Dan Warner played his first live show on guitar in 1973, as a young student of Seb Jorgensen at Montsalvat artists’ colony in Melbourne, Australia…
…but the family moved away…and around…for quite a while…
THE WARNER BROTHERS
…back in Melbourne in the mid-1980s, Dan began playing duo shows in the pubs with fellow guitarist, James Stewart – James on his green Guild Starfire and Dan on his acoustic Maton. Dan was a fan of Neil Young, Rickie Lee Jones, Richard Clapton, Tom Waits – Stewie was more into Duane Allman, Little Feat, Wanda Jackson, Hank Williams. The two met solidly in Dylan. Dan and James played gigs and residencies around town for a couple of years before adding a rhythm section. As a joke, punters who came to see them started calling the nameless band ‘The Warner Brothers’. It stuck.
The Warner Brothers were fiercely independent – building up a sizeable following at residencies that the band ran themselves in off-the-grid pubs: The Albion Inn and The John Barleycorn in Collingwood; The Riverside Inn in Richmond. By the late 80s, James and Dan had started to write and record their own songs and then, in July 1992, The Warner Brothers released their first self-funded independent album, Talking In Your Sleep.
The lead song from the record, James Stewart’s ‘Stuck in Melbourne’, saw the band get dragged into the mainstream for a brief time. The fleeting notoriety of the band caught the attention of the real Warner Brothers, who weren’t happy, and, after some wrangling, the band changed its name to Overnight Jones.
THE WARNER BROTHERS/OVERNIGHT JONES RELEASES
ALBUMS
TALKING IN YOUR SLEEP, 1992 
Notable tracks: Stuck in Melbourne; Brunswick St Girl; Four Leaf Clover
MY PRIVATE TRAIN, 1994
Notable tracks: Head Over Heels
ICE BAIT GAS, 1996
Notable tracks: Big as the Moon; 15 Bucks a Week; Henty Stomp
EPs
SLIK DEGREASE
1998
Notable tracks: The Hard Way
*All releases by THE WARNER BROTHERS/OVERNIGHT JONES are currently out of print.
DAN & AL
During the 90s, around The Warner Brothers’s commitments, Dan also played duo gigs with fellow acoustic guitarist, Al MacInnes. ‘Dan & Al’ became known for their long residencies – Tuesday nights at The Great Britain and then The Corner in Richmond; and just about every Sunday arvo during the 90s at The Punters Club in Fitzroy. ‘Dan and Al’ released one album at the end of the 90s – as well as a notable video directed by Al and animated by his fellow students at RMIT. It’s a cover of the 1950s song by Nervous Norvus – The Fang. Here’s the link
ALBUMS
ISLE OF HOP, 1999
Notable tracks: The Man in the Moon; Ganzo Manana
WARNER CORNER
In the mid-90s, Dan began presenting a weekly segment ‘Warner Corner’ on Jonnie von Goes’ show ‘The JVG Radio Method’ on Melbourne community radio station 3RRR FM. Each week, alongside local musicians Ed Bates, Jane Hendry, Dave Evans, Nathan Farrelly, Miles McNicol and Greg Field, Dan would perform a song live according to Jon’s theme. The segment ran for over 20 years and Dan performed more than 1000 songs live on Jon’s show – some of which live here.
Over the odd summer, since retiring from Warner Corner, Dan presents with Jed Macartney their own themed show, Ebb Tide.
DAN WARNER SOLO
At the end of the 90s, when the band broke up and Al moved overseas, Dan joined Paul Hester’s post-Crowded House band, The Largest Living Things. When the American guitarist from the band, Kevin Garant, decided to return home – Dan and Kev demoed some songs – and Dan relocated to NYC for two years to play some gigs and to try to shop the songs.
Dan ended up returning to Australia in the mid-2000s and began releasing solo albums.
SOLO ALBUMS
A LIKENESS OF YOU, 2005
Notable tracks: A Likeness; Pastures
NIGHT PARROTS, 2008
Notable tracks: Is That What They’re Sayin’; Bernie
FALL INTO THE SKY, 2014
Notable tracks: Ideas of Liza; Box of Wood
MAYBE, THEN… 2022
Notable tracks: Summer Out of Reach; All Souls’ Day
EPs
LONG GONE SONGS, 2023
Notable tracks: Long Gone Songs
THE SENTIMENTAL BLOKE
Between recording sessions for ‘A Likeness of You’, Dan toured with Jen Anderson (The Black Sorrows/WPA) and Dave Evans (The Band Who Knew Too Much) as a singer/instrumentalist in ‘The Larrikins’, a trio that played live Jen’s soundtrack for the Australian silent film, The Sentimental Bloke. Directed by Raymond Longford in Sydney in 1919, The Sentimental Bloke is one of the world’s oldest surviving feature-films.
In 2005 the film played in Venice and London. In 2006, the film toured to the US (including the Telluride Film Festival), Canada and Japan. The Larrikins also played at the inaugural Chungmuro Film Festival in South Korea.
The Larrikins still perform the soundtrack, whenever and wherever they can…
THE NIGHT PARROTS
From September 2023, Dan and Melbourne musician Marcel Borrack decided to combine their talents into a single entity to be known simply as ‘The Night Parrots’ – a vehicle for an ongoing songwriting project for both artists to release material under a single banner.
The melding of these two celebrated artists into a single songwriting team had been a long time coming. Marcel had produced, with Tim Harvey, the final three of Dan’s solo albums, with more and more songs becoming closer collaborations with each release.
Here is the video for the first co-write ‘Every Moon is Blue’ that appeared on the album, Maybe Then…
Here is the first Borrack/Warner co-write ‘St Patrick and St Michael’.
Alongside ‘new’ The Night Parrots singles, Marcel and Dan continue to release material with their separate musical projects – The Telecaster Diaries; The MiniBikes; The Warner Brothers; Dan & Al.
All The Night Parrots’ single releases are available on the band’s Spotify page here.
And here’s the Bandcamp page.