2024 release of two albums. (strangely)(emotional) and I Passed Through Minor Chord In A Morning.
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.
"Dave Graney ‘n’ the Coral Snakes 30th anniversary tour for the Soft ‘n’ Sexy Sound album is happening in October-November.The rehearsals have begun and it’s great getting into a lot of songs that we rarely or never played. It was a really deeply serious set of songs. Deep Inside A Song, Scorched Earth Love Affair, the Pre Revolutionary Scene, Morrison Floorshow, I’m Not Afraid To Be Heavy, I’m Gonna Live In My Own Big World, Rock n Roll Is Where I Hide, The Birds And The Goats, Dandies Are Never Unbuttoned and more! A thing of it’s own. Produced by Victor Van Vugt. Great art by Tony Mahony, including our genre/logo AOART. There were also little messages all over the booklet alluding to the times such as Tenez Le Droit, Baby. That was the motto of the Victorian Police and Melbourne in the first half of the 90s was a scene of police and gangland revenge and retribution due to the Walsh st shootings. There was some other text floating around, "Whiskey Fast and Honey Slow" which is a line from a Tim Buckley song which I thought could have described some of the music. Also "Woe Is You", which appears in the song Outward Bound and which I thought encapsulated the angst free but not necessarily meek and mild stance from which I was delivering the conceptual bombs of which the album was made.
The music is sounding great. There have only been a couple of times since we recorded it that I have sat and listened to this record intensely. I am so proud of it. Really no weak part to it. Diverse? Hell yes! Made under pressure. Victors recording and production was amazing. I am sorry if I never thanked him enough. Cannot believe how he recorded some of the vocals so well at almost a whispered volume.
We will be playing the entire album in order and then another set of songs from albums before and after. Join us!
Robin Casinader, Clare Moore, Dave Graney, Stu Thomas and Rod Hayward
“The Soft ‘n’ Sexy Sound. 1995. Gold status. ARIA award for Best Male Artist (I called it “king of pop” as that sounded less pretentious). Rock’n’Roll Is Where I Hide, I’m Not Afraid To Be Heavy, Apollo 69, Morrison Floorshow.
Looking forward to getting back into this Shelby GT500 of an album for a celebratory tour. (The previous year’s album You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel had been a Monaro GTS and Night Of The Wolverine was of course a Second Hand Ford. The Devil Drives - a Statesmen ‘73 Caprice/leaded – lay in wait in the future).
Great to be playing with guitar master Rod Hayward and Robin Casinader on keys again. Robin insists we play the album in order so we are going to do just that. Then a set of classics from our corner of rock from before and after 1995. Stu Thomas will be joining with us on the bass guitar (as we call it in the business). The bass guitar. Count us in Clare Moore - Queen Of The Tubs- and see you at a show!”
The roundabout way we took to make the Soft n Sexy Sound.
Didn’t
somebody smarter than me say that life is what happens while you plan
to do something else?
Dave
Graney and the Coral Snakes started in London 1987 after Clare
Moore and I finished up with the Moodists. Gordy Blair on
bass, Louis Vause on piano and Malcolm Ross on guitar. Recorded for
Fire Records. Had to return to Australia in late ‘88 due to visa
problems we recorded an album for Fire in Melbourne with the White
Buffaloes who included Rod Hayward on guitar, Conway Savage
(who later left to join the Bad Seeds) on piano and Chris Walsh (ex
the Moodists) on bass. (Called My Life On The Plains and produced by
Phil Vinall who came over from London. He later returned to produce
Magic Dirt). Returned to the UK in 1990 to reunite with the Coral
Snakes and pick up where we left off. Recorded I Was The Hunter And I
Was The Prey with Phil Vinall again producing in a studio in Croydon.
A major indie distribution company went under, taking many small
labels with it and the album was put into a state of
suspense-limbo-of unknown destination so Clare Moore and I returned
to Australia. All through 1991-2 we played in Melbourne and Sydney as
Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes with Rod Hayward and Robin Casinader
on keys. We played shows without a bass player which we called “Soft
and Sexy shows” as they were a different approach to our normal
sets, focusing more on vocals and song arrangements and textures. We
listened to a lot of classic reggae and KD Langs’ Ingenue album.
Gordy
Blair came out to play with us for six months before returning to the
UK. A live show from this time was recorded and released as Lure
Of the Tropics. We also played with the late Andrew Picouleau on
bass. In 12 months in 1992-3 we released I Was The Hunter and I
Was The Prey, Lure Of The Tropics and Night Of The
Wolverine. The latter really came out of the Soft and Sexy
semi acoustic shows we had been doing. It had no bass on half of
it and was produced with Tony Cohen.
