I’m sitting across from my mum eating salami and olives. She is telling me how she remembers when Southgate was built, a grand new promise on concrete etched onto the edge of a Yarra already foetid with it’s burdens. Two glasses of wine have a way of wiping away all the hapless miscalculations made before our consultation.

This is trans-generational concert-going, honoured by the chance to take my mother, of whom I possess hard-copy pictures of singing on stage with my tied to her chest at surely not older than months, to see a band which, all considered, soundtracked her life at my age in the same way that twenty-six years later it soundtracks mine. She says if she could go back in time and see anyone it would be Janis Joplin. I say it would be Gil Scott-Heron. I remember being sad on her behalf when he passed because I knew how much she loved him.

My mother is mocking attendees. A woman says she first saw these fellas at a festival and Mum mutters ‘Punter’s Club, every Thursday, two bucks a pot’, a business model of which I take firm note. I pull the arms off my glasses and she just laughs.

It’s all waiting around. We lose light and out the Three come, Warren Ellis dancing around like a gremlin to Boz Scaggs of all things. Jim and Mick look thoroughly unimpressed, and take up their posts as the only two people able to translate the ravings of the circular logic Arrival alien on the violin. Ellis is chatting something about something and then everything swells as we launch into Love Changes Everything 1 2 and 3, the cover of which singles was definitely made by one of these three in Microsoft Paint or something. The piano soars to the skies buoyed in the raft of White’s drumming like communist free jazz, booming floor tom and all, and Turner’s fan-like ethereal fingerstyle playing. Mum and I are in the same position on the edge of our seats, elbows rested on spread knees, our genetic vertigo from being up in the high stalls swept away in the dark. The stage is lit like a loft in New York, though as Mum says ‘there are no lofts in New York anymore’. And it’s true. There’s nothing like how the Three got to this point anymore. It’s remiss to say if they started now there’d be nowhere to go. They’d play a bunch of house shows sure, but this isn’t grammable music.

They lull out of the new stuff, Ellis heckling the crowd back and unstoppably spitting into a bucket. What proceeds is a chronology of a thirty year discography, diving off into the Indian (Love Song) Ocean, magnetic tambourine lining perfectly up with the looped splucking as the hobbit writhes around on the floor, and Turner has his chance to really show off. This is steppe music. This is driving home from Ballarat, Ellis-ium, over the parched hills in the rain.

Dirty Three smell like the radio playing from the open door of the idle old Hyundai I grew up in, with red lipstick scrawls all over the ceiling, which shit itself one day on the road and was towed home in exchange for baklava. This is taking my violin out in the rain and pacing along the brick fence beside the road playing Rachmaninov. Jim White barely breaking a sweat in a suit jacket, he and Turner sharing frustrated capitulated glances as Ellis rambles about getting caught in the violin lead, how if he had a wireless transmitter he’d be playing out in the foyer, turns to Turner and says come on Mick let’s get this over with and go and split an eighty dollar bottle of white wine somewhere. I’d eat my own finger to work one more night of bar work and serve Dirty Three a bottle of eighty dollar white.

The minute Everything’s Fucked hits so do the tears. And they do not stop rolling. We swirl into the post-rock Arleta cover, Once I Remember.

Once we all remember. We all remember this music. Ellis might soundtrack now, Turner paint pictures for rehearsal spaces, White clatter Milford-Graves on the kit, but this is the real soundtrack. This is the fibre and fabric of our lives. A temporality thought impossible. They go out on the last tracks from Love Changes Everything and Mum launches out of her seat to ovate. I’m not sure what’s more important temporally then. The moment shared with the band that made us all get off our arses and create, or the moment of elation I see her in right now.

The encore of Hope. The plaintive violin harmonics. The crowd brays for Deep Water, and below they go. Lying in bed or scuffing holes in shoes, getting wet feet, or sharing a particularly poignant moment with a sheep on a country back road, or driving home from rehearsal and seeing ‘Fox!’.

Ellis announces: ‘this is about waking up in the back of a car dead’ and I catch myself able to mouth word for word the introduction to the last song. ‘This is for anyone who’s dead or dying tonight. It’s called Sue’s Last Ride, or It’s a Fucking Bummer That You Died’. He takes to the floor on his back, cradling the tiny body of the four-stringed violin, the notes living through his fingers as the wire brushes hiss across the skin of the snare. The corners of my smile are wet with tears. Turner builds that tiny riff, if you could say Turner has riffs and not misremembered psalms. And the grit-wail of the D string comes in, up to the A and back around, travelling thirty years of backstreets through this lot’s mind into the claws of the beast. Ellis leaves, saying nothing. So too does White. Eventually, Turner too, facing the crowd for the first and last time. All be upstanding, ovate the preachers.

We’re standing outside. I’m looking at my Mum and seeing me. Smelling her osso bucco on the stove. Staring down all the bullshit we faced together. Staring through anthologies of concrete poetry, the annotations in her copy of The Vulture, her old paintings I’ve collected. She asks me how I am. I say I cried a few times. She asks if I’m ok. I say ‘you know what they say’ and my op shop hoodie around. The black text reads ‘music is the act of thinking with sound’. We laugh, and hug, and go our separate ways.