dave graney - Moodists-Coral Snakes-mistLY-FEARFUL WIGGINGS

dave graney - Moodists-Coral Snakes-mistLY-FEARFUL WIGGINGS
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About Me

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2023 book THERE HE GOES WITH HIS EYE OUT (lyrics 1980-2023) 2023 reissue Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes Night Of The Wolverine. Double vinyl release. 2023 ROCK album with Clare Moore IN A MISTLY . WORKSHY - 2017 memoir out on Affirm Press. Available at shows or via website. Moodists - Coral Snakes - mistLY. I don’t know what I am and don’t want to know any more than I already know. I aspire, in my music , to 40s B Movie (voice and presence) and wish I could play guitar like Dickey Betts, John Cippolina or Grant Green - but not in this lifetime, I know.

Thursday, July 31, 2014

FEARFUL WIGGINGS reviews and stories - online tour posters

 Some reviews and online concert posters. All the faces and modes and imagery and characters and places- are from within the songs on FEARFUL WIGGINGS.

You can get a cd or a digital copy - or both - from Bandcamp HERE. 




FEARFUL WIGGINGS is at itunes here. Its a great album.




A very thoughtful review of a show by art writer Chris McCauliffe 



Hello Dave. Congratulations on the release of ‘Fearful Wiggings’. That’s a pretty big album (your 28th offering in your career so far). It’s slightly more laid back compared to previous releases, so why the change of pace, and why did you decide to go solo with this album (which is your second solo album, I believe)?
I really loved some recent music by the American artist Bill Callahan. His albums DREAM RIVER and MY APOCALYPSE. Found it fascinating as to how little instrumentation there was and how much room it left for the voice. Still remaining full of power and dynamics. Started recording early last year with my acoustic, knowing I’d be working with Clare’s band the DAMES (in which I play guitar) and HARRY HOWARD and the NDE (in which I play bass) for the rest of that year. Had time to spend on my album. Felt like doing something different. Our 2012 album “You’ve been in my mind” was a real high point for our up tempo pop rock songs. Did it in the same studio as 2011s “rock’n’roll is where I hide” album so I just felt we’d exhausted that tip for a while.
You’re in your 4th decade of writing and performing songs. In an industry where longevity seems to be less common occurrence (particularly with younger musicians), how do you keep challenging yourself to come up with new material, and not burn out?
Enjoy yourself! Play with people who love to play too. What else? Don’t worry about people who think they run the show. Musicians rule! Its good to have being a musician to fall back on! Actually, I really can’t do anything else, there is no retiring in this business. Once you accept that , you can relax and get in a groove.
I love the clip to the first single ‘Everything Was Legendary with Robert’ (the whole séance theme you went with was very cool), but I do have to ask exactly why everything was legendary with Robert?
I did a song called “You wanna be there but you don’t wanna travel” in the 90s. I loved it so much I recorded it twice- in 1990 and 1994. It was about the same sort of character. A legend in his own share house kitchen. Never looking you in the eye, always off somewhere else. Waiting for his real life to start. I’ve been that type of person myself. The video was directed and shot by Donna McRae and Michael Vale. They thought up the whole visual idea. Based around an early French film maker called George Melies.
In 1996, you won the ARIA for Best Male Artist, in which you slyly declared yourself ‘King of Pop’ (referencing 70’s teen magazine, Go-Set’s pop award… I still remember that, by the way – pure brilliance). How relevant do you think awards like the ARIAs are to our music industry in Australia?

Well they’re pretty good if they recognise people’s work . Pity it’s just bought and sold by different TV channels. I always thought it’d be better to be exclusive and behind closed doors- for insiders only. Then the TV channels would have to report it on the News – either fights or gossip. Make it more of a glamorous – forbidden thing. Would be more fun for the players too. I haven’t been near one in decades.
The relationship you have with your wife and musical partner, Clare Moore, is a rare and enviable one. What’s your secret to a happy, creative partnership? How much do you influence each other with your respective musical projects (Clare’s résumé is amazing!) ?

