DIRTINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS

THE DIRTY Three were formed in that roughest, but most appropriate of spawning grounds, a Melbourne bar, with the time-honoured ambition of making the rent. This unholy trinity of violinist Warren Ellis, drummer Jim White and guitarist Mick Turner had been around the block a few times, having collaborated with the likes of ex-Triffid David McComb, The Cruel Sea, and The Walkabouts. More recently, Warren has also played on the last three Nick Cave records, not to mention touring extensively with the Bad Seeds.

A cursory listen to any of The Dirty Three’s four albums, especially 1996’s Horse Stories, and this year’s Steve Albini-produced Ocean Songs, betrays a band apart. Their music, a wash of Ellis’ keening violin and Turner and White’s rolling thunder rhythms, is overpoweringly intense: intensely slow, intensely maudlin, and intensely affecting. This is the sound of three natural born players giving free expression to a kind of gorgeous melancholia rarely found outside a Hank song, a Hopper painting or a Kavanagh poem.

“Our records have always reflected the emotional state everyone has been in at the time,” Warren Ellis reflects, recuperating at his girlfriend’s house in France after a gruelling flight from Japan. “Ocean Songs is sort of a schizophrenic record. I think it was a reaction against the (live) show, which had become really violent and hysterical towards the end of the last American tour. We had toured ourselves into the ground and were ready to have a group nervous breakdown, so the idea was to try to avoid making a really bombastic record, or an obvious kind of follow-up to Horse Stories.”

The Dirty Three are an itinerant lot, and have more of an affinity with strolling traditional or country players than any group of record company-funded strategists accustomed to hitting the campaign trail once every two years. By Warren’s admission, the band usually write and work out material on the run, and have only practiced perhaps a dozen times in four or five years. The road is where they live, and to play is their vocation, often to the detriment of their physical and mental health. In many ways, Ocean Songs was a process of recovery from road psychosis.

“It’d been non-stop for nearly four years,” Warren testifies. “We were staying hotels every night, on couches and floors, y’know, and it definitely took its toll. We were basically just playing to live from day to day, it meant we had a room for the night; when we weren’t playing, we didn’t have any money. It was sort of like this really wild adventure, you know? But like all things, you can only take so much.”

A couple of years ago, The Dirty Three, along with Nick Cave, provided musical accompaniment to the 1928 Carl Dreyer silent movie Le Passion De Jeanne D’Arc at the London Waterloo National Film Theatre. Warren remembers the event with a mixture of pride and incredulity.

“Nick and I sat down two days before, and started watching it, working it out, and thinking of music to play,” the violinist recalls, “and then we rehearsed fourteen hours a day for two days. It was really quite an audacious thing to attempt. We were probably asking for eggs and tomatoes to be thrown at us. That (film) ranks amongst a lot of people’s very special films and it probably could’ve seemed quite sacrilegious. I remember being totally nerve-racked when we walked out to do it, but after settling in, it was really fantastic. In various travels I’ve been offered bootlegs of it, but I’ve always refused to listen to it, I’ve wanted to remember it for being something very special.”

When quizzed about the circumstances of his taking up the violin, Warren displays typically Australian unpretentiousness.

“I was about ten years old,” he relates, “and I used to hang around at rubbish dumps. At my local dump I found an accordion and started playing that. My teacher in school started giving me lessons, teaching me old war songs and stuff like that, and then some guy came around asking if anyone wanted to learn violin. When I noticed that all the girls had put their hands up, I put mine up too. And I got a violin, ended up going to the lesson, and there weren’t any girls there, so now I was stuck with this fuckin’ thing!”

Through the encouragement of his father, a country and western singer, Warren got into bluegrass, then ended up playing in orchestras for the best part of a decade. After that he took to busking his way around in Scotland, Ireland, and Hungary, before finally returning home to Melbourne. After an ill-fated 18-month stint as a schoolteacher, he formed the Dirty Three with Turner and White. Which is where we came in.

“We’ve always been fiercely independent by the very nature of what we’re doing,” Ellis concludes. We’ll play as long as we think what we’re doing is good within our hearts. And when we think we’re shite, it’ll be time to open up that laundrette or corner store.”

• The Dirty Three play Whelan’s, Wexford Street, Dublin on Friday August 14th and Connolly’s of Leap, Co. Cork on Saturday 15th. They also play Liss Ard ’98 on Friday, September 4th. Ocean Songs is out now on Bella Union.