The Dirty Three: a retrospective, in three parts.

Part 2: maturity

Melbourne is a music town. More so than any other Australian city, music dominates the cultural landscape here. Go out anywhere – at least in the inner city – on any given night, and there’s bound to be a band playing somewhere nearby.

None of those bands is the Dirty Three. Like many Australians involved in the arts, they’ve long since left the country (though I think Mick Turner is still around here somewhere), but the scene that fostered them is still very much alive. I’ve written before on this site about three of my favourite bands in that scene, and my intention here is not to write about the Melbourne music scene again, but rather to explain how my immersion in the scene helped me come back to the Dirty Three after a long absence.

I moved to Melbourne from Canberra about three-and-a-half years ago. I was twenty-five, I’d been listening to music by long-dead jazz musicians almost exclusively for the past several years (nothing wrong with that, I hasten to add), and I was ready for a change. I was ready to renew my long-dormant interest in contemporary music.

Melbourne, for reasons outlined above, was the ideal city in which to do that. I started going out to catch bands three, four times a week – sometimes taking advantage of the particularly fertile scene in Fitzroy, where I lived for my first year in Melbourne, to see as many as five or six local bands in a night. I also started going to see touring bands from overseas: something I hadn’t done for a long time, partly because of the dead jazz thing mentioned above, partly because touring bands from overseas didn’t tour to Canberra very often. (And even if they did, it was a pain in the arse to get to the gigs – but that’s another story.) And, crucially, I started once again listening to contemporary music.

One of the bands I started listening to again was the Dirty Three. I’d always liked them, and I’d always felt vaguely ashamed of not having more of their albums, but for whatever reason – lack of money being a key one – I didn’t own any of their releases other than their self-titled album and a couple of tour souvenir C.D.s, the Sharks E.P. (of which more later) and the Lowlands album (of which more in the third and final instalment of this series). But now, here I was in Melbourne, earning decent money, and hungry for music. It came as something of a surprise when I first realised that I could afford to buy all those Dirty Three albums I’d put off getting for so long.

The first one I bought here in Melbourne was Horse Stories. It still had the feel of an instant classic to me, even if one I was only passingly familiar with. I can still remember the excitement emanating over the airwaves one week in 1996 when I tuned into Triple-J and they were talking about this new Dirty Three album. When I first took it back to my house in Melbourne and opened it up, it was a slightly spine-tingling moment – as it is still, a good couple of years after I first bought it. The album is austerely presented: the vivid cover painting (by Mick Turner, in what would soon become a trademark style) gives way as soon as the C.D. case is opened to images of cloudy skies and simple text. The simplest text, really: the first thing you notice when you open the case is the disc itself, which bears only the name of the album, the name of the band, and the name of the record label. Opposite it, on the back-page of the liner notes, is what is conspicuously absent from the back of the case: a track list, printed in dark red against the aforementioned cloudy sky.

I was surprised by how familiar I was with some of the titles in that track list. I’d heard them on the radio way back when, of course, and I’d heard some of them played live (usually furnished by Warren Ellis with an alternative and wildly verbose title). The Dirty Three have always been good at titles, for both albums and for songs, and the titles of the songs on Horse Stories have become something akin to mantras, or psalms, for Dirty Three fans: words of power that mean so much more than what they say. This, after all, is the true beginning of the Dirty Three legend, and even if you have only a passing familiarity with the band there’s a chance you’ll recognise names like “Sue’s Last Ride”, or “Hope”, or “I Remember a Time When Once You Used to Love Me”.

I was surprised by how familiar I was, too, with some of the melodies on the album. The Dirty Three have always been about melody above all other musical elements, and it’s testament to their skill and power as song-writers that the melodies lingered on, latent in my brain, even though unheard for ten years. I can remember a vivid sense from those radio days of the band having honed their sound: they weren’t doing anything noticeably different, they were just doing it better.

A case in point is track three on Horse Stories, the aforementioned “Hope”. It’s an iconic song, perhaps the most moving on the entire album, and the title at first seems unlikely: the Dirty Three haven’t often presented joy without attendant sorrow, and at the beginning of the song it seems that if this is hope then it’s a very Dirty Three style of hope: the songs starts in the darkest despair, with Warren Ellis, displaying typical casual virtuosity, squeezing – almost literally, it sounds like – squeaky, rasping notes out of his violin with which to frame the first of the song’s two main melodies. It’s almost painful to listen to, both physically and emotionally; at times it sounds like the violin is crying and at other times it sounds, quite frankly, like the violin is dry-retching. It seems like somebody forgot to put the “less” on the end of the title.

