The Dirty Three: a retrospective, in three parts.

Part 1: the early years

I can remember the first time I ever heard of the Dirty Three. Not the first time I heard them, but the first time I heard of them. And not clearly, not sharply – but I can remember it nonetheless.

It was on a radio station we have here in Australia called Triple-J. In 1990s Canberra, when I was in high-school, it was what the cool kids listened to. Yeah, I had my odd moment of coolness, even if only a very few close friends who also loved music and respected my opinion on bands and albums admitted it.

And the Dirty Three sounded like a cool band. Not that that was my reason for getting into them: my reason for getting into them was nothing more adventurous than because everyone on Triple-J told me I should. Including, by word-of-mouth, Nick Cave, who I was pretty enthusiastic about back then (this was about the time he released Let Love In – still, to my slight shame, the only Nick Cave album I own). The first time I heard about the Dirty Three, it was in connection with Nick Cave.

Given that connection, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised and a little shocked – in a wonderful way – that the Dirty Three had a song called “Everything’s Fucked”. I wasn’t used to swearing in song-titles at that stage; much less such pointed, bitter swearing. There’s a venerable music show on A.B.C.-T.V. in Australia called Rage, which airs late at night, all through the night, on Friday and Saturday, showing nothing more or less than one music video after another, almost without interruption. Every Saturday night the videos are chosen by a “guest programmer”, that is, a band or singer that is currently or was recently touring the country. At about the same time I first heard about the Dirty Three I’d also hit upon the wonderful discovery that if I tape-recorded Rage on Saturday night and went to bed, I could watch it back the next day and fast-forward through all the dud songs.

Doing so, it soon became apparent that some songs appeared over and over again – that is, they were favoured by many different bands. One such song was “Everything’s Fucked”, with its strange Western-inspired video (you can hear Warren Ellis refer to it obliquely on the album Live! At Meredith, of which more in later instalment of this retrospective). The first time I stopped fast-forwarding the video to listen to the song, it was specifically because I’d heard about this band, whose name sounded so typically Aussie pub-rock but whose line-up and approach to music-making sounded like nothing else on earth, but I’d never actually heard any of their music. “Everything’s Fucked” was the first Dirty Three song I ever heard – as, I suspect, it was for many other people, and it remains a crowd favourite to this day.

It appears as track five on what was the band’s second album, Dirty Three. At the time I actually thought it was their debut album – partly because it was self-titled, and perhaps also partly because there was only one year between it and the band’s actual debut, Sad and Dangerous. It was, in any event, the first Dirty Three album I ever bought. I bought it not so much because I loved that one song I’d heard, “Everything’s Fucked” – I liked it, sure, but I wasn’t sure I entirely understood it – but rather because I wanted to be the kind of guy who owned an album by a band like the Dirty Three. Sure, because I was curious, too, but it’s important not to discount the delight to be had in playing music over the school radio that none of your friends has ever heard before. The Dirty Three spun them out a bit – also their songs took up a good chunk of time in my slot on the radio, which meant that I didn’t have to think of so many songs to play, which suited me just fine.

Because I did take to playing them quite a lot, because once I gave that C.D. a spin I found that I loved it. Just about everything the Dirty Three have since gone on to do is encapsulated in that one album – hell, it’s practically all there in the first tune, “Indian Love Song”: Warren Ellis’s unexpected pizzicato, the way he suddenly careens off into orbit, taking flight in a fit of ecstatic and always melodic bowing, the times, so abrupt that they make you catch your breath, when it all breaks down again and everything gets a bit quiet, like when you suddenly realise everyone’s spontaneously left a party and it’s just you and a couple of mates at four o’clock in the morning with a bottle of wine and you’re out the back, talking quietly so you don’t disturb the neighbours or the ghosts.

There’s a fair bit on that album that wouldn’t show up on later efforts, too: harmonica, kalimba, space organ (whatever that is) – and a cover song (“Kim’s Dirt”, written by Kim Salmon, an early champion of the band but one without the public profile of Nick Cave). There’s also precious little information about the band: just a line-up, some credits, a track list, and a couple of photos of the band which don’t reveal much more than that these three guys don’t really look like they should be in a band together. When this album came out the internet wasn’t the all-pervading data behemoth it is these days, so I couldn’t just hop online to find out all the info I wanted about the Dirty Three. Hell, my mum had only recently started coming home with stories about the new “email” they had in the office. (This was only ten years ago, kids!) In a way I kind of miss that about those days: I become obsessed with bands I love and I desperately desire to find out everything I can about them, but at the same time I love that mystery that wraps itself around a band you’re listening to for the first time. That mystery was hard and dark in those days.

And it meant that there wasn’t much to focus on other than the music. And the Dirty Three have always offered their listeners a lot of music. For a long time my favourite song on Dirty Three was track two, “Better Go Home Now”. The wild rush and swoop and exhilaration of “Indian Love Song” is barely over before the listener is dunked into an icy torment that would quickly become a Dirty Three trademark. It’s like the flipside of the love-affair that you can imagine within the notes of “Indian Love Song”: after the thrill, the despair. Warren Ellis’s violin wails above Jim White’s crashing drums; Mick Turner’s guitar is almost buried between the two, and sticks to low notes the whole way through. Ellis’s drum-work is atypically strong on the beat in this performance: the whole song surges forward like a broken-hearted lover who doesn’t know what to do with his drunken rage at being abandoned. If ever there was a Dirty Three tune that was “Sad and Dangerous”, it was this one

After that things slow right down. The variety in instrumentation that was something of a hallmark of the Dirty Three’s early years is on full display on “Odd Couple”, track three on Dirty Three. This time the beat is left to Turner, who’s right up the front of the mix. Warren Ellis’s violin is nowhere to be heard: in its place there’s a woozy accordion playing fast and loose with the metre and dragging Turner and White with it.

Next up is “Kim’s Dirt”, then “Everything’s Fucked”, then “The Last Night” and finally “Dirty Equation”. If the last two tracks don’t linger in the mind quite in the way the rest of the album does, it’s largely because of the strength of what’s gone before it. The album closes with “Dirty Equation”, a fiery cacophony of a performance, and the listener wonders how this could be the same band that had performed so delicately on tracks such as “Odd Couple” and “Kim’s Dirt”. Dirty Three was the album that truly launched the band, and as far as opening statements go it’s hard to beat.

Of course, it wasn’t really the opening statement. Their career kicked off with the album Sad and Dangerous, a title that sums up right from the start exactly what the Dirty Three is all about. Somewhat better than the music, as it happens: this is very much a band in its early stages. Perhaps it’s not fair to think of this as the band’s first album: it was apparently recorded for the band’s own benefit, so they could hear what they sounded like, and the decision to release it to the public was made after the fact. The album’s an odd mixture: it’s quite clearly a document of a band in its early stages, and there are some ideas here that would be quickly abandoned (“Devil in the Hole”, “Jim’s Dog”, “Short Break”). At times the music sounds like a soundtrack in search of a movie. But there are just as many moments when we can see the band as it would be in the future, and the sound is virtually unchanged. It’s a testament to the band’s good taste and good sense that they quickly abandoned the occasional dead-end ideas that pop up on Sad and Dangerous: after that album, tunes like “Jim’s Dog” are never heard again.

So by 1994, the Dirty Three had become the proverbial Band To Watch. They were Showing A Lot Of Promise. And in the next instalment of this retrospective, I’ll tell you about how they fulfilled that promise.