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

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

My photo
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, May 21, 2015

Further Out - Swingy George - the Tantanoola Tiger!

Another thing I neglected to mention about time and the music you send out into the unknown.
There was a song on the Moodists "Thirsty's Calling" album called "Swingy George" . We came from St Kilda to London and put the song down there. Propulsive kind of song we were best at. Bass heavy on one chord with Mick Turner grinding out some crude slabs of slide guitar. No blues except for my style of repeating lines over and over. Nobody ever asked me what lyrics were about in the band. I never made it my thing to separate them out.We had no lyric sheets with our records and the whole experience was a totality. 1984.
Then I got a call the other week from a  friend in Mt Gambier. He and his friends, hot rod aficionados and long term potheads had been watching a  dvd of the Moodists LIVE IN LONDON (1984). 

He said "that song Swingy George- was that about Swingy George?"

We then proceeded to compare notes on this character from our childhoods who had been a presence around the local (east side) childrens playgrounds. He would just sit there in the swings, looking comical because of his adult size. Nothing rotten ever happened, he was just a bit of a bogeyman. "Swingy George". Anyway, it took over 30 years for that song to get heard by a person who could hook into it and KNOW what the fuck I was singing about!
I now realize it was a kind of a folk tune. the post punk scene had this imperative that you write about your own experience and environment. The only thing was, in Melbourne, that we HATED most of our environment and were totally into frequencies from New York or London. Really, why would you be interested in Cold Chisel or the Angels with the Birthday Party or laughing Clowns, Alan Vega/ Suicide, the Fall, the Fore Engines  or the Contortions in your head?
I also wrote it with the film "night of the hunter" in my brain. That film was such a touch stone in that scene. 40s movies in general. The word "swingin'" had all the connotations of hanging as well as the goofy musical feel. The Jungle Jim was in every playground. Something for kids to hang off. I liked things to be just a  few repetitive lines.

"george was real enough
it didn't take much to make him swing
he was a black coat that we all coloured
yeah something from sleep caught in our light
a bad shape caught in our back yard
we wanted to see him swing
he was hangin around this jungle jim
just a black coat drifting
swingy george
he was a black coat that we all coloured
yeah something from sleep caught in our light
a bad shape caught in our back yard
he was still there when he had gone
we wanted to see him swing
he was hangin around this jungle jim
just a black coat drifting
swingy george
"



My friend was ringing about playing a gig in a  cafe on the main street of Mt Gambier in August. Also playing in the Tantanoola Hotel which is a timber town in one of the huge, spooky pine forests which surround the area. There is the legend of the Tantanoola Tiger!
It inspired Max Harris to pen this poem about the area ....

The Tantanoola Tiger

There in the bracken was the ominous spoor mark,
Huge, splayed, deadly, and quiet as breath,
And all around lay bloodied and dying,
Staring dumbly into their several eternities,
The rams that Mr Morphett loved as sons.

Not only Tantanoola, but at Mount Schanck
The claw welts patterned the saplings
With mysteries terrible as Egypt's demons,
More evil than the blueness of the Lakes,
And less than a mile from the homestead, too.

Sheep died more rapidly than the years
Which the tiger ruled in tooth and talk,
And it padded from Beachport to the Border,
While blood streamed down the minds of the folk
Of Mount Gambier, Tantanoola, of Casterton.

Oh this tiger was seen all right, grinning,
Yellow and gleaming with satin stripes:
Its body arched and undulated through the tea-tree;
In this land of dead volcanoes it was a flame,
It was a brightness, it was the glory of death,

It was fine, this tiger, a sweet shudder
In the heath and everlastings of the Border,
A roc bird up the ghostly ring-barked gums
Of Mingbool Swamp, a roaring fate
Descending on the mindless backs of grazing things.

Childhoods burned with its burning eyes,
Tantanoola was a magic playground word,
It rushed through young dreams like a river
And it had lovers in Mr Morphett and Mr Marks
For the ten long hunting unbelieving years.

Troopers and blacks made safari, Africa-fashion,
Pastoral Quixotes swayed on their ambling mounts,
Lost in invisible trails. The red-faced
Young Lindsay Gordons of the Mount
Tormented their heartbeats in the rustling nights

While the tiger grew bigger and clear as an axe.
'A circus once abandoned a tiger cub.'
This was the creed of the hunters and poets.
'A dingo that's got itself too far south'
The grey old cynics thundered in their beers,

And blows were swapped and friendships broken,
Beauty burst on a loveless and dreary people,
And their moneyed minds broke into singing
A myth; these soured and tasteless settlers
Were Greeks and Trojans, billabong troubadours,

Plucking their themes at the picnic races
Around the kegs in the flapping canvas booths.
On the waist-coats shark's teeth swung in time,
And old eyes, sharply seamed and squinting,
Opened mysteriously in misty musical surprise,

Until the day Jack Heffernan made camp
By a mob of sheep on the far slope of Mount Schanck
And woke to find the tiger on its haunches,
Bigger than a mountain, love, or imagination,
Grinning lazily down on a dying ewe,

And he drew a bead and shot it through the head.
Look down, oh mourners of history, poets,
Look down on the black and breeding volcanic soil,
Lean on your fork in this potato country,
Regard the yellowed fangs and quivering claws

Of a mangy and dying Siberian wolf.
It came as a fable or a natural image
To pace the bars of these sunless minds,
A small and unimpressive common wolf
In desperately poor and cold condition.

It howled to the wattle when it swam ashore
From the wreck of the foundered Helena,
Smelt death and black snakes and tight lips
On every fence-post and slip-rail.
It was three foot six from head to tail.

