When Warren Ellis was making the album Ghosteen with his friend and collaborator Nick Cave, he sensed a “presence” in the studio, lighting their way.
“I don’t know what it was, but every day was a revelation. Every day was a surprise. It’s the only time I’ve ever been in the studio and felt there was another presence. There was something else guiding us. It was the only time I ever felt something else was in control – it was neither Nick or me.”
Ghosteen was informed by Cave’s experience of losing his son Arthur at the age of 15. I tell Ellis that the album, released in 2019, four years after Arthur’s death, affected me deeply but that, having listened to it once, I don’t feel I could ever sit through it again.
“I don’t think of that record as sad or anything the way that you do. I respect what you think. I feel like it is a beautiful record about surrender. It’s about surrendering to something and finding meaning in a terrible event on your own terms. I was convinced that would be the end of our relationship collaborating – I didn’t feel we could go beyond that.”
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Ellis and Cave have worked together on and off since 1993, when Cave invited Ellis to join the Bad Seeds during the making of Let Love In, the fire-and-brimstone masterpiece best known today for its track Red Right Hand, also known as the theme for Peaky Blinders.
But Ellis has always had a life in music apart from Cave. He will shortly return to Ireland with his formative project, Dirty Three, for a concert at which he and his bandmates Jim White and Mick Turner will perform material from last year’s album Love Changes Everything.
The record is Dirty Three’s first in 12 years, and it captures Ellis and company at a wistful crossroads. The band formed in Melbourne in the early 1990s; they’re all hovering around their 60s now; they’ve lived lives full of joy and suffering, happiness and loss.
The sense of having experienced the world at its kindest and its cruellest is filtered into an extraordinary album that is powered by Ellis’s keening violin but that, amid dark, flensing moments, finds space for the soulful and the meditative. Just like life itself, it is fraught one instant, sweet and blissful the next.
“Dirty Three will always be my spiritual home. [But] I don’t think Dirty Three is the sort of band you want coming to town every weekend. It goes the same for us playing,” he says of the long interlude between recordings. “You want to get out there, do the shows the best that you can and then move away from it. It makes it all the more special.”
Cave was already a decade-plus into his career when he invited Ellis to work with him. But it soon became clear that the duo elevated each other’s artistry. The relationship continues to inspire both.
That much was plain when the Bad Seeds performed Cave’s Tupelo at their concert in Dublin last year. As Cave ranted and raved, it was obvious that this cathartic account of the birth of Elvis amid the rain “crashing on the pane” was powered by Ellis’s scary, swooping violin as much as by Cave’s singing. It was an extraordinary sight – and one in which the alchemical power flowed equally from each.
Ellis is speaking from his apartment in Paris; his huge bristling beard – think Ronnie Drew dressed as Rasputin – fills the screen. He lives in the city with his wife, the composer Delphine Ciampi, and their two sons. Over the past decade or so he became close to another adopted Parisian, Marianne Faithfull. She died last January, and Ellis remains heartbroken by the loss.
“I loved her very much,” he says. “And she loved me too. I watched the documentary about her, Broken English. It was very emotional, because I realised how much I miss her. She was such a one-off. So defiant, so frustrating, so tyrannical and absolutely adorable.”
He collaborated extensively with Faithfull, including producing She Walks in Beauty, her swansong album, from 2021. This was a friendship as much as an artistic relationship, however. Ellis grows emotional as he recalls visiting her apartment, sitting with her as she watched “horrific shows [about] time-travelling nurses”.
“She was a contradictory person, and complex, but just worth everything. The thing with her is I always knew where I stood. She always shot straight. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it’s upsetting or confronting, but you know where you stand. She was very much herself.”
Even before Faithfull’s death, the past several years had been full of upheaval and trauma. After Ghosteen he felt that he and Cave might never work together again – that they had said all they needed to say. But they would go on to make Carnage, their lockdown masterpiece, and then last year’s Wild God, a sort of coming up for air after the crushing pressure of Ghosteen.
Ellis has also helped set up a wildlife sanctuary in Sumatra, in Indonesia, which led the Australian film-maker Justin Kurzel to make Ellis Park, a movie about both that project and Ellis’s life.
Ellis agreed to participate because he wanted to publicise the sanctuary, which cares for animals with injuries that mean they can never be released back into the wild. Early in the process, however, it became obvious that Kurzel was as interested in Ellis’s journey as in that of the animals.
The problem was that there was a lot of darkness and addiction to discuss, including a stint on heroin, and Ellis wasn’t sure he wanted to revisit difficult times. When he and Kurzel travelled back to Ellis’s home city of Ballarat, in the state of Victoria, for example, he found his past intruding uncomfortably on the present. He wondered if he might not be better off pulling the plug on the project.
“I was quite conflicted about it,” he says. “At a certain point I realised that I felt uncomfortable. That generally is a good place to be making something from. I decided to let Justin have his vision as a director and stop trying to get in the way. And Justin was very respectful and very sensitive about things.
“I’ve said this before, and I will continue to say it: it’s probably the most important collaboration I’ve ever had with anybody. My life changed making that and my life changed after that. It got pretty bad in the immediate aftermath of the filming – just confronting stuff.”
Ellis recalls “stepping off the edge of the world” for four or five months. “I’d been prescribed Xanax for 10 years, for anxiety and all that sort of thing. [I] jumped off that and just went into the abyss. If anybody’s reading this, and they’re going through that, I really wish them well. I’ve given up a bunch of stuff, and that was really horrendous. I basically had a nervous breakdown.”
After the strife came salvation, in the form of the Wild God shows with Cave – transcendental celebrations of surviving the worst life can throw at you. “There was something very different about that tour,” Ellis says. “A concert when it’s good is like nothing else on earth.”
With the Bad Seeds in hibernation, he is looking forward to bringing Dirty Three on the road again and to sharing with his audience songs that are full of darkness but look always towards the light.
“It’s still the greatest wonder for me that I’ve continued to do this for 35 years now,” he says. “It’s my sole way of employment, the way I’ve raised a family, the way I’ve kept food on the table. To stay in the music game so long ... If I think about it, it feels like a miracle sometimes.”
Dirty Three play Vicar Street, Dublin, on Saturday, December 6th
