The Dresden Dolls

"I've just finished my breakfast in a fantastic cafe in East Berlin," explains Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer between mouthfuls, clearly enraptured by her surroundings. "I do love to travel, but I feel like I only get a really fleeting trace of any place I'm in or any person I meet. So it sort of feels like a constant cocktease, you know?"

I must say, that seems like the most perfect, characteristic response from Palmer, a woman whose songs are never short on beautiful, poetic bluntness. It's a perfect match for he Dolls' cabaret-style performance, which fits snugly into her twisted lyrical narratives.

"I can't ignore the fact that a lot of the music I grew up on was musical theatre," she almost agrees. "I always really loved followable stories, followable plots, really visible images and stuff like that. But you know, to say that's the only thing that we do would be to ignore that a lot of our songs are really just rock songs."

That said, Palmer is clearly one of the 21st century's great musical storytellers. Two years ago, when I first witnessed the bizarre and wonderful filmclip to Girl Anachronism, I was drawn to the band's website to find the most comprehensive and, perhaps, disturbing pictorial autobiography. Palmer has an intimacy with her audience that would seriously frighten most people in her position.

"To me that's the most fun part of the job, actually. The opportunity to be able to have that kind of intimate relationship with so many people. I think people misunderstand the power that is actually implicit in sharing yourself and being so vulnerable, because you actually disarm people that way and you become less vulnerable by being so honest with yourself. It gives much less room for criticism if you're your own harshest critic. So I try to do that very deliberately in my own journal and writings and interviews, I feel like the more I reveal of myself, not only the more light I can shed on the music and draw people in to some of the blanks, but I see it as an artform in itself."

Yet, despite their intimacy, she and drumming partner Brian Viglione have created a warped and quite alien act for themselves, drawing you in just as it pulls you away.

"That's also what makes it art. It can't be so blunt and obvious that you don't leave anything to the imagination. I've noticed this, some of my absolute favourite songwriters also do this toggle between the hyper-personal and the surreal and they bounce back and forth as if it's nothing. A good example of that is Robyn Hitchcock, or Leonard Cohen, or Edward Ka-Stel from The Legendary Pink Dots, who all have this ability to be describing the Martian landscape in one line and in the next they're staring at a photograph of their mother who just died, but it's a sort of dreamlike stream-of-consciousness connection that can actually make everything believable.

"You need to look closely because I think we suggest a lot more than we actually do. The stage set consists of a piano and a drum set. Our costumes consist of Brian wearing sneakers and shorts and face paint and me wearing a pair of stockings that I've worn for the past five years and a black dress and face paint. The whole thing takes three-and-a-half minutes to put together and there's nothing elaborate about it. I think in people's impressions and imagination, it's so much more vast than that and it's actually not. But I think that's very telling because it means that we suggest a lot just by the way we act and play on stage."

Some weeks ago, heroic piano man Ben Folds revealed to me his attachment to the 'Dolls (of Palmer: 'She's classic, man'). I wanted to surprise her with this revelation, but it appears Folds has beaten me to it.

"He and I just struck up a friendship and he's totally one of the kindred souls. I could just tell the first time I saw him that he was some long-lost brother..." They're even playing some shows together while both tour our fine, brown land.

Finally, it's good to know that even a band with as much creativity and artistry as The Dresden Dolls has its moments. "Brian eggs on at me that there's a totally recognisable 'Amanda rhythm' that I keep writing into all my songs, that he thinks gets boring. You know, the duh-duh-duh-duh rhythm. And then he goes, 'Oh! There it fucking is again. Well, I've got to do something even more interesting with the drums so people don't notice you're writing the same song over again'."

Ben Revi

dB proudly presents The Dresden Dolls at the Adelaide UniBar on Wed 20 Sept. 'Yes, Virginia' is out now through Roadrunner.