Home Blog With ‘Supergroup’ Bleak Squad, Adalita Is Starting Over: ‘We’re These Old Showgirls, But We’re A Baby Band’

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With ‘Supergroup’ Bleak Squad, Adalita Is Starting Over: ‘We’re These Old Showgirls, But We’re A Baby Band’

upnext2blowFebruary 12, 20265 Mins read0

With 'Supergroup' Bleak Squad, Adalita Is Starting Over: 'We’re These Old Showgirls, But We’re A Baby Band'

Ahead of a highly anticipated set at Perth Festival, Adalita explains how what began as a jam between herself, Mick Harvey, Mick Turner and Marty Brown became the brooding, beautiful Bleak Squad.

Bleak Squad

“I’ve never been in another band besides Magic Dirt,” says Adalita. “So being in Bleak Squad is quite a big deal.”

A mononymically known icon of Australian music, Adalita has a long and impressive history spanning across four decades. As the leader of grunge legends Magic Dirt, she released six albums and six EPs that garnered nine ARIA nominations. When that band went on hiatus in 2010, she turned to a solo career that produced three more albums and two more ARIA nominations.

Adalita enjoyed leading her own projects, being in charge of her own creative process, and recording on her own. “Collaborating with other people didn’t come naturally to me. Or so I thought,” she says. “I just really like working alone. I like doing a lot of things alone. I’m a bit of a hermit.”

All that changed when drummer/producer Marty Brown (Art of Fighting, Clare Bowditch, Lisa Mitchell) proposed that Adalita join him and two other legends of local music, Mick Harvey (The Birthday Party, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey) and Mick Turner (Dirty Three, Venom P. Stinger, Mess Esque), to get together. “We didn’t know it was going to turn into a band. It was really: ‘let’s just have a jam’,” she recounts.

“I knew everyone quite well already,” Adalita explains. “So, coming into it, I wasn’t as nervous as I could’ve been heading into something new, with those initial nerves and fear of the unknown. There was still the potential it wasn’t going to work out, but I was excited.”

“Marty said: ‘Just bring in something that you think we could all work on – everyone brings three songs’,” she continues. “That was the only direction. We met up, set up, and literally just started playing. Showing everyone our riffs and ideas. It was no talk and all action.”

“That doesn’t happen every day. Where you can get a group of people together, and you don’t even need to really talk. You just play. You just play, and it sounds good. I’m telling you, it was real easy.”

Calling the set-up “so loose and so casual”, Adalita talks through the evolution of the project from a jam into a band as being “like a nice relationship evolving”. After initial sessions at Head Gap Studios in Melbourne, they finished off the recordings in Brown’s own Standalone Studios. The approach was always to record things largely live and keep things pretty stripped back.

“That approach just felt right,” says Adalita. “It was refreshing, to not have to do fucking ten thousand backing vocals, all these guitar overdubs, y’know: ‘let’s chuck a glockenspiel on that!’ It was just four people playing, with only a few minimal overdubs.”

If the coming-together of the four was equal parts spontaneous and serendipitous, it was across the process of mixing what would be their debut album, Strange Love, that their sense of identity firmed.

“We sat back and realised that we were quite happy with what we had, and that we wanted to release it,” Adalita offers. “That’s when we had to come up with a band name, do the photos, do all the things.”

Figuring the music was “dark, moody and cinematic” —if there was a definitive lyric, it’d be “let the world just go to hell”— they settled on Bleak Squad as a name that captured the music’s sound, and their assembly as a collection of musicians. “We’re all coming from the same dark forest,” Adalita says, poetically. “We’re gathering together a new little tribe, drawn from that same pool of creativity.”

Having come out at the end of this period with a coherent album and a strong collective identity, is Adalita surprised? That it was all so “low-key” and “easy”? “I am a bit,” she considers. “There were many [nice] surprises along the way” — from integrating Mick Turner’s “completely unique” guitar-playing style to having Harvey and Adalita share vocal duties, often duetting across the album.

Issuing Strange Love on Melbourne punk label Poison City, the newly-minted Bleak Squad “were keeping [their] expectations realistic”; aka “pretty low”. But a strong response to the record has led Bleak Squad to hit the road, a quartet of veterans starting something new.

“It’s been a nice little adventure thus far,” Adalita smiles. “We’re these old showgirls, but when we’re out on the road, we’re a baby band. We’re brand new. We’re just finding our feet and settling into it. It’s been really nice, and refreshing, to feel like you’re new again…”

“It’s not something I planned or craved for. I wasn’t seeking anything like that, but when it happens, you observe that feeling, and you take that in.”

An imminent run of dates —from the East Coast to the West, where they’re performing as part of Perth Festival— marks Bleaks Squad’s biggest tour so far. “It’s gonna be fun to be on a much broader roadtrip,” says Adlita. “Everyone in the band is very witty, it’s a laugh a minute with those guys, I just sit back and watch the show.”

In performing in a new outfit, Adalita feels like she’s learning things about herself. Not just through “singing differently, singing something slightly more sophisticated or mellow or croony”. But, working with different people in a different setting, how she can be “a better bandmate or workmate or person in general.”

And what she learns in Bleak Squad feeds back into Magic Dirt, who are currently at work on writing their first new album since 2008’s Girl.

As well as writing for a new Magic Dirt record, Adalita is also developing ideas for a second Bleak Squad album; the quartet is keen to keep exploring their new guise.

“We’re all just brimming with ideas all the time – everyone in the band is always creatively working,” she says. “We’re definitely planning to do something new as soon as we can. But the Micks are always overseas, so it’s hard to get together. We have to strike while the iron’s hot, though. And just keep at it.”

Bleak Squad will perform at this year’s Perth Festival and tour across the country from February to March. You can find tickets to their Perth Festival show here.