But there’s a second melody, a bridge in the traditional song-writing sense, a sumptuous “ah, but” moment when the song suddenly blossoms and Ellis’s notes become stronger and bolder and his playing becomes, if more conventional, then also more powerfully direct. Ellis’s violin is double-tracked here, playing a kind of a canon, twining around itself ecstatically, and as the violin (or “violins”) soars upwards it brings everything else with it – Jim White’s drums, Mick Turner’s guitar (playing through the chord changes in a much more straight-forward manner than is normally the case on a Dirty Three song), and especially the listener. You can almost feel yourself floating out of your seat as the song stirs your heart. This, then, is hope: hope from nothing, blind faith, optimism from the heart of the darkest depression.

It’s an early peak, but by this stage of their career the Dirty Three are such consummate musicians and song-writers that the album never wavers from therein. By this stage I’d been away from the Dirty Three for so long that – notwithstanding my vivid memories of their live shows in the nineties, which invariably escalated into walls of cascading white noise – I’d forgotten how loud a band they were. Horse Stories alternates neatly between the loud and the soft – the angry and the despondent, the self-aggrandising and the painfully shy. A song like “Hope” is followed by one like “I Remember a Time When Once You Used to Love Me”, a fierce waltz positively bristling with electricity in which Mick Turner’s guitar clangs and grinds and Warren Ellis’s violin – urged on by Jim White’s cascading drum-rolls – wrings out every last drop of fury and regret that the listener could reasonably expect to hear in a song with a title like that. Then it’s “At the Bar”, all mournful solitude, then “Red”, which has the melody of a ballad but which is pushed out of the speakers almost against its will, again with White’s drum rolls being the driving force.

And so it goes, the Dirty Three I remembered but had somehow forgotten, as exhilarating and even deafening as they’d been live back in the day, but as sorrowful and melancholy as their music has always seemed destined to be. I’d been away from the Dirty Three for a long time, and it was good to be back.

Back in the nineties, the band was releasing albums thick and fast. And although I’d stopped buying their albums – actually, no that sounds harsh, let’s change that. Although my purchase of their albums had been delayed indefinitely, I was still managing to stay in touch with the Dirty Three. I was still listening to the radio, and by the late nineties, when the band followed up Horse Stories with Ocean Songs, I’d only recently become old enough to start attending gigs. So, in fact, the first time I ever saw the Dirty Three play live was when they were touring Ocean Songs.

It’s somewhat surprising to think that at that stage the Dirty Three was still appearing in strange, small, out-of-the-way places, at least in Canberra: on this occasion the hall at some forgotten high-school in the unlovely part of town. I was mainly listening out for the songs I was most familiar with, of course, the songs from their self-titled album, but I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with their newer songs when they played them.

I can’t recall the set-list from that night, but given the circumstances it’s reasonable to assume that it was heavy on selections from Ocean Songs. As with Horse Stories, the title Ocean Songs is apposite: the music here seems isolated, adrift, miles from land. The songs don’t go anywhere particularly, relying instead on repetition and slow builds to provide a sense of emotional rather than musical progress. Above all there’s a sense of tremendous space in Ocean Songs, and one of the most fascinating aspects of the album is the way in which the band generates this space while also being tighter than on any of their previous albums. Up until this point the Dirty Three’s music had been striking for the way in which Ellis, Turner, and White almost seemed to be playing separate music simultaneously, and yet producing such natural and unified results. By contrast, their playing on Ocean Songs is more focussed, more drawn together – it’d be tempting to say more traditionally “band-like”, if that didn’t suggest that the music had become less interesting. In fact, on Ocean Songs the Dirty Three’s music cut away a lot of the elements that had been so exhilarating in their earlier work, but which was also in danger of becoming overbearing: the fire and feedback squalls that surfaced on earlier albums is absolutely gone, and what the listener is left with is simpler, more direct – and ultimately more emotionally resonant. Even the nominally “loud” songs such as “Authentic Celestial Music” never break out into the kind of furious distortion that was one of the band’s trademarks even up to Horse Stories.

