Dirty Three: Snow Problem.

The Dirty Three play the Tivoli Theatre on March 5. She Has No Strings Apollo is in stores now.

Of course the new Dirty Three album, She Has No Strings Apollo, is bloody marvellous. It goes without saying. Warren Ellis, the world’s finest rock violinist, member of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds and father of two, sounds slightly less certain as he ponders how this ‘difficult’ child found its feet. But in the end he convinces himself.

At home in Paris where snow has turned the French capital into a proverbial winter wonderland, Ellis has a slightly less romantic view. “It’s fucking freezing,” he says. “Snow, you haven’t seen any for a while?” No. ”It’s still white, still cold, still looks great.” Not that his kids are too concerned. “Two-and-a-half and one,” he says. “Busy is the right word for the effect they have had on my life. I’m not looking forward to their teenage years. If they are anything like I was then it’s going to be no fun, at all.”

Parental concerns aside, he admits the trio - Ellis, Mick Turner (guitar/bass) and Jim White (drums) - had its problems with this album.

“It certainly came out - after quite a struggle,” Ellis says. “We really had to work at it. It’s weird. We get together and we can sit down and just start playing. We know each other as musicians so well. But, songs just don’t fall out of the thing that is Dirty Three. We can play together a lot and it’s really easy to respect each other but things seem to get harder and harder - I don’t know why.”

So there they were, in a beach house in Victoria at the beginning of 2001, wondering how the hell they were going to get an album together. They recorded some songs. They didn’t like them because they didn’t seem to sound like a step in any direction from the previous record, Whatever You Love, You Are.

“There was nothing there that really caught our attention,” Ellis says. ‘It wasn’t that bad but it wasn’t that good either. It was just more of the same, really. We didn’t want to put a record out sheerly for the exercise. We’re not that kind of band.”

So they shelved the session and went off on their separate ways.

Jim toured with Smog and Will Oldham, Mick also played some solo shows with Oldham but as Marquis De Tren and set up King Crab records which has already released a small bundle of albums including Ellis’ solo Three Pieces For Violin. Warren was, of course, busy recording and touring with Cave.

A year later, in February 2002, they met in Melbourne to demo some ideas they had been working on individually. Inspiration had seemingly drawn closer to the surface.

“We decided to do something we haven’t done for a while,” Ellis says. “The only other time we’d done it was - partially - with Horse Stories. We recorded a bunch of stuff in Australia and then took the songs we liked the most out on a two-month European tour and played them. It was like going back to the old days, just going out, playing and seeing what happens. It’s nerve-wracking but thrilling. That put an edge on it, just playing this bunch of songs we didn’t know.”

“Basically, we worked out the songs live. During that time, we met Fabrice (Lor) at a show in Paris and he offered to record us at the venue Les Instants Chavires, located in the suburbs of Paris. Fabrice plays in bands, runs a label (Prohibited Records) and, amongst other things recorded part of the soundtrack for Amelie, the film which did for Montmartre what Knotting Hill did for, well, Knotting Hill. We went in for three days and just recorded Apollo.”

The sixth Dirty Three studio album, She Has No Strings Apollo is their punchiest record yet, losing nothing for its flexing of muscle; the atmospheres still breathe and swirl, hang vast and spatial. There are epic majesties, silent whispers, brutal cadenzas. Ghosts flitter through Apollo’s airs and graces and it’s possible to imagine shrouded figures, distant yet tangible. Ellis’ violin weeps and tears as Turner carves elegant-yet-tense guitar figures and White drums with such aplomb and sympathy it’s impossible not to conclude yet again that he is one of the modern era’s best skinsmen. Yet you expect it of them. You don’t expect them to be fallible.

“Oh, all musicians are, I think,” Ellis says. “But we did come through. I think it’s our most rock album and I think the reason it flows is it was recorded when it was still forming. We are now playing more like we used to play.  There’s something new about it yet something really familiar about it  - something that goes back to those very edgy days when we were really playing for the love of it.”

“Our albums have become more structured over the years but this one is about letting the music develop its own character and letting a dialogue take place. It sounds to me like the spirit of our earlier record combined with what we are, what the Dirty Three has become - this time.”

“I honestly don’t know what comes next because it seems we always seem to surprise ourselves in the end. It’s a very organic thing, the Dirty Three.”