We
signed with ID records and toured outside of inner city Melbourne and
Sydney for the first time, working nationally opening for Hunters and
Collectors and then the Cruel Sea and then a national tour of our
own. To do these dates we had to get louder and funkier and this led
to the album You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel,
again produced with the late Tony Cohen in 1994. This album debuted
top 10 in Australia. (It featured I’m Gonna Release Your Soul
and The Stars, Baby).
We
played all kinds of outdoor festivals and live tv shows. Clare Moore
began collecting exotic vinyl (which was abundant in op shops then)
in all the new regional towns we were visiting and we listened to a
lot of hip hop and trip hop , country, Brazilian music and jazz
(pilfered from the Universal Records offices) which led to us
thinking of recording an album with more attention to textures and
arrangements than just recording a performance as if it was a live
show. We recorded the Soft and Sexy Sound with Victor Van Vugt
producing. Victor had left Australia with the Moodists as a teenager
and had stayed in the UK as a live mixer for Nick Cave and The Bad
Seeds, The Pogues and the Fall and many other artists. He had started
working in the studio more and had come back to Melbourne. He knew
what we wanted, Clare Moore and I were of a very UK music
sensibility.
We spent a lot of time rehearsing the songs and
recorded it all at AAV in Melbourne. Robin Casinader scored a lot of
strings for it. On the last day of rehearsal I showed everybody a
song I had written called Rock n Roll Is Where I Hide. I had
it all totally arranged. The band kicked into it really easily and we
put that down as well. It was the least Soft ‘n’ Sexy sounding
song of all but it was the one which people tuned into and it became
one of the songs we have been most associated with. It went for six
minutes and had no chorus and the title appeared nowhere in the
lyric. It was weird and it rocked. It helped that we had a classic
rock guitarist in Rod Hayward to really drive the insistent guitar
motif right out of the world. It was released in 1995 and went Gold
in 1996 (I got my gold record made with gold ropes so I could wear it
around my neck, hip hop style) and I was awarded an ARIA for Best
Male Artist. (This award had previously been shared around between
Barnesy, Farnesy and Deisel).
Up until that we had been inside a small label - ID - which was inside the large coroporation that was Universal Records. (Universal had a catalogue of LABELS. One person looked after MOTOWN and ISLAND. They also had Polydor, Phonogram, Polygram, Def Jam....It was huge.) We were benefiting from the power and range of the big machine. When I won the award people outside the ID label noticed us. It had been quite sweet until then.
We had already recorded our next
album The Devil Drives and Clare Moore and I took it to London
to mix with some trip hop adjacent studio people the day after the
1996 awards. Both Night Of The Wolverine and The Soft n Sexy Sound
were released on This Way Up in the UK/ Europe in 1996.
******EXCERPTS FROM WORKSHY in regard to The Soft 'n' Sexy Sound
The
Soft
’N’ Sexy
recording session was quite fraught. Clare Moore and I had
communicated our wish to Victor the producer for the aesthetic drive
to be more towards the recording of songs and sounds and textures
than the recording of a band, but we/I had not communicated this very
well to the rest of the Coral Snakes. Our music had been produced by
the live music scene we’d been playing in. It had been heated up
and cooked, and the tempos were tight and the choruses were
signposted. The snares cracked and the guitars were loud. Now we were
asking the band to try and get some feels such as ‘dread’ into
tracks by playing slower and being less quick to climax. Tension. We
wanted to grind things out. This was hard to articulate at the
recording stage.
Again,
I had brought about twenty songs to the pre-production and rehearsing
sessions, which ran almost straight into the recording dates that had
been booked. Times for photo sessions and video production were also
being nutted out, vaguely. It was a situation of industrial music
being pulled into a production line, but it was great to be making
music for a waiting audience and business.
The
songs I was writing were a kind of reaction against the world of the
big festival/grunge-era music we were in the middle of. It had a kind
of orthodoxy about it that I found pretty corny. Clare Moore and I
had come from the 1980s and that underworld scene. Post-Nirvana,
there were younger acts getting easy rides from high school into
recording and touring situations. That was a new normal to them but
it didn’t make for very funky music. And the way it went straight
to large festival stage dimensions with attendant big gestures and
PAs ruined the sound as well. It wasn’t a situation where
individual or unique sounds could be brought out. Nobody
sound-checked and you had to go on and hit hard with your best-known
and most powerful hits. A big contrast to the 60s festivals where
people like Hendrix presented new material to audiences who expected
surprises. Nobody in this world knew of our former band, the
Moodists, and we didn’t drag that period into view. We were happy
to play in this new situation. Our peers from that era, the
Go-Betweens and the Triffids, had not really made it into the new
decade as yet. For Kim Salmon, who was a peer we could look across to
and check our co-ordinates, the 90s were all about the Surrealists,
not the Scientists.
