At its best, the Dirty Three live show is capable of disrupting the flow of time and taking listeners on a trip through emotional imperfection, culminating in physical liberation.
A key feature of the band’s performances is the banter of violinist and de facto spokesperson Warren Ellis. He’s a captivating orator, offering rambling assessments of everything from politics and drug use to titans of popular culture.
When he’s not traversing the globe with Dirty Three or Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Ellis resides in Paris with his wife and two children, and has done so since the late ’90s. The French capital has been the centre of global attention and sympathy over the last few weeks, following a series of coordinated terrorist attacks on November 13 that killed 130 people.
“This year’s been very strange in general, starting with the Charlie Hebdo events in January,” says Ellis. “Just all around the world, it seems to have been a very strange year. But the events of November 13 have been very sad and very tragic. Very strange times.”
At the risk of being pessimistic, the future’s not looking much brighter. The vulnerability exposed by such horrifying events tends to catalyse a surge in extreme political conservatism.
“The elections here – they just had the preliminaries and it’s looking really grim,” Ellis says of the initial support for France’s anti-immigrant National Front party, which has since subsided. “Unfortunately, it feels like it’s just the beginning of things, really. It seems like we’re just entering into a very sad and strange time at the moment.
“When this sort of thing happens within the city that you live, things change, and that’s what it’s meant to do. It’s interesting – I really want to be here. It’s not entered my mind to leave. I just think, ‘Fuck ’em. Fuck that.’”
Indeed, it’s essential to keep conducting life in a positive manner and demonstrating progressive ideas. “I’ve done a concert since the attacks here, but there’s a different resonance about them,” says Ellis. “I got asked to do some for an AIDS charity – Jean Paul Gaultier has this foundation to raise money for research. I went and played a couple of songs with Marianne Faithfull and a ballet dancer, and when you go to a concert there’s a different feeling there now in the audience and onstage. It feels more important to perform and to keep making music and to keep living a normal life.”
This realisation bodes well for Dirty Three’s imminent return to the live stage after a three-year absence. Ellis, guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White released their eighth album Toward The Low Sun in February 2012, and toured steadily for the duration of that year. In the succeeding years, Ellis has been exceedingly busy with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, releasing Push The Sky Away in early 2013 before spending a couple of years on tour.
“[Dirty Three] has always been a story that’s unfolded as it’s moved on,” he says. “The three of us have all been involved in other things – I’ve been doing The Bad Seeds for 20 years now and soundtrack stuff with Nick for 15 years. We always thought it was in everybody’s interest that it wasn’t a monogamous kind of relationship, in terms of the musicality of the whole thing and the narrative of us as individuals. We’re fortunate that we’re doing different things. When we do a record, there’s never really a dialogue of what’s next.”
While making the most of family time, during the past 12 months Ellis has busied himself with film soundtracks. In the past, he and Cave have composed scores for The Proposition, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, The Road, Lawless, West Of Memphis and Far From Men. Most recently, Ellis worked solo on the soundtrack for the French-Turkish production Mustang.
Ellis and Cave are both responsible for birthing a unique artistic niche, and with this in mind, working at the behest of film directors could well be a creatively suffocating experience. However, Ellis relishes the opportunity.
“I like that about films, that there are people telling you they don’t like what you do, whereas when you’re in a band it’s very self-satisfying. Because I’d come in from a band world, it was a slight worry that I’d have to give up my freedom – and in many ways, it made me actually discover a new sense of freedom, because you have to actually throw out ideas that you might really want to hold onto and then you have to start again. You’re forced to take a lot more risks.”
Along with a slew of wonderful film scores, Ellis’ experiences in the world of cinema have positively aided his work with the Dirty Three and The Bad Seeds. “Sitting down to do a film, I’ll make like 40 demos of ideas. In a band, you sit down and do a dozen or something like that. It opened up an approach, particularly with some of the Grinderman stuff and The Bad Seeds’ later stuff, where we worked more in that way of making a lot of ideas and then picking the least obvious ones. It’s just about trying to find a new way to stay in the same game.”
Supported by Mirel Wagner, Dirty Three play the State Theatre on Friday January 15 as part of Sydney Festival 2016. More information is available here.
