Four local music legends got together. What happened next is a gift

The Age

12-06-2025

When we were beautiful and young, there was still time for every little thing,' Mick Harvey sighed on his fifth solo album. His mind was partly on Mutiny In Heaven, the film about his old band The Birthday Party. And partly, as always, on myriad other projects.
Another year has flown. Or is it two? He and Adalita, who still leads Magic Dirt when she's not years-deep in a solo record or more transient collaborations, are sitting on a couch in his North Melbourne studio to talk about one they've been holding close until time allowed.
Bleak Squad is an elegantly brooding rock quartet that sounds exactly like the sum of its exceptional parts. Guitarist Mick Turner is still best known from Dirty Three, despite sundry other bands. Drummer Marty Brown is from Art of Fighting, as well as countless other gigs and studio productions.
We're talking, to cut to the obvious rock'n'roll epithet, about a supergroup. 'No, we're a supper group,' Harvey responds. Adalita smiles. She's probably heard that one before. Whatever they call it, it's a gift.
'I had some bits of songs sitting around; I always have – ideas that didn't fit anywhere else,' she says. 'It was like, finally, I had somewhere to put them. And it was so natural, right from the start. Like we'd been playing together for years.'
'It was very casual. No egos, no expectations,' Harvey says. 'It wasn't burdened with any of that. It was completely open. Marty just said, 'Come in, bring three or four ideas, we'll see what happens'. So that's what we did.'
Over four days at Head Gap studios in Preston, the four distinct musical personalities became a band with unexpected ease.
'A song would become so much a [result] of what everyone had contributed that I started forgetting whose music it was in the first place,' Harvey says, still surprised at how readily a whole album began to present itself. Strange Love is due in August.
We'd need to find a less cluttered room to draw a map of all the tangled connections that led Brown – a prolific studio operator and artist manager as well as musician – to envisage a smooth, cohesive bond with the three 'living legends'.
'I've worked with them all enough to know that a fast, easy, improvisational kind of music is achievable,' he tells me later, by phone from Ballarat. 'Some people need things to be more rehearsed, or it's like, 'I've written this...' and they might be more demanding about what it could be.
'There was none of that... I knew we could all just relax together and jam some bits. But yeah, I was surprised by how well 'jamming some bits' turned out.'
Everything Must Change, the first song unveiled last week, is a portentous illustration. It began with a nebulous handful of chords presented by Turner – overseas as we speak, with his duo Mess Esque ('the Micks are always overseas', Adalita says). Harvey threw in a string of apocalyptic lyrics, then encouraged Adalita to intrude.
'You tapped into something,' he tells her, 'and made it an even more surreal kind of excursion, which was fantastic. It messes with your head. The construction is kind of unfathomable to me. It was like a mystery, in a way.'
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'Like a gothic Alice Through the Looking Glass,' Adalita says, still riffing. 'I was just hoping to come up with something. That's always my fear.' She spins a telling metaphor for her writing process: 'like dredging a lake'.
Fear, mystery, surreal, gothic, apocalyptic... Bleak Squad isn't all bats and dungeons, but fans of any of its members will recognise a through-line of clamorous gloom, unsettled energy and ghostly beauty, an entrenched darkness of the soul that gives their name just the right touch of gallows humour.
'It's not about any particular style,' Harvey says. 'It's about a kind of attitude and approach to things.'
'It's got that sort of dark, noirish edge,' Adalita says, but 'of course it offers comfort because it's music. Music can be a real companion. It can give people solace.'
'I've been associated with a lot of music that people have declared to be depressing over the years,' says Harvey, 'and I know that fans of that music don't find it depressing at all. They find a release. They find a space where they can feel inspired, to go beyond feeling isolated.'
'A kindred spirit,' Adalita says.
They're anything but bleak company, these two. Asked to search their memories for their first formal collaboration, they arrive at the Suburban Mayhem movie soundtrack of 2006. Harvey won an Australian Film Institute award for the score. He asked Adalita to sing songs by Gun Club, Bauhaus and Magic Dirt.
'I was a little bit scared of you then. I'm not any more,' she says, laying her beanie on his black velvet lapel.
'Everyone's scared of me,' Harvey says, blinking. But he's spooked by something else. 'You know we're the only ones still going from that [recording session]?' They count off absent friends. Rowland S. Howard. Spencer P. Jones. Magic Dirt's Dean Turner. Drummer Peter Jones. Producer-engineer Tony Cohen. The thought hangs heavily.
'You do carry all of that stuff,' Harvey says. 'Everybody who you work with, you get something from them. Sometimes I'm not sure which bits [of music] come from me, or from Rowland, or anyone else. They're all in there.'
There's no time to dwell. That's the only commodity in scarce supply, Brown acknowledges, as Bleak Squad plan the road ahead.
'It's been quite … hard,' he says, laughing. 'I've been shocked by how busy everyone is, but schedules are worked out so far in advance that we can map out when we're all in the same country, at least.'
So far, just four dates are booked for August and October. Harvey says 'we could ramp it up a bit early next year – although Mick Turner's probably madly booking stuff right now for his half-a-dozen projects'.
'We're experienced enough to understand about give and take,' he says. 'Everyone gives space to other people in the musical process, but then you also understand when people aren't available. It's been difficult, but nobody's been getting pissed off.'
He turns to remind Adalita of the 'three or four unfinished songs' they really must revisit. 'Ooh, I'd love to hear those tracks,' she enthuses. 'We might have to fill the set out a bit?'
Strange Love will be released on August 22. Bleak Squad play Queenscliff Town Hall on Aug 1, Meeniyan Town Hall on August 2, Sydney Recital Hall on Oct 11 and Melbourne Recital Centre on Oct 16.
Legends unite
Often brilliant, usually brief, sometimes bruising, 'supergroups' are known to form when distinctive talents, famous names and stolen moments collide. Here's a mixed dozen playlist.
Cream (1966–1968): The term was coined for blues-rock giants Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, and largely defined by their unsustainable combustion.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1969–2013): Again, the harmony was purely musical but their on-and-off union remains the gold standard.
Asia (1981–): Never mind art. Refugees from Yes, King Crimson and ELP turned UK prog into '80s FM gold.
Power Station (1984–1985): Robert Palmer, bits of Duran Duran and Chic added up to serious '80 club muscle.
The Highwaymen (1985–1995): Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson. Country's Mount Rushmore.
Trio (1987–2002): Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt. Is your heart broken yet?
Traveling Wilburys (1988–1991): Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne. An old-timers' backyard jam that swallowed the pop charts.
Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band (1989–): Joe Walsh, Peter Frampton, Todd Rundgren, Sheila E., Dr. John, Billy Preston, Colin Hay… scores of stars on an evolving jukebox roadshow with no reason to quit.
Monsters of Folk (2004–2009): Conor Oberst, Jim James, M. Ward, and Mike Mogis. Indie-folk's polite Avengers.
SuperHeavy (2011): Mick Jagger, Joss Stone, Damian Marley, A.R. Rahman and Dave Stewart. What do you mean you never heard of them?
Hollywood Vampires (2015–): Alice Cooper, Johnny Depp and Aerosmith's Joe Perry toast ghosts of rock's past with whatever Beatles, Eagles, Guns or Roses drop by.