Centuries will die like swatted blowflies
Before word or wolf will work a tremor
Of tenderness in the crusty knuckles
Around the glasses in the Tantanoola pub
Where its red bead eyes now stare towards the sun.




This song from FEARFUL WIGGINGS mentioned Max Harris and his poem "upon throwing a copy of the New Statesman from the window whilst driving along the Coorong".
 



 
We're playing some shows soon! There's also now a second show at Memo for Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes.







Friday, May 8, 2015

Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes NIGHT OF THE WOLVERINE show in August. Archiving the fuck out of it. Smashing it!

The last few weeks have been a rabbit hole of archiving songs and music from old tapes and digitizing them.

Before that- I did a lovely gig at a place in Ballarat called The Eastern. Ballarat has always been a hard place to "make show" in but this old joint is something different. A sweet crew of people came along to the room and I had a great time. Patrick McCabe , a local player, did an opening set and was real charming. He even did a song about us and the last time we played in Ballarat and the venue dropped the curtain on us while we were playing. The indignity!(It was a part of a music school and they were teaching students how to put on an event. Number one- the musicians are horrible- crush them!)
I was passed a note from an old friend from the MOODISTS days. Now bands grab onto many things when they are young and cooking themselves up in order to get some internal heat and balance happening. Some sense of themselves and where they sit in regard to the smaller world of music they are trying to live in and that worlds relation to the wider world. Worlds within worlds.
THE MOODISTS were three parts South Australian in the Melbourne scene. We were always outsiders, and grabbed tight onto that. We were also not from private schools and didn't take hard drugs. We were hard core boozers and loved country music and football. So we were delighted when we met a fellow who came to our gigs who was from Ballarat and who was a shearer to boot. This fit so well with us. He was a lovely guy and we got a lot of poise from knowing him.
So this card that was handed to me was from this old compadre, Mark, and he apologized for not making the show as he was shearing in the area and had some early morning work to do. How hard would that work be as you get older? How cool did I feel? To have this touch , this contact from such a real world, when I'd been so shamefully engaged in the precious world of alternative music for so long. This is me in the dressing room. (You always need a hat , scarf and coat when night falls in Ballarat).


Then there was our annual trip to Adelaide to play at our favourite venue, the Wheatsheaf. When I do a gig here, people come out of the woodwork. For Clare Moore too- we never know what to expect. there is also no dressing room or ANYWHERE to hide and take a breather, it's all out there in the room.
People also get into my music here like nowhere else, they know my shit! Always a pleasure to play in South Australia. They get me.

A woman came up to talk, saying she had a lot of my albums, a very nice person. She then said that her father had known my father, during the war. they had been on the island of Borneo together.

I have had a picture of them together for many years, they must be 17 years old in it. My dad Noel is on the left. I love the way their hats are at the same angle.



Then I came back to Melbourne to archive some more music from boxes of old tapes. I'd been meaning to do it for years but now I had to find some particular stuff. From particular periods of particular bands. I got a bit atomized, I'm afraid.


First, I had to get  some more tracks for this Cherry Red/Creation Moodists disc that's being put together.

I looked through some old notebooks and saw that I met up with Slaughter Joe Foster at BAROCCA in Soho August 13th 1985, then met with him and Allan McGhee at the Bee Hive cafe in Kings Cross Sept 4th.
The Jesus & Mary Chain gig at the Electric Ballroom where there was this "kind of a riot" was September 9th and we recorded the 3 songs for Creation at Alaska on September 10th.
We did shows around London as the single came out and a  tour of Holland in December.
Our bass player Chris Walsh left to return to Australia after that tour.
We recorded these other three  songs I found, with some others at our rehearsal room , (SOLID LIGHT in CAMDEN), onto a 4 track tape player and did further overdubs at a home studio owned by Scott Bushburt from Turkey Bones and the Wild Dogs.
There is no bass on the session.
So the extra three songs are From 1986, no bass, lots of trebly guitar and drums and Clare Moore singing "the train from Kansas City" by the Shangri Las. Also another long lost song of ours called "the day they all wake up" and a version of Brian Wilson and Glen Campbells "I Guess I'm dumb" with me singing. Freaky sounds.
This is a picture of the Moodists at their last show in London at the Sir George Robey in 1986 or 1987. I was back there as a punter in 1996 to see Arthur Lee play with Love!



I then found all these live and rehearsal tapes of the 1986/1987 Moodists which featured David McClymont on bass. This was a really musically turbo charged, inspired period and the songs sound amazing. I really love the music we made then and would love to make a digital release of the songs.


The other main things I was looking for were demos for the NIGHT OF THE WOLVERINE album. I'd done a lot of 4 track recordings in early 1992 with our live mixer Ted Hamilton at his place. I wasn't intensely perfecting anything. Quite the opposite. The moment I put down a guitar track and then a vocal was usually the first time it had ever really been arranged or put together.
Here I am in Tony Mahonys old East St Kilda flat in 1992 where we often got drunk and listened to excellent  records and hatched plans to show the world what our ideas of something really great was...


Anyway, I found it all, as well as demos for the following two albums and the session Clare and I did for the greater part of the Devil Drives album.

I was lead to this place because we are doing a show in Melbourne with Rod Hayward and Robin Casinader. Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes playing NIGHT OF THE WOLVERINE August 8th this year. A Night of the Wolverine set and then one where we get unbuttoned.

http://www.trybooking.com/Booking/BookingEventSummary.aspx?eid=134537



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