Dick Diver: ‘It’s Fictional’

As Melbourne guitar-pop greats Dick Diver tour their second album, DOUG WALLEN talks with singer-guitarist Al McKay about Pavement, his country side band and the complicated influence of a trip to Alice Springs.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Two albums, two overnight classics. With 2011’s New Start Again and this year’s Calendar Days, Dick Diver have struck gold back to back. As casual as the two records manage to sound, they pull off what can feel like the impossible: steeping songs in Australian life without falling into shtick-y caricature, and bestowing lackadaisical guitar jangle (see also: dole wave; chillmate) with a philosophical weight that’s both heartbreaking and universal.

But listening to what Al McKay, Rupert Edwards, Steph Hughes and Al Montfort are on about never requires heavy lifting. The songs are as natural as real-life conversation, and just as permeated with passing in-jokes and digressions. No surprise, then, that interviewing McKay offers similarly winding pathways.

When I interviewed Rupert he mentioned The Sinking Tins. I listened to the songs online and really liked them. How did that band come about?
We’re all friends from … I don’t know where the connection is. We’ve been friends for a long time, and go to shows and play in various bands – or have played in various bands – and we just decided we’d start a jam band. We all had a like for, I guess, Sunday country music and drinking beer and that sort of vibe. That’s how we started out, just jamming in the shed where I used to live.

Then, unfortunately, Chris [Crisafi], who was leading the project, moved to Canberra with his girlfriend and that put a a slower on things. But we’re actually recording tomorrow and on Sunday. We get together whenever he’s down from Canberra and have a jam and share stuff online. Yeah, it’s really fun. It’s definitely Chris’ baby though.

You wrote the [Dick Diver] song ‘Amber’, right?
Yeah.

There’s some country in that. And it’s a longer song: it stretches almost to seven minutes. How did it unfold that way?
It just felt good. Some of the other songs on the record [Calendar Days] were quite sharp and punchy, and it was nice to play a song that was a little bit longer. It wasn’t thought out like that, but some of the songs we’ve had on our EP [Alice] and various other songs we’ve jammed, whether they went on to recordings or not, have been longer and a bit more sprawling.

When we did ‘Future Self II’, the version that didn’t make it onto our record [New Start Again] was longer than the one that did. We enjoy jamming, and that song lends itself to that so we just went with it.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Future Self II by dickdiver

‘Amber’ reminded me a bit of The Silver Jews and their second album The Natural Bridge, which is one of my favourite albums. It’s got that laidback country thing, but it’s also really thoughtful.
Wow, that’s a compliment. Well, I’m taking it as one. Yeah, I think Dave Berman is great. I love that band as well.

“I have a joke that every song that I’ve ever written either wants to be ‘Father to a Sister of Thought’ or ‘Range Life’.”

I hear a bit of Pavement in Dick Diver sometimes. It’s a hard thing to pinpoint, so I’ve never mentioned it in anything I’ve written about you. But I saw you support Stephen Malkmus at the Prince on his one tour. Was Pavement big for you guys? Did you get to chat with Malkmus at all?
Not really … for the first part of your question. I think we all like Pavement, but I wouldn’t say any of us are like rabid fans. Pavement fans are pretty big fans. But I have a joke with Rupe that every song that I’ve ever written either wants to be ‘Father to a Sister of Thought’ or ‘Range Life’. And it just ends up being a bit different from that in the end, or maybe becoming more like that from where it starts. So yeah, I definitely like them.

And Stephen Malkmus was … y’know, I think he’s cool. I like his shtick and really like his songwriting. When we met him we didn’t hang out. We’re not like besties. We haven’t stayed in touch or anything. But he was really nice and kind of how I’d imagined him, which was just friendly and really chilled out.

How about Todd Hunter? Have you stayed in touch with him?
[Laughs] Um, no. We haven’t. I was kind of hoping he’d throw us a few tickets to the concert. I didn’t end up going. No, haven’t heard anything more from Todd. But you never know: maybe there’s some collaboration there in the future.

Yeah, well, I was at Golden Plains when you played the Dragon cover [‘Are You Old Enough?’]. It was very well-chosen.
Thanks. It was fun. I actually didn’t realise until afterwards that Stephen Malkmus had done that cover before. Maybe that drumbeat lends itself to Dick Diver style and maybe, if there is a correlation or any shared style between Dick Diver and Pavement, it’s in those drums.

It was amazing, actually, to interview Todd. I was really surprised by that interview. He could have easily been like, “You guys are dicks.” But he was just really fun. It was a real pleasure to do that.

Will you play any new songs on this tour?
I’d like to do a couple. Al [Montfort]’s over in the States at the moment. UV Race just finished up [their tour] and now he’s playing with Total Control. So we haven’t been able to jam as a whole band lately, but Steph, Rupe and I caught up the other week and tried out some new songs. It might be fun to do one or two if we can get them up in time.

Has your contribution to the Matador Singles Club come out yet?
I’m not sure. [They’ve] got our track and Lower Plenty’s [for the split 7”]. I haven’t heard. They’ve got Queens of the Stone Age kicking goals, so I think we’re probably a little bit further down the list than that.

“It was the weirdest recording session we’ve had, because we’d never played the song as a full band.”

