The Dirty Three

Warren Ellis is in a good mood tonight – a very good mood – and it’s as if to prove a point. Because tonight’s reprisal of Dirty Three’s 1998 album Ocean Songs isn’t some misty-eyed nostalgia trip like many of the “Don’t Look Back” gigs can turn into, and nor is it the fruitless revival of a dead beast. There is no such thing as “recreation” or “revisiting” going on tonight, but simply a performance of something timeless – even if it happened to be made of a certain time. And Ellis is making bloody sure we step on our rose-tinted glasses, even going so far as to irreverently (if one can be disrespectful to that which is clearly their own) change up the record’s playing order toward the end.

Likewise, in his abundant banter he is unwilling to take a trip down memory lane to recite this album’s genesis and contribute to the Dirty Three Myth, instead opting for most likely apocryphal descriptions of each song: “This one is about lying on your back, gazing at the stars and realising you’re pretty small in the scheme of things”, “This one is about a festering romance.” His narration is ceaseless and generous, but it’s designed to throw you off the scent. Between these descriptions Turner starts up running jokes about being here to play other band’s albums in full – most hilarious mention is Supertramp – and asking the sound tech to “make it sound like Franz Ferdinand”.

All jokes aside, when it comes to the performance, it’s a truly special thing, and I can’t help returning to that moment as a prepubescent boy, craning my ear towards the speakers of my dad’s shitty mini hi-fi, trying to work out whether it was people making this noise, for all it sounded like was pure emotion given musical form. Tonight, I can see three men up on stage, one particularly humorous, but all I get is that same timeless feeling as Ocean Song’s undoubted centerpiece, ‘Authentic Celestial Music’, crashes around me.

Ellis ducks and kicks and bows around the stage, forever grazing his violin; drummer Jim White waves his sticks around like a conductor, or a magician; while the forever calm Mick Turner quietly sways as his guitar, not the drums, provides the backbone for this storm of moods. Instrumentally and compositionally, they never quite come together entirely, and this is what gives these songs a tension and dynamic that I had until now forgotten.

What we’ve heard tonight is not a recording played live, not even an album’s worth of material, but a pure sonic and emotional force, and Ellis’ comedy routine was only ever there to provide the sanguine counterpoint to this fact. We have reconnected to something far more alive and violent than a memory – even if it inevitably sustains itself as only that.

by Lawson Fletcher