Mick Turner: Part 1

In the first installment of a two-part interview, ANDREW MCMILLEN talks to Mick Turner about his early days with the Moodists and Venom P Stinger, his distinctive style of playing and how his life changed when he joined the Dirty Three.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Mick Turner’s shadow looms large over the Australian musical landscape, not just due to his considerable height but also through his distinctive six-string contributions over the past 30-odd years to acts as diverse as Dirty Three, Venom P. Stinger, The Moodists and The Sick Things, not to mention the material released under his own name. Besides his music, Turner’s distinctive painting style has appeared on Dirty Three album covers and, more recently, hung on walls in public exhibitions.

I caught up with Mick the day after a rare solo show at the Lofly Hangar in Brisbane in June, alongside collaborators Jeffrey Wegener and Ian Wadley. When I join him at Ric’s in the Fortitude Valley, he’s digging into spicy beef noodle salad and orange juice. I’m early, so while he eats, we discuss last night’s show, Australian politics (Julia Gillard had just become prime minister overnight, to national surprise) and sport (neither of us give much of a shit) before relocating next door to Kaliber, a quieter spot with a courtyard. Mick’s sinuses are playing up, but he stays and talks for an hour-and-a-half. Much like his guitar parts in the Dirty Three, however, it takes a while for him to warm up.

A loose kind of style

How do you feel about music this year, Mick? Are you still as excited about it as you were when you started?
I am. I suppose it's a constantly evolving kind of thing as an artist. My inspiration hasn't stopped. I'm still trying to make that great record that I'll probably never make.

When did you first become interested in music? Did you play as a child?
I inherited my brothers' and sisters' record collections. They were quite a bit older than me; when I was seven or eight-years-old, and I just became a very avid music fan very early on. I started teaching myself to play guitar when I was 13.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Was there a point where you just decided to throw yourself into a career in music?
I've had a couple of periods where music is all I've done for a living. One was early on with The Moodists. We went to live in England in 1983. That just happened because the offer was there. They asked me join at the time they were just about to go. I think I was on the dole. We scraped by for two years over there nearly starving but it was a lot of fun. I left The Moodists, after we returned to Australia in 1985. I kept playing music, but had started doing day jobs, of course. Then in 1993 Dirty Three started making more money than I was earning in my job - I had been working in the CSIRO library for quite a few years. I made an active decision to quit that work and just do music.

You've been playing with Jim White for over 20 years. I'm interested to know what you see when you look across the kit at him while you're playing music together.
Jim's a great player, he's totally unique. I don't know anyone who plays like him. He's kept working at it determinedly for so long and he's very on top of it now, and he's got a very singular vision of where he's going with his music. He's very serious about it, but it's great. I have a lot of admiration for Jim. He’s bit of a celebrity in NYC where he lives now, known as one of the world’s great drummers.

How did you come across Jim?
Just [through] the Melbourne music scene. I was playing in Fungus Brains and I’d been in The Sick Things. He was playing in bands like People With Chairs Up Their Noses and the Feral Dinosaurs. We were playing at the same venues. We found ourselves on the same bill often and it was quite a small community of musicians and everyone gets to know each other of course that alternative little scene, it's quite small. That was the early ’80s.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Was Venom P. Stinger the first band you played in together?
Yes.

Venom P. reformed earlier in 2010. How did those reformation shows go for you?
They were good. We just did a show in New York. Our singer Dugald Mackenzie had died a few years ago, but we got a guy called Tim Evans from Bird Blobs and various other bands, and he was living in New York. Jim lives in New York so I went over there and we rehearsed and did a show there. Then we went to England and did the Pavement All Tomorrow’s Parties [in May 2010], which was fun.

How did the audience respond? Did they know who you were in the first place?
It was alright. I don’t know, probably not. I guess maybe some did, maybe some would have looked us up on the Internet or something. I don't think our records are available at all.

There’s a couple of YouTube clips but, that’s about it in terms of online stuff.
I actually found some where you could download our records, but I don't advise it. They did something funny with the speed; it plays at the wrong speed. I don't know how that happened. Drag City I think are releasing it. They’re going to release a completist kind of Venom P. Stinger record including all the material with Dugald singing.

