Adalita: ‘I Had No Ambition To Play Music’

"It was just packed with weird cats,” Adalita Srsen says, of her musical birthplace, Geelong's Barwon Club in the late-'80s/early-'90s. “[There were] all these young people that just came from maybe dysfunctional families or whatever and didn't have anywhere to go and just needed a scene... [It was] like, 'Yeah, we're weird but we're proud and this is what we do and this is the music we love and this is what we wear and this is how we talk and this is the hairdo I've got'. And, you know, you just felt like you had a family in that kind of scene.” From this scene emerged the band that would define Srsen's musical existence for the next 20-odd years, Magic Dirt.

Magic Dirt occupied that rare musical space that appeals in equal measures to radio tastemakers (they even appeared on John Peel's BBC radio show in 1997), career-making (or breaking) label types and a wide spectrum of the public. They were a popular band that maintained their edge. They hovered around the fringes of mainstream success, seemingly enough to make a go of it but without ever really forgetting where they'd come from.

Key to the band's emergence and successes was the pairing of Srsen and bass player Dean Turner. Their relationship, musical and otherwise, formed a platform from which Srsen developed her own musical chops. “It was completely accidental, I had no ambition to be in a rock band or make music, it wasn't something that I did or loved or [that] was on my radar at all,” Srsen says of her teenage years. “I'd always written poetry, so I had words and things. So then I started learning the guitar, self-taught from a book, and then I started putting the words of my poetry with my music and then recorded little things on cassettes, when cassettes were around. Then I met Dean and he heard the tapes and he said, 'These are great songs, we should do something'. I was like, 'Okay'.”

Needless to say, the thing took off – the Magic Dirt chapter of Adalita's story is now well told. But Turner was also to play a vital role in the next instalment of his friend's story: the birth of the solo artist, Adalita. “Dean really encouraged me to branch out and try these other songs and I was really nervous about it and kind of didn't want to do it because I was too nervous playing live,” she says. “I didn't mind the recording part, I enjoyed that, but live, I thought, 'I can't do this, it's too hard'... Early on even Dean was surprised that I kept doing the shows because he thought I was probably too afraid to keep doing it.”