The Dirty Three

I had no idea what to expect when I got to the door of the East End, the short-lived club on Madison’s east side in the mid-nineties. I was there for the Man… or Astro-Man show as they were on the cover that month. What I didn’t know was that the opening act, The Dirty Three, would be a band I would love for years to come. That was October of 1996.

Prior to the show, I hadn’t heard much about this Australian band, except that they traveled around the country, in an old, black Cadillac, going show to show without breaking. I’d heard stories about the band’s leader and violinist Warren Ellis, and his love for whiskey.

When I ran into him at the show, bottle in hand and wearing black, he was just as mysterious and foreboding a figure as I’d heard about. In fact, they were all very quiet.

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The Dirty Three - Warren Ellis

The fluid ease with which Dirty Three create the romance of tidal pulls and the despair of lonesome oceans in their new CD, Ocean Songs, is both tranquilizing and electric. Drums, guitar and violin serve a common purpose, swirling with deliberate ingenuity that lulls and soothes while cutting against the grain. Billowing sails and creaking timbers have room to stretch out. Gurgling mysteries lay simmering beneath the trio’s simple nuances and subtle twists.

Formed in a bar on the rough side of Melbourne, Australia, Dirty Three sound both weathered and full of life, deliberate, yet lazy. Warren Ellis’ winding gypsy fiddle skims and plummets while the cavernous drums of Jim White sound like sharp splashes and plodding depth charges. Their spacious longing can turn romantic and does so several times, stunningly in, “Sea Above, Sky Below,” while the sullen, barren slogging of “Authentic Celestial Music” forms a musical mechanical contraption that starts out of breath then steps up the pace. The ambling ambiance is both hypnotic and ambient, gracefully stumbling in slow motion then turning dangerously monomaniacal. No better example of this appears than Mick Turner’s breezy guitar playing on the whispery “Distant Shores,” a three-hundred-and-sixty degree turn from his crashing, savage churning in “Deep Waters.”

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Midnight Oil

Midnight Oil has been playing their own kind of music for twenty-seven years now with only two changes in personnel. They actually started in 1971 as The Farm. That says a lot when you think about it and think is what Midnight Oil does. Throughout their thirteen releases Midnight Oil has never let up on their causes of social awareness, inequalities and environmental justice. They have also never let up on their hard rocking and sing-along passionate music. 

Fronted by the seven foot tall, shaven head singer, Peter Garrett, Midnight Oil is loud and energetic in their live performances. They have been known to play guerrilla shows on flatbed trucks, once even in front of Exxon’s New York City headquarters, midday during the week. Garrett, who has a law degree, ran for the Australian Senate on a Nuclear Disarmament ticket, losing by only a small margin. The defeat only strengthened his objective of speaking out on political matters as his conscience saw fit. You can’t really argue with a seven-foot tall bald man, can you?

Selling millions of records all over the world, Midnight Oil broke onto the American scene with 1987’s “Diesel and Dust,” a monumental album with unforgettable songs like “Beds Are Burning,” “Sell My Soul,” “Sometimes” and “Put Down That Weapon.” The follow up, 1990’s “Blue Sky Mining” was just as great with the anti-war song “Forgotten Years” and “Shakers and Movers” being as good as anything recorded in that decade.

Midnight Oil’s new CD is “Capricornia” and they are touring the world in support of it. I interviewed Peter Garrett, via e-mail as he was at his home in Sydney Australia. 

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