I was going to ask about that. I've seen some discussion boards talking about that for a few years, so it's close to completion would you say?
You'd think so. But I thought it was a year-and-a-half ago, so I don't know. [Laughs] … I'm not really that concerned about it. It’s not like I have to do anything about it. It's old. I'd be just as happy if it didn't come out. I'm not precious about these sort of things. I think it was good, I had a really good time with that band and it was kind of a time in my life. But I'm more interested in what I'm doing right now.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

So was the reformation a one-off thing?
I did it for fun and it's fun to play that way. It's kind of a different style to the way I play with Dirty Three or the way I’ve played for a long time. It's really fun to play that kid of scuzzy guitar, so yeah, I had a good time.

Did you ease back into that punk style?
Yeah, it was quite easy to remember the songs, and very loose. I've got a very loose kind of style. It's not very precise at all. It's not like you have to practice and practice to get it perfectly right. It's kind of more intuitive, and flowing kind of thing. It's not really that different to what I do now anyway. It's just a bit more driven.

Do you think a band like Venom could find an audience if they were starting out this year?
I don't know. That's a good question. What do you think? You're probably more in touch. Someone told me last night that there's all these young people in their early 20s on Facebook or something who list Venom P. Stinger as a band they like. So maybe we would but look, there's probably only 10 of them, and he just happened to find them.

Stars spaced out in the sky

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] I want to turn the discussion to Dirty Three. I was at the impromptu Horse Stories show at Butlins [in the UK] last year.
You were there? I'm sorry [laughs]. Was it alright?

Warren [Ellis] seemed to have sprung that one on you. I think you and Jim coped pretty well considering it was impromptu, although you couldn't remember the chords to some songs.
We just weren't prepared for it at all.

It came off pretty well. I felt so privileged to be there to see it.
It was a laidback kind of show. It was very casual. It's nice to do shows like that.

I remember Warren holding up the iPod.
Yeah. [Laughs] Was that your iPod?

No. Warren said he doesn't own an iPod because he doesn't want people to think that he's a cunt, and then he apologised to my girlfriend for saying the word “cunt”. [*Laughter] I wonder, when I see Dirty Three, how you and Jim feel about Warren's monologues and his little stories between songs. You tend to stare into the distance, impassively.
Oh no, I think they're great. I kind of tune out a bit sometimes because he will tell the same story more than once. If he gets a good response he'll tell it again the next night. Which, of course, is smart. I think it's a good thing to do. I like them. Have you seen the doco?

Yeah.
I like the animation … where Jim ends up in bed with Mick Fleetwood. It's hilarious. [Laughter] I thought that was really good.

What did you get out of touring Ocean Songs [earlier this year]? Is that a process you'd like to revisit with another album?
It was good. I wouldn't have thought of it myself but we did it because they asked us, and I think that's a great idea, the whole series of bands with their albums. As a fan, me seeing these other bands doing it, I really love the idea of going and seeing a band playing an album that I've loved, or even an unfamiliar album. I think it's a really good concept … We did quite a few of those shows [so] I'm kind of glad we've stopped doing it now. It's a bit retrospective, but these things are good to do, but not dwell on. It's good to get on with it. [Laughs]

Was Ocean Songs your pick?
It probably wouldn't have been, but it's sometimes when someone gives you an appreciation of something you've done down the track, it gives you a new perspective on it. From doing that, from what people said about that record, about the music on that record, led me to a different appreciation of that record, which was nice. I like it when that happens.

Finding something new in something you've already put a lot of time into.
It makes it like a new piece of work. It must be 12 years or more since we recorded Ocean Songs. It's like you were a different person then too. It doesn't feel like I created that so much, so it's like I can look at it objectively.

On the documentary, Chan Marshall said that, without fail, every time she watches you she's drawn to tears because she's struck by the beauty of the music. It might be hard for you to judge since you're in the band, but what do you feel when you're playing with Dirty Three?
I find it moving too. Playing music, when it's at the best, the best situation is when you can lose yourself in it, and have fun. I really love that part of music, listening to music or playing it; it kind of takes you out of yourself, maybe. It's almost like an out of body type of thing.

Do you remember the Bobby Gillespie [Primal Scream singer] quote from that DVD? He said your guitar playing is like, “The way that stars are spaced out in the sky.”
Yeah, that was very flattering for him to say that. It's a nice thing to say.

