Dirty Three, Oran Mor, Glasgow

Despite the incongruity of hearing The Black Eyed Peas as a warm up track, Oran Mor’s beautifully decorated auditorium is a perfect setting for Australian instrumental trio Dirty Three. Featuring Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds violin player Warren Ellis, PJ Harvey drummer Jim White and painter/guitarist Mick Turner they have been producing albums together since the early 1990s and tour when their schedules allow.

Wild hair and beard set off by a natty pink polka dot shirt, Ellis launches into the first of several sprawling stories introducing the songs – a convoluted journey via faulty reincarnation into Bono’s underpants (not for the only time this evening) to launch ‘I Was A Teenage Haemorrhoid’ (as it turns out an alternate title for ‘Furnace Skies’ from the band’s latest LP, ‘Towards The Low Sun’).

There is nothing polite about this pounding instrumental band. The fury with which Ellis plays his fiddle, throwing himself around the stage, howling, spitting and flailing matches the astonishing intensity of the music.

The relentless drum rolls and cacophony thin out a few less committed audience members, but soon this man on a mission to destroy his bow and his stone-faced cohorts have the occupants of this glorious room mesmerised. He asks the soundman to make him sound “more like Jim Morrison and less like Jim Kerr,” and heaven forfend he sound like “the guy from Coldplay”. This is the antithesis of stadium rock, experimental, fearless, but avoiding histrionics.

Ellis’ between song banter ranges from a simple request for a cup of coffee to a recommendation for the local dry cleaner; He delivers a messianic grand plan to capture all the arseholes in the world using a giant T-shirt baited with “Victorian Sponge cake”; this fantasy takes in Bon Jovi guitar solos and resolves with polar bears tap dancing.

‘The Pier’ stands out among the newer material, not having had so much time to loosen up. ‘Hope’, from 1996’s ‘Horse Stories’, is beautiful and meditative. A near silent crowd are offered their own psychedelic experience: Alasdair Gray’s painted ceiling seems ripe to come to life, as the golden constellations catch the light. Ellis climbs atop the speaker stack to play then makes a graceful decent, barely missing a note; he eats a banana and stomps around as the song peaks.

Another surreal sermon, this time about the ‘Valley Of The Pauls’ – where Messrs McCartney, Hewson, Gadd, Newman and Weller have retreated to produce cuckoo clocks in Switzerland. Bono ends up in lederhosen and their Coldplay child has 666 tattooed on its head. As soundtracks for these flights for fancy, Dirty Three show the same level of unhinged imagination at work in their music.

‘Everything Is Fucked’ demonstrates that if we’re lucky, Dirty Three might be what the apocalypse sounds like. ‘Lullaby For Christy’ closes the set on a mellower note, and they leave without an encore, despite applause that would bring a lesser band back to knock out several more tunes.