And
though I’d bought Jeff Buckley’s first EP, I couldn’t stand all
the people who copied him. There was no restraint! I preferred Waylon
Jennings – and I’d also heard a lot of Tim Buckley’s music. The
late Jeff’s story and approach had a lot of the 90s in it. The
angst and the damage and the howling.
Rock’n’Roll
is Where I Hide
All
this unease with my surroundings and the general pop zeitgeist fed
into a song called ‘Rock’n’Roll is Where I Hide’, which
eventually drove the album to Gold Status in Australia and kept us
touring it for two years. This song was actually the raw sound of our
band; it had none of the textures and production or arrangement
quirks we approached on the other songs on TheSoft
’N’ Sexy Sound.
I’d
walked around the streets and experienced a couple of years of people
clocking me as some sort of face they had seen recently in the paper
or on TV. That sort of attention is maddening. Because you enjoy it –
it’s flattering, but weird. It creeps you out and rots your poise.
I had always been the sort to stand back and observe people and
situations, like a crime writer. I was never jumping on tables and
wanting to be the centre of attention. Now I was feeling that power,
or that way of being, being taken away from me. People were looking
at me. They’d sit behind me at cafés …
There
was also the uncomfortable way I sat with the rest of the grunge-era
music life. The scene was all these long-haired, cargo-shorted,
tribal-tattooed, dreadlocked, shirtless young athletic men yelling
about ‘awesome’ things and acting out in ‘full on’ prankish
manners. I wouldn’t say I was contrarian in nature, I just
preferred to identify as a country man than a dude. Not that new kind
of a dude anyway.
The
music for ‘Rock’n’roll is Where I Hide’ was a three-chord
trick with one note pedalling throughout, all the way, for six
minutes. It was coming from some sort of a hypnotic mantra direction.
In other ways, it was totally springing from my youthful listening to
Southern Rock, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. I had the
perfect band to bring it to life. Rod Hayward’s guitar skills were
so great. Beautiful tone from his old Strat and his Marshall amp.
Precise chording and stellar soloing. The groove from Gordy and Clare
Moore was amazing, and Robin Casinader built the electric piano
dynamics like a true player.
We have done a few shows so far in 2025 and are booking more.
original photo by Charlie Kinross
We played a great set as Dave Graney and the mistLY in January at George Lane in Melbourne and then headed to Adelaide where we sold out the Wheatsheaf on a Thursday night for two sets with Cousin Q on bass. The heat was incredible. We rehearsed the day before in Q's basement in 44 degree heat. It was psychedelic, fierce Adelaide heat and light. Taking no prisoners.
We then drove to Bellwether Wines in the Coonawarra (just outside Penola) where Clare and I made show as a duo. The venue is inside a heritage shearing shed that has been converted into a small winery. Squizzy Taylor brought up a smaall PA from Mt Gambier.
It
was the most blood related gig I have ever done! A brother and his
partner from Canberra, a sister from Melbourne (with my niece), a cousin
and spouse from Adelaide
, a second cousin from Carpenter Rocks and another from Dismal Swamp. I
opened with my song Family Gatherings name checks all my uncles and
aunties and generally admits that I ran away from familial duties to
join a circus. But as usual I didn’t expect anybody to notice. One
cousin who had never seen me perform thanked me for putting his mothers
name in a song. He also said all my between song talk was “very Graney”.
I nodded. I talked with another fellow who knew my late cousin Marty
from Naracoorte who was my age and had a fierce reputation. So fierce I
dropped his status as a relative to a character in Semaphore a few years
ago who was making signs that he was about to attack me and he turned
white and fled. Even though Marty was no longer with us on earth. The
fellow at the gig said Marty loved to read books and did so even when he
was out driving his semi trailer truck on long hauls. I asked what kind
of books but he did not know. Just books. Another family mystery never
to be solved and perhaps only me left wondering. The last image was
taken by my sister Julie and shows the glamping tents that you can stay
in at Bellwether. Lovely canvas tents on timber platforms. A communal
kitchen and bathrooms up near the winery
The duo setup is a little like this. (Footage from a different show)
I was part of a team singing some Tom Waits songs recently in Melbourne. A great bunch of players to be part of a team with. I concentrated on songs from TW's Tropicana Motel/LA piano ballad period as that is my favourite of his.