I like the imagery there. I wouldn't have thought of it that way but now that he said it I can picture it.
Yeah, I certainly hadn't thought about it that way. It was even nice that he had any thoughts at all about it. [Laughs]

A stubborn blind belief’

When the band first started out, were you surprised when it found an audience? Did you ever doubt that it would find an audience?
No, I kind of thought [the music] was really good. I had a feeling that people would like it. I had a lot of confidence in it for some reason. I'm not sure why, because most music I’d ever loved hadn’t been widely appreciated. When we were about to go overseas for the first time, we had three weeks of shows in USA and a couple weeks in Europe lined up but no other plans, yet we had all moved out of our homes and pretty much had one- way tickets. Warren was saying, “What are we going to do after these few shows? How are we going to manage?” But I wasn’t concerned. I had a stubborn blind belief that nothing could stop us.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

Was it based on any other kind of sound that you'd heard or a combination of sounds that you'd heard, or was it just – how it happened, that Dirty Three sound?
I had a bunch of tunes and ideas that I’d recorded on 4-track at home over the years, none of it ever fitted with other bands I was playing with, so I’d brought those ideas along. Warren also had bits and pieces stored up. It was a bit of just throwing these ideas out there and seeing what happened. I'm trying to think what else I was playing around that time, it was like Fungus Brains, Venom P. Stinger … both [had] been going forever.

It's curious though, because that style of playing is so removed from those other two bands.
Really?

Yeah, in tempo and in feeling.
Yeah, I guess so. The reason we started [Dirty Three] off was just to get a few free drinks and a little bit of money, on a Friday night at a small bar a friend of Warren’s had started. We’d play three one-hour sets, and as we never rehearsed the songs were all made up and hashed out there. It was like one of those lucky things where it clicked between us. Although me and Jim had been playing forever, Warren was fairly new in town but he was already paying in several bands. Jim was playing a couple of bands with Warren. I think it was very lucky that it clicked and it for me it became this vehicle where I could bring out all these things I was kind of working on, on home 4-tracks for years. My first solo record [Tren Phantasma] is actually drawn a lot from stuff that I did pre-Dirty Three. So for me it became a vehicle for those home 4-track recordings, and so much more with those two.

Also, to get away from – this is not really to the music side – but we were all playing a lot of bands and we were all sick of the rehearsal rigmarole where you have to rehearse each week and never getting paid anything. We kind of made these rules we wouldn't rehearse and we'd always pay ourselves. It was so refreshing. [Laughter] Suddenly, music became so much more fun again. The other stuff, it had started to become tedious, the whole process of it. Dirty Three had freed all that up.

So you found some creative solace in improvisation?
It was all new and it was inspiring to play that freely and music really became magic again. The other bands never totally stopped being fun really but so much of it wasn't fun. That might have helped too but also I think we really clicked musically, kind of developed this communication. We had this natural musical communication straight off.

I sense that when I see glances between you and Jim. One thing that always fascinates me about the Dirty Three is that you seem to drive the rhythm and Jim reacts to you, and Warren plays over the top of both of you. Is that an accurate picture?
Certainly, for a lot of it; maybe not always. I don't think about it that much. but we are able to do that without having to talk about it too much. You're probably right, that's what happens in a lot of cases.

Were you surprised that D3 still finds a large audience across the world?
I'm really happy we do. It's actually gotten better. It kind of waned for awhile and now things have gotten better again. In a way I miss playing as often because we don't play as much as we used to. I think we're playing better than ever but being so – Warren lives in Paris, Jim lives in New York, and I'm living in Melbourne – distance is starting to tell a bit. I guess we haven't made a record for five years. But it's good that we're still going. It's been a long time. It's good everyone's doing things.

“I've got a very loose kind of style. It's not very precise at all. It's not like you have to practice and practice to get it perfectly right. It's kind of more intuitive.”

Which keeps the combined element fresh, I suppose, if you're working on different projects you can bring fresh ears.
Hopefully, yeah. We do struggle sometimes to come up with new things. But it's all part of it. I think the distance is telling a bit, but hopefully we'll get over that. I think it just means things like making a new record take longer, I think we’ve always had differences in how we see things when recording. When we start actually making up new material. In the old days, the process that goes on where you resolve – you end up coming up with music that you make together that you really like. I think that process has just been slowed down a lot by the distance.

