Released to unanimous acclaim last year, Dick Diver’s second LP Calendar Days consolidated the band’s standing as Australian storytellers par excellence – crafting resolute beauty from the mundane, painting aural landscapes, from the suburbs to Alice Springs.
This point in time marks an estimated midpoint between that album and the next, with a seven-inch release of new song New Name Blues (with the B-side cover of Coloured Stone’s Lonely Life) providing a satisfying stopgap between full-length releases.
New Name Blues, sung by certified national treasure Al Montfort, marks a slight departure from the band’s previous lyrical tone, channelling the overt political satire of their past two Supernatural Amphitheatre appearances with cutting lines such as “Dreamtime is done/Howard, Kochie and Bolt/They won.”
While the song is explicitly reactionary to the current political climate, singer-guitarist Rupert Edwards explains it’s not reactionary to the murmuring criticisms that bands of Dick Diver’s ilk aren’t as politically engaged as necessary in these trying times.
“I didn’t write the song, so I can’t speak for Al Montfort, who wrote it. But I don’t think we’re too consciously reactive to perceptions about the band. We just write whatever we feel like at the time. It’s not like a PR strategy, certainly,” he explains. “From my point of view, I want to have types of songs that reflect who we are as people. Everyone has lots of different moods. Everyone can be satirical, can say things about politics, but at the same time everyone says some dumb things as well. Hopefully, because we are a bit like that, it finds its way into the songs.”
While there’s a palpable crop of artists embracing nostalgic Australiana, with varying degrees of success, drenched in irony, Dick Diver have managed to veer towards a heartfelt and sincere reflection of our nation.
“I think if it’s gonna be there, it’s gonna be there with some sort of sincerity, rather than be flippant about it. A lot of these things are part of – I don’t speak for broader Australian culture – but these things are what we experience. Not necessarily because we love them or hate them, but because they’re there, and you can’t do anything about it whether you sing about it or not. It’s not a case of being dishonest if these things weren’t in our songs, but because they’re there they find their way into the songs,” Edwards states. “It’s pretty simple in that way.”
Despite boasting four formidable songwriters in their ranks, the compositional load is not governed by an intra-band bureaucracy. “We don’t talk about it too much, it works out pretty well on its own. I think me and Al McKay probably write the most songs, therefore more of our songs filter through. Then again, Steph [Hughes] and Al Montfort are really good songwriters in their own right, when they have a song and bring it along it’ll pretty much always pop up somewhere,” Edwards states.
Though there was a relatively elongated lead-up to debut album New Start Again, Dick Diver have been on a steady path of recording and touring ever since. A gnarly feat, considering the concurrent musical projects.
“There are always quieter patches. A lot of us in the band have one or more, or many more, other bands going on. But at the same time, from my point of view, there’s been more of a momentum building in my mind, which means we become busier as a band as time goes on,” Edwards reasons. “We haven’t had a huge lull, but it’s not like we’re playing every week. We rarely do a big tour or anything.”
In terms of recording, the band nestled into Apollo Bay earlier in the year putting together the follow-up to Calendar Days. “The stuff we did in April was for something completely different [than New Name Blues], which will get released at some stage,” he reveals. “It’ll end up being another record, it’s just a matter of when it’s all finished, organising when we’re all free to have a good go at putting it out properly. Some of it’s an extension [from Calendar Days], some of it is a bit different. I dunno if it will surprise anyone. Some of it feels really, really different to me, so it’s exciting for that reason,” Edwards says.
“The process has been pretty similar to the other times. There may have been one or two things that we worked out there, but most of the stuff we recorded was written well before. I think one of the songs was written a year before. Most of it we have a pretty good idea of what we’re gonna do,” he says. “The last show we played, half the set, or three quarters of the set, was all new songs that we hadn’t put out or anything. That was mostly so we’ll get used to playing them live so we don’t look like complete tools when the time comes when we have to play them properly.”
With a current standing as one of the country’s most revered songwriting outfits, Rupe is pragmatic when it comes to future possibilities. “I don’t have any delusions about mainstream success. We’re going to the States, and hopefully have one of our records out there eventually. Hopefully people will like the record, and it won’t sound like a repetition of what we’ve already done.”