That night when I first saw them perform, Warren Ellis spent much of the night playing with his back to the audience. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that he played facing his band-mates: either way, he was clearly intensely absorbed in the music. With Ocean Songs Ellis’s violin became unquestionably the focal point of the band’s music – even more so than on the band’s previous albums. Turner’s guitar and White’s drums were still as vitally important as they’d ever been, of course, but when you listen to the album it’s never in doubt that their role is that of support players to the violin: the Dirty Three have always been about melody foremost, but never previously more so than on Ocean Songs. Much of the album is given over to almost obsessive repetition of the songs’ key melodies, building resonance in the listener’s head almost by rote rather than by the cascading escalation into roaring frenzy that had marked so much of the band’s previous music. Ocean Songs is an unfailingly quiet album, restrained, and tranquil. This is the open ocean, miles from anywhere and anyone, a continuous expanse from horizon to horizon. That the album is over an hour long only adds to this impression.

With much of the dynamic variety of earlier albums stripped away, Ocean Songs is an album focussed on melody and on a sustained mood. At times the album feels like one long continuous song, so consistent is the tone of the music played here. Indeed it’s tempting to listen to the album as a symphony of sorts, leading to a long penultimate song – “Deep Water” – that draws the songs before it into an emotional whole just as logical and inevitable as any sustained work from the world of Classical music. As with “Hope” on Horse Stories, “Deep Water” features Ellis’s violin prominently double-tracked, but to even more striking effect than on the earlier song: with Turner’s guitar churning away in the bass range, the doubled-up violin provides both tenor and alto/soprano roles, creating a musical richness greater than anything the Dirty Three had given us before.

Back to that gig in the school-hall in Canberra, and I was a young fan who’d saved up his money and now fell eagerly upon the merch desk. I bought two things: a t-shirt that I still have to this day (I was horrified to discover after I’d bought it that it was a tight fit: I desperately tried to stretch the sleeves for weeks after buying it. Baggy was in back then), and a C.D. The C.D. was a four-song tour-only E.P. called Sharks, and in the almost ten years since I bought it it has been one of my absolute favourite C.D.s. Two of the four songs were recorded in Scuzz Studios in Melbourne, and on these songs the band is furnished in a sound quite unlike any other recording I’ve heard of them: if a little dark and murky, paradoxically also full of space that allows the music to breathe gloriously, Jim White’s drums in particular.

Perhaps the most interesting song on the E.P. is the third one. It’s entitled “Rope”, and as the title suggests it’s a reworking of the classic “Hope” from Horse Stories. But it’s a reworking with the emphasis shifted as the changed title might indicate: although the melody remains identical, and the bridge just as soaring, the queasy rubato employed during the song’s main theme brings the desolation home all too strongly. The hope that was a glimpse of redemption in the earlier rendition of the song is here just a phantom, a tease: the despair at the heart of this new version makes the revised title terrifyingly suggestive.

The final track is the only disappointment on the E.P., an almost throw-away live recording of the Dirty Three backing Nick Cave in a by-the-book cover of “Running Scared”, made famous by Roy Orbison. While it’s a useful historical document of the Dirty Three playing with one of their great champions, and an enjoyable enough performance as far as it goes, it reaches no great heights: there are no notable departures from the Orbison version, the Dirty Three are hemmed in throughout, and Cave, as so often, does nothing that couldn’t be improved by his singing inside his natural range. Still, it’s only two and a quarter minutes long, so it doesn’t stick around long enough to dampen the effects of the first three songs on the E.P.

And anyway, Sharks was only ever a tour-only souvenir, a tiny snapshot of a very specific period in the Dirty Three’s history, and the Dirty Three after all have always been an albums band. The next album came surprisingly quickly: in 1999 the band released Whatever You Love, You Are.

Whatever You Love, You Are is the first Dirty Three album since I bought the self-titled that I have no specific memory of. In fact, until recently my knowledge of it was so hazy that I couldn’t recall if it was the one that everybody said was slightly disappointing, or if it wasn’t. I could remember there was one that everybody said was slightly disappointing (even when I stopped buying contemporary music, I didn’t stop reading reviews – I just didn’t pay them much heed). In actual fact, the second time I saw the band perform it must have been when they were touring in support of Whatever You Love, but when you don’t own the albums it’s hard to keep track of which song comes from where. Certainly, when I picked up a copy of the album some of the song titles were ever-so-slightly familiar.