Toward the start of Dirty Three’s career, you toured with artists like Sonic Youth, John Cale and Pavement. What do you remember from that time? Was it a steep learning curve?
No, it was a really heady time. When we left Australia, we pretty much went on tour non-stop for quite a few years. Most of those tours came in around that time. We were just being carried along by it, but the experience of playing as a support for a band is kind of – a lot of people ignore you and aren't interested, so I don't know. It was good. I wouldn't have not done it for anything. The most exciting shows were our own ones. We were getting really enthusiastic audiences.

Going back to the writing side of things, is there a point where you can tell that a certain chord progression or arpeggio is going to work with the context of a Dirty Three song, as opposed to your solo stuff?
When I take an idea to the others … A lot of ideas in my solo projects have actually become Dirty Three songs and it's kind of like evolution, like one's gone one way. The same initial ideas become two very different things; one Dirty Three plays and one may be on my solo record. Hopefully you can't tell!

You fooled me. I can’t tell.
Some things – we're kind of like – we really try to be open to try any ideas. And we're also very conscious of not repeating ourselves too much… We do it where we come out with a Dirty Three song by the numbers, you know…

I was wondering about that.
I'm sure we're guilty of having done it. But we try and be aware of doing that, although it is true to some extent that every musician has their lines and they really spend their whole creative life playing those lines over and over in slightly different ways.

I've seen you play six times now with Dirty Three. Every time I see you I'm always struck by how stoic and impassive you appear on stage. Is that because you're concentrating or because you're not feeling the emotion to it?
What do other people do? Do they kind of jump around?

Warren goes nuts, as I'm sure you know.
Of course, that's his shtick. [Laughs] Part of it is it matches his personality. Warren is a very outgoing person. I'm more insular. I think I'm kind of a shy person, and I don't feel comfortable on stage really. I don't feel comfortable being the centre of attention, but I like to play music live, so once the gig starts I'm fine. I just go into my own space. I don't feel like I'm being stoic, mentally. I'm not being stoic.

It's just your personality.
I guess it's just the way I hold my body, I don't know. It's a bit awkward. I don't know what to do about that. [Laughs]

I'm just wondering if there’s a thought process behind it.
People have said it before you so I do get it a lot. What would I do about it? Do I jump around? I'd feel like a dick. [Laughs] I like dancing but I don't do it in front of people, maybe on a dance floor but not on the stage.

You’ve never been comfortable on stage?
Just in general. I don't like the idea of the attention focusing in on me, but I've come to terms with it, as you do if you want to play music and you want to do that.

What about at a show like last night, which was comparatively intimate compared to an ATP stage?
I actually prefer that because you aren't on the big stages. Often on the big stage you can't even see the audience, maybe see the first row or two of people but it feels like if you really thought about it, there are people looking at you and you can't see them. Playing like last night, I find really great, found it very comfortable actually, not totally but much more.

The power of three

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Do you ever get grief from Warren and Jim for always taking the stage in jeans and a shirt, where they're wearing suits?
No. Do they wear suits? I always start talking about Jim White’s wardrobe … He may be wearing a suit, but it’s got tuna oil stains on it. And he uses it to wipe his feet on. [Laughs]

‘Dirty’ Three – it makes sense.
But no. All of us have respect for each other's wardrobe choices. [Laughs]

Do you pay much attention to your public image in that way? Do you put much thought into what you're going to wear or do you just chuck it on and go out there?
No, I'm not very good at dressing up. I don’t put much effort into it, but neither does Jim White, really. Warren's more the fashion man in the band. Jim wears the same thing every time, too. I kind of wish I wasn't like that. I wish I could walk out with really good clothes-taste but I haven't got it in me. [Laughs] It's like the whole jumping around on stage. I don't know. I just like playing music.

It's a noble pursuit. In Robert Forster's book, The Ten Rules Of Rock And Roll, one of his rules is “the three piece band is the purest form of rock and roll expression”. I wonder what you make of that.
I think that's good. I think three is a really good number for a band. It's just really workable; it's a magic number really. It certainly makes it easier managing everything. It's cheaper which means you can do more and you'll probably last longer because there is less stress. Musically, it puts more space in the music. If you start getting more instruments it could be great but there's something really nice about … sparity. Is that a word? [Mick whips out his iPhone, Googles ‘sparity’, and finds it’s not a word. He later emails me to say he meant “sparsity”.]

