Mr Magpie

“This is a song, ladies and gentlemen, about – [long pause] finding yourself in a very big fucking
hole and deciding to decorate it and hang around there for like two or three good years and
(getting) to know yourself more than anybody really should… and anybody could…”

Thus spoke Warren Ellis–front-violinist, spokesman, symbol, and soul of the Australian
band Dirty Three-about a quarter of the way into what ends up being a three and a half
minute introduction to one of their most cherished songs during a performance at the
Sydney Opera House in 2019. His soliloquy also touches upon moving back in with one’s
parents, his mate Phil (to whom he dedicates the tune), and the notable and apparently
alarming absence of flies in New South Wales. It is obvious from the second Ellis opens
his mouth that he is improvising, which makes his speech highly entertaining (despite
its lasting half the length of the song itself), but it is also obvious from his tone of voice
that certain bits of material are probably lived experiences that have traveled a long and
rocky road to be laid (more or less) to rest here as a tossed-off joke.

This is actually, in a way, a fitting introduction to the song, and to the way in which
Warren Ellis plays-or, perhaps more fittingly, is played by-his violin. He writhes on
stage and paces, his eyes often closed, facing the audience sometimes, just as often the
other members of the band or someplace else entirely, tracing such wide and winding
arcs it’s a miracle he doesn’t run into anything. He kicks the air; he stamps his feet; he
gestures skywards with his bow like it’s a lightning rod; he shouts apropos of absolutely
nothing but the sound; he plays his bloody heart out. Seeming, all the while, as if he is
about to crash and burn at any moment, the brakes having fallen off long ago, almost; as
if he is just one step removed from being a raving madman who’s been handed a violin,
almost; as if he’s just making it all up as he goes – almost. Yet underneath the shambolic
showmanship is an unmistakable air of truth and feeling, a sense that he knows exactly
what he is doing and exactly who he is, that he knows the score and he knows the song.
I’ve heard almost all of the extant live recordings of this particular tune, and every time
it is, unmistakably and however far from the record it may stray on stage, the same song.
The emotional dust it kicks up has the same familiar taste, and the kind of physical feeling he’s clearly in the grip of up there is something you can’t fake (not without a lot
of drugs, and he says he’s given those up.) I’m moved by the music, every time, but I may
be even more moved by the way the music moves him: the way it shakes his limbs like a
marionette’s, bending him backwards at the waist as he plays as if demanding every last
bit, holding him, like a dancer in the last dance of the night, swooning into a dip. The
way it throws his limbs out in kicks and blows to the downbeats of Jim White’s drums,
as if summoning rain, dancing Diaghilev’s Spring Rounds. Or how in a quiet moment it
might, letting the strings loose, drop him limp to the floor, first prostrate and then
curled, fetal, like a bereaved child, listening to Mick Turner spin lullabies,
softly-strummed and strange, out of his guitar. As the music coaxes him back to life, he
picks up his fiddle and plucks it, off beat and out of tune, rocking, as if comforting
himself. And he gets back in time and he gets back in tune, or as close to either as he
can or wants to be, and he plays imperfectly but beautifully, at least to me (and I’ve been
playing violin imperfectly for almost as long as I’ve been doing anything else – I should
know.)

While I say that his playing is beautiful, I would not call it pretty. It is messy, noisy,
sometimes actually unpleasant, and from a classical perspective hopelessly bastardized
(I can’t imagine what my Juilliard-trained mother would make of it) and yet from it
emerges, somehow, music which means a great deal to me and a lot of other people.
Music which I would call honest. Honest because, and not in spite, of its imperfection
and at times seeming ugliness, honest because wherever Warren Ellis is getting all of
that energy from he isn’t saving any of it for the long ride home and honest because in
its sheer sparsity it has nothing-few effects, little (if any) stage lighting, and, most of all,
no words-to hide behind. I’m reminded of a passage from one of van Gogh’s letters:

“…my bony carcass is so full of energy that it makes straight for its objective. The result is a degree of sincerity, perhaps original at times, about what I feel, but only if the subject lends itself to my crude and clumsy touch.”

Life – what other subject could music, or any kind of art, have? We fail every time we try
to invent another, and yet we keep trying to, because real life is never really all that pretty; it is crude, it is rarely profound, and it is often the last thing we want to have a
good hard think about. It is easier than ever to escape the world these days, and easier
than ever to want to. Music is the most escapist form of art we have, and probably the
best form of escapism, period, if by best we mean ‘least likely to plant you in an early
grave’. Its power stems, I think, from its abstract nature: it doesn’t have to ‘mean’
anything and it has almost no materiality to it; the weight of the world cannot drag it
down, and this allows us to be weightless within it: to bliss out; to escape from the rat
race and the maze of thought into pure feeling. Music is so essential to most people’s
experience of life that it might be called a basic human need. I don’t know that I could
live in a world without music, and just from watching Ellis on stage I’m sure he’d be
doomed. Nietzsche, famously, wrote that “without music life would be a mistake.” True,
but – this axiom cuts both ways. Without life, music would be (and often is) a mistake – a
loud waste of everybody’s time, and none of us have any of that to spare.