What song is it?
It’s a song called ‘Altona’. It’s one that Rupe wrote. They approached Al actually, so it came through Lower Plenty [which Al Montfort also plays in]. So it’s sort of like an Al split. I haven’t even heard the Lower Plenty song yet, but Al says it’s really different from ours.

We just had a few songs sitting around, and Rupe had one that seemed fitting. He and I jammed it a couple of times. It had to be an exclusive song and we had to get it done really quick.

Did you record it yourselves or have Mikey [Young] do it?
Yeah, Mikey did it again [as with both albums]. We recorded it at just a rehearsal studio.

Did you record anything else while you were doing that one?
No, just the one. Actually, it was the weirdest recording session we’ve had, because we’d never played the song as a full band. Usually, even if you put in overdubs on a track, you’ve at least played the song live a couple of times or rehearsed it. This one we’d never even played it as a whole band. Rupe had made a demo that we had all heard, but we all put it together [from that]. We played the guitars, bass and drums together and added to it. We didn’t really know what it was going to sound like until the end.

Which, I gotta say, I didn’t really enjoy. It was just … different. Because it feels like a band song. It feels like a song we should be playing as a band and live. But it didn’t come together that way, which I guess is new for me.

The first thing I asked Rupert about was ‘Alice’, which is actually your song. He said you spent some time in Alice Springs. How long were you there and why?
I went up to Alice Springs with a friend of mine, who was going to work up there. She was working at a women’s legal centre, like a legal advice centre. She was just starting her job up there with another friend, a social worker. I always wanted to go so we did the drive and I stayed there for a few days. We went out and saw some of the stuff around Alice. She was up there for a couple years and over that time she’d come back down to Melbourne and we’d catch up and I’d hear about her job. That seeped in.

“People would say, ‘Oh, my boyfriend’s being cheeky’. When you realise what they actually mean, it’s really awful.”

When I first went up I had this great weekend with one of my really good friends and one of her really good friends, who was lovely. Then there was the, I guess, the shock of the city kid out in Alice Springs seeing the DV [domestic violence] and the alcoholism. Some of the seedier sides of Australia. I remember there was a bottle shop that was open like 24 hours a day, right in the poorest part of town. All sorts of issues. Anyone that’s been up there kind of sees that.

Yeah, Helen would come back and chat with me about the kind of work she was doing out in the various communities, and I became aware of this entirely new language that would be spoken with lots of the people she was working with. It was all really euphemistic. It was really weird. Domestic violence is a big issue and she’d be working with some of her case workers; she was basically a lawyer that ended up doing social work, so she was completely unprepared for a lot of this stuff. People would say, “Oh, my boyfriend’s being cheeky” or “He’s keeping me up all night.” You kind of go, “Ah, yeah,” but when you realise what they actually mean when they’re saying that, it’s really awful.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Alice by dickdiver

The song came about because I’d been to Alice and had this amazing weekend. I wanted to express that and be like, it’s really exciting to be out in the desert and seeing all this amazing stuff you’ve read about and seen in all the photos. But at the same time, there was this whole other world that you don’t understand and you’re not part of and you don’t have access to. And there’s a lot of problems that are going on between, I guess, colonial culture and the traditional people there.

I just wanted to put that tension side by side without making a comment about it or anything. I don’t understand it and I don’t live there, but I certainly felt very conflicted and strange when I was out there. And then when I’d catch up with Helen when she was back in town.

“You feel an emotional response and you don’t really know how to deal with that.”

I imagine you’d have a conflict already, just trying to write a song about something you’d gone and experienced. I know some of what you’re saying is secondhand, but you don’t want to do the writer cliché of every time you take a trip, you’re inspired and have to have the song that’s about each place.
Yeah. And it’s fictional. The song is entirely fictional. It’s based on a trip I had and a few conversations I had, but I didn’t want it to be political. I didn’t want it to be a story about Alice Springs. What I wanted to explore more – and it can be applicable to anything – is seeing something you don’t understand and you feel an emotional response and you don’t really know how to deal with that. You have so many conflicting emotions, or some feelings one way or another.

And obviously someone could hear it, as I’m sure most people do, and just think it’s a nice little guitar song about a girl named Alice.
Yeah. And I like that as well. I definitely didn’t want to write a song that was shoving something down people’s throats. Certainly about that topic of all things. I’m not qualified to talk about it in a way that’s didactic. But at the same time I’d like to think that some people listening to it … I’ve had a couple people come up to me that have worked up there or whatever and have said things [that] suggest they got something out of it in that sense.

But I’m more than happy for it to be just a pop song as well, because there’s that side to it where it is a really beautiful place.

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‘Calendar Days’ is out now through Chapter. Launch dates below.

Fri, July 5 – Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC [sold out, w/Twerps + The Stevens]
Sat, July 6 – The Bridge Hotel, Castlemaine, VIC [w/Palm Springs]
Sun, July 7 – Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC [w/Lost Animal + School of Radiant Living]
Fri, July 12 – The Barwon Club, Geelong, VIC [w/Heirophants]
Sat, July 13 – Red Rattler, Sydney, NSW [w/Footy + Destiny 3000]
Sat, July 20 – The Bird, Perth, WA [w/Doctopus + The Dianas]
Sat, July 27 – Transit Bar, Canberra, ACT [w/TV Colours + Teaser Pony]