Dirty Three’s Mick Turner Pulls Back The Curtains On Making Their Debut Record

It’s been three years since Dirty Three last played live and some of the songs from the self-titled album haven’t been performed for 20 years. This month, the trio of Warren Ellis, Jim White and Mick Turner will be reconvening for three weeks of warm-up ahead of the shows. 

Down the line from Melbourne, Turner seems fairly relaxed about reacquainting himself with the older songs, admitting that the previous day was the first time in 20 years he’d listened to the album. “I thought I better revisit it and check I still know how to play them! It came back pretty quickly. We’ve got a chemistry that works really well. It’s certainly a real pleasure to do,” he enthuses, before revealing, “We are also going to try to do some demos in the time between the shows.”

The idea to celebrate the album’s anniversary came from a remark made by the international headline act at this year’s Vivid festival. “Funnily enough it was Robert Smith of The Cure who made a comment when he heard we were playing and said, 'Oh are they playing their first album?' so we thought, 'Oh ok, we should!'"

Indian Love Song 

"I’m still not sure what the odd time signature is on this song. It might be 6/4 but it’s a funny rhythm. It’s based around that one motif. When we got our first shows, it was a residency at a bar [Baker's Arms Hotel, Abbotsford] and we put the band together to play there. We had to play three sets over three hours and so we got together before the first show and we all had different little ideas and played them out over time and this was one of those for sure. In a way this song defines our voice and how we work together. We certainly found the Dirty Three sound through jamming that song. It’s a very simple idea that keeps going but it’s the dynamics and tension that makes it what it is. Warren came along with the initial idea and had that name for it. I think that maybe he heard some Indian music and the idea for it came out of that."

Better Go Home Now

"This is about when you start wearing your drink down the front of your shirt and it’s time to go home. That was one of our oddly short songs, I can’t remember if we played it longer live. I don’t think every song should be ten minutes long, there’s not much planning that goes into that side of it, it’s just how they get played out when we work on them and what feels right. There’s a really good version of this song that we did for the triple j Live album in 1996."

Odd Couple

"We’re going to get the accordion out to play this one live. We used to have more instruments and swap around a lot: space belts, bass guitar, odd bits of percussion like a mop bucket. With the practicalities of touring we used other instruments less and less and there’s only so much squeezebox you can stand [laughs]. We used it on a couple of other things. We haven’t played this one for a long time, I can’t remember the last time we played it live."

Kim’s Dirt

"A space belt is like a vacuum cleaner hose that you swing around your head and it makes an ethereal whistling sound. We’d been using that on this song live before we recorded it. The riff on this song was actually written by Kim Salmon. We used to play with Kim a lot in those days and Warren and Jim were playing with him in a group called STM for a while so he gave us this song, hence the title. I don’t know if we ever actually played it live with Kim. Doing those early shows and playing three sets, it was nice to do ones like this with a different feel and mood."

Everything’s Fucked 

"This one was originally built around my guitar lines and we added all the dynamics as a band and it became a bit of a favourite. The thing with Dirty Three is that you bring along an idea and it never ends up sounding like what you imagine. Those guys are really inventive and talented and they always add so much to any idea I have. Sometimes I’ve used almost the same idea on a solo record and the Dirty Three idea turns out so different you wouldn’t know it was the same thing. In the early days I’d been playing in a lot of punk rock bands and I had a lot of material that didn’t fit with those groups, such as Venom P Stinger. I had a fair bit of material on home recordings that I brought to Dirty Three so it was a great vehicle for a lot of my other ideas."

The Last Night

"Tony Wyzenbeek who played on the album is going to play this live with us. He’s also on Indian Love Song playing harmonica. This is a similar song to Everything’s Fucked with a guitar motif that I had and the other guys added to it and put the dynamics into the music. We’d been playing all of these songs live a lot and we were pretty prepared when we went into the old ABC studios in Melbourne. The room was amazing, it was the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra rehearsal room so it was a really big space. It was all done live over a couple of days, we didn’t do any overdubs that I remember."

Dirty Equation

"This was a great song to play live at the time. A real release. That would’ve been not long after we’d made the album. This was a riff that Warren had that we played through and built up, very similar to Indian Love Song in that sense. There’s great video of us playing it live at a festival in Sydney which Midnight Oil also played at and there was a film crew there. It was a great way to end the night with this song. We’ll be playing the album in sequence for these shows and we’re also looking at other songs that we played around that time. There definitely will be other tracks for sure."