Clare’s playing keys on a lot of these dates though she’ll be behind the kit at the SolBar. We have experienced a lot of stuff. We know what each other is talking about. I love playing with the Dames too and can’t wait to do another Clare Moore album. We do some film and TV soundtrack work together (though not as much as we like) and Clare is amazing with that stuff. Editing and playing keys and organising the pieces for the timing of the film. She’s great with harmony and also keeping Stu and Stuart informed of things. That’s important, communicating with each other. The guys have to leave their lives behind when we go on tour, we take ours with us.

What is the one main thing you want your audience to take away with them after a live Dave Graney performance (apart from a copy of the album, that is)?

Well, we’d like them to think they’ve seen and heard something unique. Something you can’t get anywhere else. We don’t do other people’s songs. It’s all my stuff. I like sensation, goofy stuff. Street language and grooves. So its kind of a balance between throwaway show business foolishness and madly ambitious flights of the imagination. Sometimes the two are the same thing and that’s really great.
And finally, from one hat aficionado to another, how many hats do you actually own?

Not enough. It’s hard to get hats to go with different outfits. I’ve only had one I really liked and that’s really stuffed. I need another one. They’re annoying, they give you an attitude.

The Point - Sunshine Coast




Talking to a young bloke at the paper in Mt Gambier.


Dave Graney was driving along the Coorong in South Australia when he was reminded of Max Harris, the celebrated modernist poet and unwitting protagonist in the Ern Malley literary hoax of the late 1940s.
Still endeavouring to escape the cloud of controversy, Harris had written a poem in the mid-1950s titled On Throwing a Copy of The New Statesman into the Coorong. Casting his eye along the same quiet country road that had inspired Harris’ poem, Graney contemplated the pre-ordained strictures of country life.
‘‘I was driving down the same road, driving down roads your mother and father might have driven down, thinking of your life, and your mind wanders to things,’’ Graney says. ‘‘Ephemeral and permanent kinds of things – you drive around on roads that are set there, and you can’t really drive off things that are set in your life.’’
Graney’s musings subsequently became Country Roads Unwinding, a song that would appear on his new album, Fearful Wiggings.
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In a departure from previous records with his band the mistLY, Fearful Wiggings is largely a solo acoustic outing, with input from Graney’s wife and long-time musical partner Clare Moore and guest appearances from Lisa Gerrard from Australian ambient dance group Dead Can Dance and British folk-blues artist Nick Harper.
The change in style and tempo from Graney’s previous records was more happenstance than deliberate strategy. ‘‘I had no definite idea at the beginning whether it was going to be with a band or not,’’ Graney explains.  ‘‘I really loved the last two albums by Bill Callahan [Apocalypse, from 2011, and Dream River, 2013] – they’re really minimalist and leave a lot of room for the vocal. I really wanted to explore that a bit.’’
 He contacted Harper, the son of renowned British folk musician Roy Harper, after hearing he had been playing Graney’s Rock’n’Roll Is Where I Hide in his live set.
‘‘Nick Harper grew up in that avant-garge British folk scene of the early 1970s, which I’ve immersed myself in,’’ Graney says. ‘‘He’s an incredibly talented, shamanistic-type of guitarist – he does things that he does beyond what you can learn in books, when you’ve done the 20,000 hours of tinkling around on a guitar that you’ve got to do. I was quite honoured by the fact he was playing one of my tunes, so I got in touch with him.’’
He is in the midst of a national tour that has taken him to some different types of venue: a chicken shop in Ocean Grove, a book shop in Canberra and a converted bank building in the old centre of Newcastle. For Graney it’s about ‘‘playing a different kind of show, for a different kind of album’’.
Later this year Graney and his band will head to Europe to play some shows (while in Europe, Graney and Moore will also find time to play in Harry Howard’s backing band, the NDE).   His Francophile leanings continue to evolve – the title of Fearful Wiggings is taken from the glossary to a book of French short stories. But Graney is particularly impressed by the honesty of French songwriters.
‘‘They have songwriters [who] write about middle-age people, singing about failure and not caring about anybody or anything. That sort of thing is just not allowed in American or English music – there always has to be some sort of corny positivism in English-language stuff,’’ Graney says.
‘‘But the French do not care – they express all sorts of pithy, misanthropic kind of things.  Everything’s allowed in an adult way – bitterness, schadenfreude and all those kinds of things.  That’s what I like about European lyrics.’’