I picked up the album after seeing a documentary on the band at the Melbourne International Film Festival. The documentary was called Dirty Three, and it was generally as unimaginative as that title suggests. But let’s not quibble: if the ultimate aim of a music documentary could be said to be to make the viewer want to rush out and spend days listening to the music in question, then Dirty Three, the documentary, can be held up as an unqualified success. That this is probably just as attributable to the power of the band’s music as to its presentation in the documentary is besides the point here: immediately after seeing the documentary I rushed out to buy a copy of Whatever You Love, You Are. (This, incidentally, was in the middle of this year, 2007. Embarrassingly late to the party, I know.)

What was immediately striking about the album, even before I wrenched off the copious amount of plastic wrapping in which J.B. Hi-Fi insists on swaddling their C.D.s, was that Whatever You Love, You Are has the fewest songs of any Dirty Three album thus far: only six. It’s a risky strategy: a relatively poor song can be easily hidden when there are a dozen or more tracks, but with so few songs every one has to count. But by the time they released the album, the Dirty Three well and truly knew what they were doing.

With only one exception, the songs on Whatever You Love are not especially long, and this makes for an interesting contrast with its immediate predecessor: regardless of its merits – and it has many and they are substantial – there’s no escaping the fact that over the course of its 70-odd-minute running time Ocean Songs can sometimes feel a bit samey – much like the ocean itself. It’s a minor flaw, but it is a flaw nonetheless. Of course, the lack of variety on Ocean Songs lends the album a great deal of its tranquil, almost meditative power – but it also means that it’s easy to lose track of what song you’re up to, or where on the album you are. It’s easy for the music to slip into the background.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that the Dirty Three scaled back the running time substantially for Whatever You Love, You Are. The drastic reduction in duration (by about half an hour) marks the second time in as many albums that the band had narrowed their focus: first it was sonically, from the cantering musical variety of Horse Stories to the uniform mood of Ocean Songs, and now temporally. In fact, the band’s whole history to this point had been one of constant refinement and revision of their previous work.

Every song on Whatever You Love is stunningly good. The opening track “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies” is not quite like anything the Dirty Three had done before. The band’s discography is littered with melancholia, despair, hopelessness (however transitory) – but none of the other songs in their repertoire have quite the sense of dread that “Some Summers” has. The third song, “I Offered It Up to the Night Sky”, begins with something that’s almost a cacophony: melody, always the most essential component of the Dirty Three’s music, is practically thrown out the window as the band squalls up and down scales, blurts out notes, generally gives the impression of stuffing around. It’s a baffling but a fascinating way to start what is the longest track on the album. After two and a half minutes of this, there’s a short break, and then the song proper begins. The other songs on the album are more “orthodox” Dirty Three, but no less memorable for that. But the greatest moment of the album is without doubt the final song.

“Lullabye for Christie” is a difficult song to write about – how can you write about something that’s so simple and so perfect and so beautiful, and not sound prosaic? All three musicians play here with incredible delicacy – most especially Jim White, who gently taps at his drum-kit, occasionally offering a note from the bass drum (a rarity in the Dirty Three’s music) that sounds plucked rather than struck. The melody of the song, composed primarily of long sustained notes, seems to simply float out of Ellis’s violin. It comprises only two phrases, each repeated numerous times – apart from a single brief diversion late in the song, when it seems as though Ellis has been caught up in the almost indescribable joy of the music. The song builds steadily, with White’s drums becoming slowly more insistent – and then, just at the point where most Dirty Three songs in the past would have flown off into a flurry of ecstasy, the band instead gently pull the music back in, and the album finishes with a whisper.

Whatever You Love, You Are is the greatest album the band have produced either before or since, but like most magic, the exact reason why is so affecting is hard to pinpoint: It affects the listener in an emotional way so pure as to be almost visceral. I can’t really say why this is so, not in any terms that won’t make it sound incredibly dry and dull. I don’t think it’s because I was that much less familiar with it when I first listened to it. That would be unfair on the Dirty Three and their consummate skill as musicians: Whatever You Love, You Are is simply a breath-taking album.

And perhaps the most incredible thing about it is that it so completely eclipses the two albums that went before it, Horse Stories and Ocean Songs, albums which any band of any ilk must surely be jealous of. In only a few years the Dirty Three had created three albums of incredibly high quality, and if the band have had difficulty sustaining that quality over the two albums that they’ve produced in the years since, we can’t really fault them. But that, as they say, is a story for another time.