Dada Ono On Cheap Violins, 'Family Guy' & A Blood Test Gone Bad

Frontwoman and electric violinist of Melbourne psych-punk four-piece Dada Ono, Nik Ranger, has just given blood and she's feeling a little woozy.

"I had no common sense. I didn't eat anything, I had no water, so naturally I can't give blood and then try and do things. It was fine, it was only a couple of hours of seeing spots everywhere I looked," she jokes.

Dada Ono was conceptualised while Ranger was living in Siem Reap in Cambodia teaching music. "My job was all I had, so I found a cheap keyboard and started banging away in my free time," she explains. After moving from her home in Queensland to Melbourne, she completed the band which now includes guitarist Jason Whatt, bassist Tom Hainsworth and drummer Broghan O'Loughlin.

Their eclectic sound revolves around Ranger's electric violin, drawing on her classical background. "I've been playing violin for about 20 years now, which is insane — longest thing I've ever done in my life, other than breathing!" she jokes. "I got my teaching degree in high school, which is kinda cool. I was very much on the path of becoming a classical musician, that's the direction I was steered towards... I don't know if you've ever seen that Family Guy episode where Peter gets taught how to play violin and he's crying and his fingers are bleeding and he plays it really well but he's like 'I hate this instrument'," she illustrates. "Like that, but less dramatic."

Following high school she dropped the instrument entirely — "I went from practicing four to seven hours a day to like, nothing, for a year". When she picked it back up, "I had an idea that I would do it for myself. I bought the electric violin off eBay, it was a $50 piece of crap but I was like 'whatever'."

On their debut record Granny Loves Smith you can hear Ranger playing that same crappy electric violin. "I've taken it to a lot of repairers and basically said, 'I know this instrument is a piece of crap but do what ever you can to save it, money is no object.'" Rather than record it DIY — "I'm a violinist who has very little concept of what it is to be in a rock band or know how all that stuff works" — she found a post on the Melbourne Musicians Facebook page from a producer who was offering up his studio space for free. "I took him up on his offer, and to his word he recorded us for free! He was just really a genuinely awesome dude," she enthuses.

Written over two years, the album's punk sensibilities are in-keeping with the sentiment of their name. "I've always seen punk music as this wonderful medium to be loose and be free and be wild but also make a statement," she explains. "'Dada' comes from the post WWI art movement, and my interpretation of Dada is 'Dad of the rebel'. It comes back into that punk origin... And 'Ono' just means 'axe' in Japanese, like a guitar. It's a fun play on words."