Patrick Emery in the AGE/SMH July 2014














August 3rd THE DAMES at the Post Office Hotel
August 17th - dave graney solo at the Drunken Poet in Melbourne August 22nd Happy Yess Club - Darwin


NZ TOUR- dave graney and clare moore
Wed 27th August: Auckland. .... Golden Dawn
Thurs 28th August: Wellington - MEOW
Fri 29th August: Christchurch - Darkroom
Sat 30th August:
Christchurch - 9.30am - appearance at Writers Festival
Sat 30th August - Dunedin - Chick's Hotel




imponderables! Darwin and NZ dates then Europe with Harry Howard




"one more fuckin' imponderable!" thundered Al Swearingen when the greasy mayor inquired as to why he seemed to dread the arrival of the telegraph in Deadwood."One more fuckin' imponderable."

2014 I have sometimes felt beset by many imponderables. Mugged by gangs of stinking imponderables. Still, we must go on.


The "Fearful Wiggings - in concert" dates shave been going very well. The music and the players have been the greatest. Mostly Stu Thomas on baritone and Clare Moore on keys and percussion - occasionally joined by Stuart Perera on electric. I've been playing two guitars through my Crate acoustic amp. This amp is a powerfully clear solid state box and I put my Maton six string and KYairi 12 string through one channel and my 1959 Ibanez Salvador archtop through a sansamp into the other channel. For the acoustics I also go through a BBE preamp and an Aphex acoustic exciter.


Playing older songs I haven't touched in years has also been enriching.

FYI we have been playing stuff like...
scorched earth love affair - 1995
you wanna be there but you don't wanna travel - 1991
where the trees walk downhill - 1981
chads car - 1982
the birds and the goats - 1995
I'm gonna live in my own big world - 1995
the sheriff of hell - 1997
I'm just havin' one of those lives - 1993
Mogambo - 1995

as well as a healthy serving of songs from FEARFUL WIGGINGS.

We started off in Castlemaine- a town where people go to avoid other people.They successfully avoided us - and our very good fellow travellers TEETH AND TONGUE.
Mt Gambier was a date at the City Band Hall. I was last in there three decades ago on a boyhood whim to play in the marching band. A beautiful 70s looking place out  on the east side of town. I always wanted to get back in there and a  local friend, BUGGO, helped me to achieve this.
We drove for many hours to get there and were greeted by a  welcoming group of people. Some looked familiar. One was a woman who insisted o hugging me and then wiped her nose, sniffed and said she was really sick and that she'd probably given me something. For some reason she took poor Clare aside and informed her she'd never heard my music and was not coming to the show and wanted to talk about a  party. It was positively Shakespearean. I mean she should have had two other crones by her side and all of them around a bubbling cauldron!

The night could have gone off the rails at any moment but never did. Quite a magical evening. BYO and all over before 11pm.  People brought eskies full of booze and sat around the trestle tables. Marvellous.



Other shows that we did like this- at venues where people set up shows in off the main tracks type rooms - were really great. Always surprising. The Piping Hot Chicken Shop in Ocean Grove, which is actually a  chicken shop. Smiths Alternative Bookshop in Canberra.


The more we drifted toward "normal" rock'n'roll joints- the less enjoyable it was. More uptight generally. Dead zones.

The record was album of the week on Triple R which was a great honour and a great lift for us. Community radio in general has been very supportive.

We have more dates to do and then Clare Moore and I will be playing in NEW ZEALAND - see below- and then accompanying Harry Howard and Edwina Preston to Europe. We play bass and drums in Harry Howard and the NDE.



I am hoping to do a few shows of my own in Europe. I'll post the dates soon.

Clare Moore's band , THE DAMES, are playing a  rare show on Sunday 3rd August at the Post Office Hotel.


Harry Howard and the NDE  are also playing at the Post Office Hotel on August 9th.


Thanks to everybody who has come to a  show or bought a cd.








