Eleven years ago, droves of Melbourne music nerds gathered for a Sunday afternoon gig at a most unlikely venue: the Copacabana International on Smith Street in Fitzroy. With its kitschy interiors and enormous marquee sign, the Copacabana was better known for Brazilian BBQ fare and Cuban salsa classes than indie rock and punk gigs.

“It’s super daggy,” promoter Ali Bird told Broadsheet at the time. “There’s nothing hip about it, which I think is half of the appeal.”

Bird helped organise a couple of shows at the Copacabana in the winter of 2014. The July 6 lineup featured Dick Diver, Hierophants and the SMB. Tickets were $8, and Dick Diver’s presence on the bill ensured the cavernous space was at capacity in time for their 3pm performance.

By mid-2014, five years after the release of their debut EP, Arks Up, Dick Diver were already lions of the Melbourne/Naarm scene.

Their second album, the previous year’s Calendar Days, had given local indie stable Chapter Music one of its biggest successes to date. Dick Diver were part of the 2014 Laneway Festival tour and had recently sold out the significantly larger Corner Hotel. They’d be touring the USA for the first time in a couple of months’ time.

But Dick Diver’s low-key Sunday afternoon gig at the Copacabana revealed a lot about the band. For guitarists Alistair McKay and Rupert Edwards, bass player Alistair Montfort and drummer Steph Hughes, the goal was to perform their heartfelt and sophisticated guitar pop songs wherever they found a receptive audience. And they weren’t taking themselves too seriously, either.

“Has anybody tried the Dick Diver toastie yet?” asked Montfort mid-show, referring to the customised menu of sandwiches on sale at the Copacabana. “It’s got all your favourite ingredients: dick cheese, dick pickles, dick-o-nnaise.”

The setlist included favourites from Dick Diver’s back catalogue, such as Calendar Days’ lead single Alice, which recalls R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion while citing everything from perfectly golden toast to a Safeway deli and the Arrernte people of Alice Springs/Mparntwe.

Alice is an apt introduction to Dick Diver’s hyper-specific, imagistic style of songwriting, which evokes the urban Australian experiences of the band’s four members while offering furtive, if not exactly withering, critiques of contemporary Australian life.

“I remember when I was much younger, before Dick Diver started, it was something that I thought a bit about,” Edwards tells The Music regarding the apparent Australianness of Dick Diver’s songwriting. “Like, why do we just accept The Kinks singing in British accents or any American bands singing in American accents, but it's a bit of a novelty when Australian bands do it?”

References to IGA, Kerri-Anne Kennerley, TV Week, Zamel’s and Melbourne’s 300-metre-high observation platform, the Eureka Skydeck, are scattered throughout Dick Diver’s repertoire. On Head Back, the closing track on their debut LP New Start Again, Montfort dedicates an entire verse to Victorian amusement parks of the 1990s.

Along with the local focus of their lyrics, Dick Diver’s fondness for all things slow and jangly made them poster children for the nebulous “dolewave” scene, and their records earned frequent comparisons to The Go-Betweens and Paul Kelly. But the band’s Australianness never seemed forced.

“The thing that was easy with Dick Diver from the get-go was that it felt kind of unselfconscious,” Edwards says. “And maybe in that unselfconsciousness, one of the aspects in there was that we're not from America or we're not from New Zealand or we're not from Indonesia. We're just from the place we're from.”

High school friends McKay and Edwards formed Dick Diver in 2008. McKay met Montfort at uni and invited him over for a jam. Hughes joined soon after. McKay and Edwards have always handled the bulk of the songwriting, but Montfort and Hughes also make essential contributions, and lead vocals are split between the four of them.

“I think we all probably share sounds that we really like and all of us had that capability to write songs,” says Hughes. “Sometimes I feel like [the songs] can be quite different, but the fact that we’re all playing them as a group does connect them. It connects very easily with us four.”

The Copacabana set included a few tracks from Dick Diver’s then-unreleased third album, Melbourne, Florida. Released in March 2015, it’s the band’s most stylistically diverse collection, ranging from the sprightly power pop of Waste The Alphabet and Tearing The Posters Down to the Gold 104.3 soft rock of Year In Pictures and Percentage Points, and the distorted synth arpeggios of Competition.

Ten years after its release – and with a vinyl reissue on the way courtesy of Chapter – the album hasn’t aged a day. “I'm really proud of the songs,” says McKay. “I think they’ve held up well.”

“I don't think we've ever really focused stylistically on any genre,” adds Montfort, who has also played in bands like Straitjacket Nation, Total Control and The UV Race. “I think because we came from four pretty different spaces and ways of doing music, the focus was on the songwriting. That's what's made it hopefully not sound dated, in that it's not tied to a certain genre in garage or punk or DIY or indie specifically.”

The Copacabana is gone now, knocked down to make way for a Lululemon outlet. And less than 18 months after performing at the venue, Dick Diver went into hibernation. McKay relocated to London, Edwards to Stockholm, and within a few years, the band members were all raising children and busying themselves with other projects, such as The Stroppies, Terry and Sleeper And Snake.

But thanks to some nifty calendar management, Dick Diver will finally reconvene for four shows at the Thornbury Theatre from August 1-3. McKay says it’s almost certain they’ll release more music together. But for now, they’re relishing bashing out their old songs.

“I'm so stoked that we have all had the opportunity to be in the same place again to do it,” says Hughes. “Often those jams at home with Dick Diver, when a song is coming together, I just get the most pumped and the most stoked.”

Montfort agrees: “When we were jamming, I noticed that we're all singing each other's songs a lot more. It was full gang vocals the whole time because everybody was jacked on everybody else's songs.”

“It was like the Bee Gees,” says Edwards. “Exactly,” says Hughes.

Dick Diver will perform at Thornbury Theatre on Friday, August 1st, Saturday, August 2nd (two shows) and Sunday, August 3rd. The tenth anniversary edition of Melbourne, Florida is available via Chapter Music.