon began garnering a reputation as a truly outstanding live band, attracting a cult following in England, Ireland, Europe and pockets of America. Sounding not unlike a cross between some Hungarian gypsy combo and Sonic Youth performing Arvo Part compositions, they recorded a succession of albums, including Sad And Dangerous, The Dirty Three and Horse Stories.

Warren Ellis became an honourary Bad Seed around about the time of Nick Cave's Murder Ballads album, despite the Dirty Three virtually living on the road.

"It'd been non-stop for nearly four years," Warren explained in 1998, between the release of their Ocean Songs album and the UFKUKO EP. "It'd been about two and a half years since we left Australia, we were staying in hotels every night, on couches and floors, y'know, and it definitely took its toll. We were just playing to basically live from day to day. Like all things, you can only take so much. We decided we had to take a break. There was a point where I had to play on The Boatman's Call tour with the Bad Seeds, so it seemed like a logical time to break away and do different things and it was really rejuvenating for the group."

A lot has happened between Ocean Songs and Whatever You Love, You Are. For a start, there was the soundtrack to the John Curran film Praise. Then Warren's exploits as a Bad Seed led to himself and Nick Cave forming a sidebar band with Jim White and Susan Stenger, breathing new life into the balladeer's back catalogue.

"I've learned a lot from them," Cave told me in August '99. "A lot. Warren's attitude is, if it's difficult and it's not sounding right, do it and see what happens. I mean, he's always been like this, ever since he's worked with the Bad Seeds, actually. He doesn't play safe in any way and that's been really good."

Since wrapping the Cave side project, Warren has experienced a series of personal and artistic epiphanies, all soundtracked by Beethoven, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Roland Kirk, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus ("I really like the vision he had of black music as a classical form") and, of course, vintage AC/DC ("I spent many months walking around Paris flat out with Powerage and Highway To Hell in my headphones doing all the moves whenever I was feeling particularly poorly").

For Ellis, painting, writing, talking and playing are merely different expressions of the same creative impulse. He sees no line of demarcation between the disciplines.

"I went really nuts on Eastern European directors last year actually," he testifies. "I've been reading biographies of film directors and found it a particularly opening experience when I didn't know how to get out of the borders I'd put up in my head about creativity."

Did all these disparate film makers and artists influence the writing and recording of Whatever You Love, You Are?

"Definitely yeah, without question. Everything influences you in some way. Y'know, you have days when you feel like you could point at the sky and a chorus of angels would sing out and trumpets would come blazing and the skies would blaze open in fire, and other days you can't even drag your sorry arse out of bed. And you can't equate the two different sensations, and it's part of the inevitable dilemma of being human.

"Last year I'd hit a particularly barren period," he continues, "and was feeling very empty and I had a lot of dear friends die, a lot of stuff that left me questioning things and thinking, 'Man, 34 going on fuckin' zero,' y'know? And I really turned to music to try and pull some fuckin' sense out of it. I can't divorce myself from the feelings I have and this record is intrinsically linked with all that stuff.

"The last song on the record, 'Lullabye For Christie' (sic), was from Liss Ard when I was out there playing and this guy started singing and it was Christy Moore. And he apparently hadn't been playing for quite a while, and I found that really to be one of those profoundly moving moments when you least expect 'em, in a wet, damp cold tent somewhere. And I really cherish those moments of clarity and lucidity and reminders of the fragility of us all. I really cherish those moments."

* Whatever You Love, You Are is out now on Bella Union.