Dave Graney and Clare Moore with Georgio "the dove" Valentino and Malcolm Ross

Dave Graney and Clare Moore with Robin Casinader - In Concert

ONE MILLION YEARS DC

Starts with a Kinksy groover sketching a 21st century populist tyrant who coasts in power on waves of public resentment at those on the lowest rungs of the ladder (He Was A Sore Winner). Sweeps across a sci fi terrain with nods to songs in the sand at the end of the world (Pop Ruins) and nods to the ties that bind in the underground communities (Comrade Of Pop and Where Did All The Freaks Go?). Songs about intense, long relationships, defunct technology that didn’t answer back, severe social status definition (I’m Not Just Any Nobody), people wandering through your mind as if it was a garage sale, the anxiety of the long running showman (wide open to the elements again) and ends with a song that’s “a little bit Merle Haggard and a little bit Samuel Beckett”. " Edith Grove! Powis Square! 56 Hope Road! Petrie Terrace!.. The Roxy! The Odeon! Apollo! Palais! Olympia! The Whisky! Detroit Grande!” Pop Ruins!"

ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS?

ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS? (The title comes from the chorus of “Song Of Life” ) is a classic rock’n’roll album. Classic if you lived through what has become known as ”the classic rock era” as it rolled out new and even broke onto the beachhead and morphed into punk. That’s the direction Dave Graney and Clare Moore have always been coming from. They have spent their lives schooled by and immersed in rock ‘n’ roll culture. Neither attended higher education and they dived in deep and kept swimming. From the Moodists through the Coral Snakes /White Buffaloes to the mistLY This is an album with their band, Dave Graney and the mistLY. Stuart Perera has played guitar with them since 1998 and Stu Thomas on bass since 2004. MARCH 2019 ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS? 2019 album out on Compact Disc - available here via mail order...
If you are from outside of Australia and wish to purchase a Compact Disc copy of ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS? please use this button (different postage)

LETS GET TIGHT

FEARFUL WIGGINGS

2014 solo album from Dave Graney. *****"If I've learnt anything in my years of writing about music it's that if you are going to do anything of worth in this tough game, you better have your own thing. Today's generic is easily replaced by tomorrow's. And yet you need to be flexible, to follow wherever the songs demand. In the case of this, only the second credited as a solo album among 30 or so Graney releases, it's a curious yet welcoming lane he walks you down, with acoustic guitars, not much percussion, vibes, smooth sounds. At the end of it you feel like you've awoken from a strange yet pleasant summer's dream. As shot by Luis Bunuel. It ranges from off-kilter reveries (A Woman Skinnies Up a Man, The Old Docklands Wheel) through to the softly seductive (How Can You Get Out of London) and the downright arch (Look Into My Shades, Everything Is Great In The Beginning.) This is music that is neither folk, nor blues, nor country, but it's all Graney, somewhere out to the left field beyond Lee Hazlewood's raised eyebrow. It's astringent on the tongue but sweetens in the telling." Noel Mengel Brisbane Courier Mail

you've been in my mind

June 2012 super high energy pop rock album - blazing electric 12 strings - total 70s rock drive. Greatest yet! available via paypal - $20 pp

rock'n'roll is where I hide/- 2011 "vintage classics/ re recordings" on LIBERATION

SUPERMODIFIED - August 2010 remixed/re-sung/re-strung//remastered/replayed comp via PAYPAL

also available as a digital album

Knock yourself (2009)-first ever dg solo set-filthy electro r&b-available via Paypal- $20

available as a digital album too

We Wuz Curious (2008)-blazing R&B jazz pop album available via paypal-$20


UNAVAILABLE-COMPLETELY SOLD OUT!!!
AVAILABLE AS A DIGITAL album

Keepin' It Unreal-(2006)-minimalist/lyrical vibes, bass, 12 string set - CDs sold out - digital only

Hashish and Liquor (2005 double disc by Dave Graney and Clare Moore) available via Paypal $25


UNAVAILABLE-COMPLETELY SOLD OUT!!!
Single album HASHISH available as a digital release

Heroic Blues- "folk soul" set from 2002-Availableas a digital album via BandCamp


UNAVAILABLE ! Completely sold out!

It is written,baby-book released 1997- available $10 via paypal