A brisk Monday night in Manchester rattles the bones of eager fans gathering outside New Century Hall, awaiting the dry warmth of the inside. The ice-filled air hums with an electric anticipation: inside, Jim White, Mick Turner, and Warren Ellis are poised to make their long-awaited live return.
After a twelve-year live hiatus, the legendary instrumental trio Dirty Three have finally given the public what they want, and what is universally needed in this hellish landscape, their live return to the stage. Their 10-date tour across the UK and Europe will see them perform in major cities, including a show at the Barbican Centre in London, before heading to Europe for four shows, closing with a performance at the Elysee Montmartre in Paris.
Formed in Melbourne in 1992, Warren Ellis, Mick Turner, and Jim White have spent over three decades crafting a distinctive, mostly instrumental world driven by visceral raw emotion. Drawing on rock, folk, jazz, and improvisation, their music ebbs and flows between subtle restraint and immense intensity, creating emotionally charged cinematic landscapes that breathe with an utmost cathartic honesty.
When they are not occupied by other projects and pursuing separate paths, Dirty Three remain deeply devoted to their craft – most poignant on their latest 2024 release Love Changes Everything, which showcases a beautifully honest testament to their everlasting raw passion for one another.
The trio drift onto the stage to Boz Scaggs’ 1976 classic Lido Shuffle. Ellis dances, claps along and stirs the air with a longing applause of excitement from the audience. As the track comes to a close, Warren Ellis tells the security at the front to take the night off and go enjoy their beer and sandwiches upstairs in their greenroom. “There won’t be much work tonight. They don’t look like the kinda people that will cause trouble. This isn’t a Kneecap concert.”
Ellis takes a moment to dedicate the show to the late bassist and friend ‘Mani’ Gary Mounfield, who sadly died on the 20th November. “This one’s for Mani!”
Within minutes, Ellis is frantically circling Jim White’s pummelling drums, back to the audience, allowing each pound to hit him before answering each strike with an oceanic surge of violins that submerge the room as they dive into the three-part melody Love Changes Everything I, II, III.
Warren Ellis wrestles with the air: his bow arcs, his body contorts, and guttural shrieks are radiated – not just through his violin, but through his coiled posture that pours every ounce of energy into each track. The kinetic energy is balanced by moments of silence, where a pause and breath is emitted, before elongated violins reenter softly into the mix, as if reawakening from a dream.
The audience appears completely fixated, soaked in warm red lights, in a spellbound hypnosis, as long, swirling instrumentals flood the historic ballroom and invite the imagination to take over.
“This is a song about all the birds outside telling you to get fucked.” Ellis says before summoning the tentative ‘Sea Above, Sky Below’ from ‘Ocean Stories’. Soft drums pulse beneath trembling guitar chords, while waves of violin flutter across the vast outback like birds about to take flight. On this long, winding road, direction and destination dissolve; we become unmoored, suspended in a place where time holds no shape and all distinctive features vanish.
Deep within the mesmerism, at peak somnambulist trance, a chaotic tension boils within the concoction, swelling deeper and further into submission. It erupts into a crescendo of whirling bright purple lights, monolithic distortions as Ellis’ screaming violins, fall into Jim White’s pulsating rhythms – reaching the summit, where the violent winds slash at the paws of your raw flesh. The sun-bleached horizon where you formerly stood is no more. As the last draw of freshly sculpted breath is inhaled, you realise you’ve reached the ultimate ecstasy.
The pinnacle of life’s treasures reaches into the palm of your hand, before you suddenly begin to realise. Small, delicate fragments slowly untangle and collapse back into a fragile whisper, the barbaric seasons fracture and tear apart, in a reminder of the life we had left behind, and the limitless voyage in which the mind can propel.
As the wooden panels murmur with memory, and a dance floor that once witnessed Hendrix’s reverie, New Century proves to be a perfect setting for Dirty Three’s live return. On stage, the near-telepathic sense of conversion between White, Turner, and Ellis explores, discovers and reacts to one another through a raw, visceral sonic language.
Dirty Three’s two-hour and a half set manages to summon every season – not just the moods of the weather, but the arc of human emotions. It’s a perfect showcase of the band’s authentic, dynamic and completely unfiltered expression.
Dirty Three seem more relevant than ever within the current climate of a highly saturated, over-produced, artificial, soulless consumerism that governs modern life. Standing completely in defiance of the constant chase for satisfaction and pleasure seeking. Their organic, structure-less, free-form soundscapes – unexpected, unplanned, and unrestricted approach invites us to look back into our dark, sullen, sequestered eyes, that we subject to busy schedules, and ritualistic routines, in a reminder of the wilding and pure essence of life’s unpredictability. That of which is sorely missed.
A deeply, emotionally cathartic spectacle has been witnessed tonight. A privilege, and a true honour to say the least. No band has come close to perfecting the unshaped tightness of space and time so cleverly and uniquely as Dirty Three have displayed.
Mick Turner, Jim White and Warren Ellis spent the evening crafting sound into feeling, creating a vast sonic mountain range alive with intricate details and wordless tales for all to enjoy and become immersed within.
Stop what you’re doing. Walk outside. Listen to a Dirty Three record and fall silent into the moment. Let your imagination do the rest.
https://dirtythree.bandcamp.com/album/love-changes-everything
