Give Us This Day Our Dulli Bread

Sometime Afghan Whigs frontman, Twilight Singers and Gutter Twins member and all-round alt.rock legend Greg Dulli arrives in Ireland shortly for a tour which sees him perform tracks from all stages of his 20-year career. The songs will be played by a stripped-down, three-piece outfit (“though we still hope to get hardcore on a few numbers,” asserts Dulli), and the singer notes that – save for a charity show a few years back – this will the first time he will have performed a greatest hits set.

Any particular reason why he chose to do such a show at this moment in time?
“There actually is,” replies Dulli. “I have a new Twilight Singers record coming out pretty soon, and at one point I’d been working on it for well over a year. I wrote a lot of songs and I kept switching them around, rewriting, etc etc. I finally told my manager, ‘I have a feeling that I’m going to keep doing this, so I need to get painted into a corner and have a deadline.’ So I asked him to book a tour, which meant that I would have to have finished the album, mastered it and completed the art-work by a certain date. It worked! I basically had to play a psychological trick on myself.”
Before a Gutter Twins show in Ireland a couple of years back, I had occasion to speak to Dulli’s collaborator in that band, former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, who turned out to be a somewhat less than garrulous interviewee (transcription of the ‘conversation’ revealed that I had actually spoken more words than he had). Dulli contends that “if you know Mark, he is a big talker” and in general speaks very highly of the diffident singer.
“My collaboration with Mark is one of the best I’ve ever had,” he gushes. “He’s the easiest guy to write songs with, and the easiest guy to tour and hang out with. He’s just one of my favourite people of the whole fuckin’ world. Also, I’ll tell you this – I’ve done a couple of hundred shows with Mark, cos he was in the Twilight Singers and I was in his band. But when we did that acoustic tour together 13 months ago, which was the last time I played, and we did material from his solo albums – all of which I love – I would sit there each night and go, ‘Wow, listen to that motherfucker!’
“There was never a night that I wasn’t thrilled to be playing with Mark Lanegan, to be his musical accompaniment, singing harmonies and so on. He’s one of finest collaborators and best friends I’ve ever had.”
As it happens, Afghan Whigs’ prominence during the grunge era meant Lanegan was far from the only alt.rock star whom Dulli encountered. The Whigs spent plenty of time in Seattle after signing to Sub-Pop and it was during this period that Dulli became acquainted with an up-and-coming outfit called Nirvana.
“I saw Nirvana when Chad Channing was the drummer!” recalls Greg. “They stayed in my house in Cincinnati on the Bleach tour, and I saw them live maybe five times. They were like any band, they had good nights and bad nights, but when they were on – unbelievable. And that kid could sing too, man. I did not know Kurt Cobain very well, but Kurt introduced me to Mark Lanegan. And Kurt was such a great singer and songwriter. I loved Nirvana – always did and always will.”

Greg Dulli plays Whelan’s, Dublin (October 27); Spring & Airbrake, Belfast (28); Roisin Dubh, Galway (29); and Cyprus Avenue, Cork (30).