More and more, we are using music–as one might use a noise machine or a sleeping
pill–to escape not only thought but feeling, aided by the ease of streaming and the
abundance of music specifically engineered to provide a frictionless slide into sleep or
stupor. You can press play on an ‘ambient’ playlist hundreds of hours long, listen to an
AI vocalist sing songs of simulated longing, or, better still, use Bloom, Brian Eno’s
infinitely generative sounds-and-cute-colored-circles app, and watch the patterns play
themselves as you fall asleep. I suppose it’s a matter of taste, but that, to me, is not
music: that is a pacifier.

The music that moves us–that makes tears start to our eyes or chills ripple across our
skin–does so not because it somehow obliterates or avoids the reality of life but because
it forces a sudden, intimate confrontation with it: this naked, raw thing, wailing like the
strings of Ellis’ violin, being born right now, finding out what this world is all about, and
not liking it very much, but at least capable of crying out. We care about live music–it
makes us feel–because we know it too will die; we empathize. It too is alive only in this
moment: it is not some eternal ray of hope singing out of the cosmos; it comes from one
human making sound and another human listening and that makes it all the more powerful. That sheet music–so much ink on paper, utterly inert and dead–can be brought to life powerfully enough to make a person weep is as much a miracle as the raising of Lazarus, and it (actually) happens every day, and it can even happen to you. That the sounds of a drum kit, a guitar, and a banged-up violin are enough to give a sixty one year-old man the strength to move about on stage for three hours like he’s twenty and newly in love is equally miraculous (although how much of that stage time consists of introductions to songs I don’t know; if anything they’ve probably gotten longer.) Things may, at times, spin out into musical catastrophe, and Ellis admits as much: that sometimes songs do just fall apart completely onstage and Mick and Jim-always so rock steady they almost look bored while playing-have to come rescue him. But then isn’t that what happens in life – you fuck up, or life fucks you up, and if you’re lucky you have some friends, or a family, who’ll fish you out of the restless waves and haul you back ashore, and if you’re not so lucky you’ll swim, and survive, and you’ll move on, and play the next song.

“It was a song that had a sentiment that kind of holds good in even the best of situations…”

As all good songs do. Here and now, in this best of all possible worlds, I think we can
collectively agree that we are not in the best of situations. As another great and timeless
song (which is not by Dirty Three) goes, ‘life’s a bitch, and then you die’, and while yes,
true, somehow it feels gratuitous, and rather demoralizing, to have dug yourself out of a
grave-more or less filled in that two or three (or four, or more) year hole-only to find
yourself standing under the Damocles dump truck full of dirt that is impending climate
catastrophe, the recurrence of preventable diseases, nuclear apocalypse, somewhere
between 4 and 500 million guns, and the hundreds other horrors hopping towards us
every day.

Even if you love life-and I, for one, really do, deep down-the despair can be crushing,
and doubly so because it is at once existential and very real. I’m not sure if it’s worse to
be sixteen, seeing that this is the world you’ll soon inherit, or sixty, watching the
foundations you’ve built your life upon crumble before your eyes. I suppose the most logical thing anyone can do is put their head in the sand, but for those of us not living
on private islands or in alternate realities this is not really an option. So what do we do?=

According to Phil (Ellis’ mate), the solution is “really easy”:
“Just fuckin go down to Bunnings (Aussie hardware store), get yourself a power drill, a power
saw, a bit of wood – and build yourself a coffin.”

For those of us who, like Ellis, say ‘thanks, but no thanks’, maybe what we do is write a
song. Or, if you can’t (although really anyone can), listen to one – really listen. Let
yourself bliss out. Try to feel. It’s always easier than we think. If it’s a good song, at the
right time, you might feel it there, with you in the room somehow: something else,
something alive. Whatever you want to call it–the sublime, the absolute, the universal,
the eternal, god–it’s a lifeline. You just have to reach out, and hold on for dear life.

At the beginning of his introduction, Ellis jokes that “this is our attempt at a hit single that
went horribly wrong [laughter]…”

I’m not sure it did go wrong. Songs are like children – they don’t get to choose a place
and time to be born. Some, to put it crudely, come stillborn. Some of the very good ones
die too young, and some of the worst hold on long enough to doubly disprove the
existence of a just god. Others seem eternal, outliving their makers, generations, and
nation states, outliving even their names.

Perhaps the songs that survive long enough to become immortal–or as close to immortal
as anything can get–are just really good. I don’t think so. Music is not something you
can apply some objective measure of quality to, any such metric or claim to objectivity
being inherently problematic and impossible. I think it’s just that some songs are
simply–and incidentally, it is often the simple ones which survive–a little more willing
to be honest. About the state of this world, about the nature of life, this impossible thing
we all share: how fragile and fleeting and ugly and painful it is, and how beautiful.

I don’t know if it’s any good, but I think this song is true.

This is a song for anyone who needs help hanging on.

This might be the one song I’d choose to play when they drop the atom bomb.

“this song – is called: everything – is – fucked!”
(alternate live version which has better audio and what a performance.)