When he’s not traversing the globe with Dirty Three or Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Ellis resides in Paris with his wife and two children, and has done since the late-‘90s. Paris has been the centre of global attention and sympathy over the last few months, following a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that killed 130 people.
“This year’s been very strange in general, starting with the Charlie Hebdo events in January,” says Ellis. “Just all around the world it seems to have been a very strange year. But the events of November 13 have been very sad and very tragic. Very strange times.”
At the risk of sounding like a pessimist – which is symptomatic of a social pathology – the future’s not looking much brighter. The vulnerability exposed by such tragic events tends to catalyse a surge in support for extreme political conservatism. “The elections here – they just had the preliminaries and it’s looking really grim,” Ellis says of the initial support for France’s anti-immigrant National Front party, which has since subsided. “Unfortunately it feels like it’s just the beginning of things really. It seems like we’re just entering into a very sad and strange time at the moment.
“When this sort of thing happens within the city that you live, things change and that’s what it’s meant to do. It’s interesting; I really want to be here. It’s not entered my mind to leave. I just think, ‘Fuck ‘em. Fuck that’.”
To counteract pessimism, it’s essential to keep conducting your life in a positive manner and fostering progressive ideas. Dirty Three’s genre-evading output is indicative of Ellis’ resilient personality.
“I’ve done a concert since the attacks here, but there’s a different resonance about them,” he says. “I got asked to do some for an AIDS charity – Jean Paul Gaultier has this foundation to raise money for research. I went and played a couple of songs with Marianne Faithfull and a ballet dancer, and when you go to a concert there’s a different feeling there now in the audience and on stage. It feels more important to perform and to keep making music and to keep living a normal life.”
This realisation bodes well for the Dirty Three’s imminent return to the live stage after a three-year absence. Ellis, guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White released their eighth album Toward the Low Sun in February 2012, and toured steadily for the duration of that year. In the succeeding years Ellis has been exceedingly busy with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, releasing Push the Sky Away in early 2013 before spending a couple of years on tour.
“[Dirty Three] has always been a story that’s unfolded as it’s moved on,” he says. “The three of us have all been involved in other things – I’ve been doing the Bad Seeds for 20 years now and soundtrack stuff with Nick for 15 years. We always thought it was in everybody’s interest that it wasn’t a monogamous kind of relationship, in terms of the musicality of the whole thing and the narrative of us as individuals. We’re fortunate that we’re doing different things. When we do a record, there’s never really a dialogue of what’s next.”
Whilst making the most of family time, during the past 12 months Ellis has busied himself with film soundtracks. In the past he and Cave composed the scores for The Proposition, The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, The Road, Lawless, West of Memphis and Far From Men. Most recently, Ellis worked solo on the soundtrack for the French-Turkish production Mustang. In collaboration with his various band mates, Ellis is responsible for birthing a unique artistic niche, so you’d imagine working at the behest of film directors could be a creatively suffocating experience. Interestingly, however, he relishes the opportunity.
“I like that there are people telling you they don’t like what you do, whereas when you’re in a band it’s very self-satisfying. Because I’d come in from a band world it was a slight worry that I’d have to give up my freedom – and in many ways it made me actually discover a new sense of freedom, because you have to actually throw out ideas that you might really want to hold onto and then you have to start again. You’re forced to take a lot more risks.”
Along with generating a slew of wonderful soundtracks, Ellis’ experience in the film world has aided his work with Dirty Three and the Bad Seeds. “Sitting down to do a film, I’ll make like 40 demos of ideas. In a band you sit down and do a dozen or something like that. It opened up an approach, particularly with some of the Grinderman stuff and the Bad Seeds’ later stuff, where we worked more in that way of making a lot of ideas and then picking the least obvious ones. It’s just about trying to find a new way to stay in the same game.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
