Dirty Harriet
With a smidge of blues and country twang, a whole lotta gravel toned rock n roll goodness and a vocalist who knows how to use it, Dirty Harriet are those gin and whiskey soaked story tellers your mamma warned you about. Traversing Melbourne’s dive bars like they were born to do it, with the knowledge that music is best served live, they’ll keep your tail feathers shaking into the wee small hours. We caught up with Andy, Mik and Crazy for a virtual chatette to find out a bit more.
Please tell us a bit about yourselves and how the band got together – what’s in the history?
Andy – The band origins are quite funny. Dirty Harriet have been around for years! Formed in 2010 or 2011 after Sin City came to an end. 90% of the current line up have played in Sin City at different points in time. Clay, Mik and Andy all played bass in Sin City. Dirty Harriet has had a recent line up change and name change to go along with it. But all the members are familiar with each other so it wasn’t a surprise that we landed with the current line up.
Crazy – Sin City broke up, we made a band out of three-quarters of them and didn’t look back; well, unless we needed a new member.
Mik – As Andy said, old bandmates from way too long ago, it’s hard to go past talented friends.
Who or what would you say has influenced you – and the band – both musically and personally?
Crazy – We all have such different personal influences and never wrote any songs to fit into a particular style, so we brought all those together because we didn’t know what else to do with them.
Mik – Whisky.
Andy – Blondie, Misfits, Social Distortion personally; the rest of the band are too varied to even try and list. They also have rather questionable tastes.
How do the songs come together – is there a kind of a plan or is it more organic?
Andy – I’d say typically Tash comes to practice with a vocal melody and some chords or a riff. We work through that, get the song structure down and build from there. We are simple people and like to keep the song writing process simple too.
Mik – “Sounds suspiciously like you’ve included more than 4 chords there Tash, we’re gonna have to simplify it…”
Crazy – Start with some bones, add some meat, scrap it, start again, hey presto, a song!
How would you describe your sound and how do you feel this has changed and evolved over time?
Crazy – A bunch of punks trying to play cowboy music.
Andy – I think 20 years ago the majority of the band were into straight up punk. Loud, fast, simple catchy chord progressions. As we’ve gotten older we’ve added some country/ cowboy flair to some songs, softened some songs a little. We like to think we are still a punk band and we definitely still have some punk bangers in the set list and will probably always have those songs but it’s nice to mix things up and break up the set list a little.
Mik – Coming in later I’d say it’s heavier than we want but every time a nice ‘lil country pop gem comes along we just can’t help but do horrible things to it.
What’s coming up next for you guys and where can people get hold of your
music goodness?
Andy – We’ve just released two tracks Coming Home and Be Alone on Spotify. We recorded the two tracks at Head Gap in Preston – Thanks to Finn, an absolute legend and so easy to work with.
Mik – We’re hoping to work on some new songs and stay as active as we can
with gigs.
Crazy – Maybe a gig if we get our shit together. I am not good at these, but if you need some humour, I’m your slut.
Instagram: @the_dirty_harriet
Bandcamp: http://dirtyharrietandthehangmen.bandcamp.com
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