Magic Dirt play The Zoo on Saturday 23 August 2008.
Magic Dirt's career has taken every twist imaginable. Hailing from Geelong, they started out over a decade ago playing music purely for fun. It wasn't long before their unique distorted noise rock earned them comparisons to Sonic Youth.
Just over 15 years and five full-length studio albums later they have hit the road for the most extensive tour of their career in support of the new album Girl recorded with old friend and producer, Lindsay Gravina.
Our Brisbane caught up with front woman extraordinaire, Adalita Srsen.
What made you decide to do such an extensive tour taking in so many regional dates?
We won a 'Playing Australia' grant to start off with which is fantastic as it allows us to play in regional areas. [A principal objective of Playing Australia is to support tours to regional and remote Australia – Ed]. We looked at all the places we hadn't been to before and started to put together a tour around that and, of course, you know, we added the capital cities which we always do when we do an album tour … so yeah, it's kind of snowballed into this quite extensive tour.
You ran a competition for indie bands to win a support slot at a show on this tour, have any of the winners been announced?
We have announced the first round of winners... check out our myspace page: www.myspace.com/magicdirt
Will we be hearing any cover versions on this tour?
Yes, we're doing a 'Scientists' song. A classic Aussie band so we'll be doing that in the encore. If we get an encore. (laughs)
Congratulations on Girl, it's a fantastic record, is it a relief to have the album finished and out there?
Yeah it is. We're really proud of it and really happy with how it's turned out. There's been such a great vibe about it, people have been saying great stuff and the reviews have been great … it's just a really nice feeling. I haven't really been too worried about the reviews and reactions to the record this time around. It's the first time I’ve felt really confident about the record. I don't really mind what anybody else thinks. It doesn't really matter to me. It is great that people are digging it definitely.
It sounds like an amalgamation of your whole career. Is that what you were looking for?
Quite a few people have been saying that, which is really cool. In hindsight I can see what people are saying but it was never really a pre-meditated thing or a conscious thing. We don't really analyse it that far. I think we just wrote a bunch of songs in the two years that we kind of 'took off'. We didn't tour that much. We just wanted to write. So, I think its an amalgamation of those couple of years of writing and putting that together and shaping a record that we thought sounded cohesive. Adalita, can you tell us about the front cover art? It's been driving me crazy trying to figure it out!
(laughs) I'm so glad you asked, there is a story for this. The girl who's got the cigarette in her mouth, her name is Gill, she's from the band Spider Vomit and the person who's lighting her cigarette is her brother Johnny. They are standing in their lounge room in their share house in Brunswick, Melbourne. They have great house parties and Gill's other band, Beaches, were doing a gig that night. I'd been thinking about the front cover and I knew I wanted a girl on the front cover. I'd always wanted to take photos of house parties ‘cos you can get some great shots. So I was like, ‘Gill I wanna come round and take some shots’ and she was like ‘Yeah, anytime’.
Then one night my partner was out at their show and I said to him 'Look if they have a house party, you've gotta call me'. So I waited and waited and waited and it got to about two in the morning and I was like ‘Oh well it musn’t be happening so I went to bed in my jamies and got a call at about three and it's like, ‘Yeah the parties on, you gotta come over and bring your tequila’. I'm like ‘Okay’, so I rolled out of bed got into a cab, got my camera, rocked up and it was unreal. Everyone was just dancing and having a great time partying on and I just took pictures of the whole house and I remember taking a quick one of when Johnny was lighting Gill's cigarette and didn't think anything of it.
So you're a bit of an artist in your spare time huh?
(laughs)... Only when I have to be, when I have to do album artwork. Otherwise ‘no’, I'm not really an artistic type at all.
What's the best thing about not being signed to a major record company?
I think you can be yourself a bit more; you don't have to be on your guard as much. With majors there's a lot of sitting down and explaining about who you are and what you do. Warner's knew what they were getting into with us, we had the initial conversation and when we signed the contract we made sure we had creative control 100% so they knew but still, especially when you do promo, mainly you do have to sit down and say well 'this is what I don't do – this is what I do do' and you have to explain it because a lot of the majors don't understand where an indie band is coming from or where I was coming from. [We] don't have to do that now. We can be our own bosses.
Magic Dirt play the Coolangatta Hotel on Friday 22 August and The Zoo on Saturday 23 August 2008.
Girl out now through Emergency Music.