“We kind of made these rules we wouldn't rehearse and we'd always pay ourselves. It was so refreshing.”

I interviewed PVT recently – a three-piece Sydney rock/electronic band – and they said one of the best things about having three members is that there’s always a majority. Any decisions that need to be made, there's always going to be two versus one.
That’s the problem. The two people gang up on the other one. [Laughs] And it happens all the time. Two people will get together and pick on the other one. You know how it happens in the school yard? Well it happens in real life too. [Laughs]

Do you think there's much more ground for Dirty Three to break, in terms of the drums/guitar/violin configuration? Is it difficult to find new sounds within that?
In trying to and wanting to and having the inspiration to make new music, we’ve brought other instruments into the studio. When we go to the live thing, some of those songs we find we really have to make it work without [the extra instruments]. Especially things like bass guitar. We tried having bass players. They were great, but it took away a bit from the fluidity … We're such a unit now that it's hard to bring other people in without affecting that flow.

It's like another voice in the mix.
It's another voice but it affects the dynamics. I guess we've got a dynamic language between us where the music will swell, pull back, move around, and really tune in with each other intuitively. I think that's one of the best things about us. When we've brought other people in they've been really good players and it's been good but it's almost – the problem with it is they spent too much on the beat or something and we lose a bit of that … We're really wanting to try different instruments, and all that sort of stuff. I don't know, we've tried loop pedals and things but they're kind of really problematic live … It's hard without vocals. Obviously having a vocal track, there's so much imagery and stuff that lends another depth to a song.

You tried it on [2005 album] Cinder.
We had one track with that. One track had actual lyrics and one was just a voice. Sally Timms [of The Mekons] did the – I don't think she said words, I think it was more like “la la la” sort of thing, which was great. She has a beautiful voice. Chan [Marshall] did the lyric-singing track, ‘Great Waves’, which also was great. I really like that track.

Did you ever record with the bassist? Is there any recording that exists with Dirty Three and bass?
In the very early days we used to play a bit of bass and bring it out. We used to swap around instruments … Bringing too many instruments along on a tour is problematic too. It kind of takes away from the show a bit when you're constantly having to – you know, change to a different instrument. It's alright but it kind of takes away from the flow of the show ... I added bass to She Has No Strings Apollo tracks and Cinder, basically just the bottom end of what the guitar was doing. Tours for those albums we brought along an extra player.

What you just mentioned about changing instruments actually ties into another one of Robert Forster's rules. He says that any guitarist who continues to change instruments after 15 minutes into a set is just showing off his guitar collection, as opposed to adding anything new to the sound. Which makes me want to ask you about what I believe is your favourite guitar, the blue-green coloured one which I've seen you play before. You played it last night, too. What's special about that instrument for you?

That's made by this guy called Danny Kopp, who is a guitar-maker from Ohio. It's a 419 semi-acoustic, and he made it. He approached me quite a few years ago at a show in Detroit, and said, "I make these guitars." He showed me one and goes, "I want to make a Mick Turner one.” I thought, “This guy is nuts.” But I looked at his guitar and it looked really good. He goes, "I'll make it for cost price.” It was [made with] all beautiful woods and stuff. I chose the type of neck and pick-up and a couple other minor things. So he made me this guitar and he made replications of some of my artwork from Dirty Three album covers, like The Mermaid [from Ocean Songs], out of mother of pearl, which was really nice. There's the horse from Horse Stories on the neck and there are a few stars around. It's really cool. The best thing is it's so well made and a beautiful playing guitar, and really unique looking body the way the edges go around.

I haven't seen it up close.
It's a really great guitar and it plays really well. It sounds pretty good. I've still got my old Telecaster and I go back to that every now and then. It's a really different sound but really nice to play. He wanted me to put my signature on the headstock, and I was like [aghast], “No, no way!” I remember being young and going into guitar shops and those fucking wankers who are there with all that stuff and you ask about a guitar and they bring it down and go [makes widdly-widdly guitar noises]. It's like, "Just go away." Putting a signature on the instrument reminds me of all that horribleness.

So we won't expect a Mick Turner signature guitar any time soon?
I think he was going to make them, but I don’t think anybody ordered one. I might order one now.

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PART TWO Turner’s painting career, his record label and his view on the industry.