We played three shows in a weekend in Melbourne and Castlemaine. Tom Waits fans are really invested in the material. They bought in , fiercely. I played a few guitar chords and sang. The songs had loads of lyrics but I didn't use any cheat sheets.
Thank you, team!
Castlemaine
brunswick ballroom - photo joyce prescher
memo music hall
We have some Dave Graney and Clare Moore shows coming up in Melbourne, Sydney, Kiama, Port Kembla and Castlemaine.
Parking
Lot Scenes takes it title from a movie about Grateful Dead fans who would gather
in force and go off piste in the parking lots around the giant venues they
would play.
I played autoharp and bass and sang to a hip hop loop and Stuart Perera added some beautiful guitar lines.
Its a lyric about musical inspiration, sometimes only flashes or moments of energy or power.
It mentions some of my favourites in the lyric.
two
minutes of Bauhaus - what more do you want?
hey
too bad! Thats all they had
but
hey! For a while - that was enough
Dear Mama- All eyez on me- a disc of Tupac
only
God can judge him now
a
dark star of the Dead- infinite loop
you’ll
get sucked in too
like
a Texas cyclone-like a Texas Funeral
don’t
be a guts- if that’s all they had
a
Happy Trail of Quicksilver
a
night in Tunisa
salt
peanuts , Dizzy!
a
Brave Exhibition from The Boys Next Door
then
put The Hair Shirt on
a
Second Helping of Skynyrd
a
Brian of Stones
a
Chaka Khan
a
Christine of Siouxsie
a
Pop Tone of PIL
a
Date With The Cramps- a Jokey War Dance
don’t
be a guts - that’s all there is
be
cool with that
the
Dead were too big for the formats, awlways
they
couldn’t turn it on
they
gave the Western Desert people framed canvases and said “fill it up”
Its
a single frame from a big movie for all we know
some
people don’t fit the profiles
they
ain’t the usual suspects
they
work in their own time and space
they
make their own sense
no
good in snapshots
no
good for Tik Toks
no
good for porch shows or the blues
parking
lot scenes
Bauhaus live at Coachella in 2009. Can't doubt Peter Murphys commitment here. This song has a great two minutes for me - then they run out of licks. But its worth it for those first minutes.
Tupac - Dear Mama. Incredibly afeecting song for me . (Not strictly from ALL EYEZ ON ME though, it preceded it).
Tupac- Only God Can Judge Me Now, from ALL EYEZ ON ME
The Grateful Dead - Dark Star
Jon Wayne - Texas Funeral. The album that contains Terxas Cyclone , Texas Jail Cell, Texas Wine and Texas Studio and But I Got Texas.
Quicksilver Messenger Service. Mona. A different version to that on HAPPY TRAILS. This performance also features their singer Dino Valenti who was in gaol when they recorded that album.
Dizzy Gillespie- A Night In Tunisia.
Dizzy Gillespie - Salt peanuts.
The Boys Next Door - Brave Exhibitions. The four piece, pre Rowland Howards joining.
The Boys Next Door - The Hair Shirt . After Rowland Howards joining.
Lynyrd Skynyrd - Workin' For MCA. A couple of years after Second Helping and minus guitarist Ed King who wrote the music for Sweet Home Alabama.
The Rolling Stones, still with Brian Jones. His power still matching both Mick and Keith. Their sound still holding all the magical shimmer and fog he brought to it.
Chaka Khan with Rufus
Chaka Khan solo
Siouxsie and The Banshees- Christine
PIL performing Poptones live. Not as good as the recorded version on Metal Box. They didn't have it in them to hold together or to play live much. But the music they made in that brief period was great.
Garbage Man from the Cramps. I loved the Bryan Gregory period.
Killing Joke - The War Dance. Geordies great guitar that he played for their entire career and Jaz's mad, paranoid ranting. They really had a spark.
The Grateful Dead crowd. Parking Lot Scenes.
Hey we are playing some shows soon....
Jan
18th Saturday afternoon at George Lane, St Kilda Dave Graney and Clare Moore/Dave Graney and the mistLY
Dave
Graney, one of multiple singers at these three Tom Waits shows. Ten Years Of
Tom Waits. Focusing on albums betyween 77-87
"Celebrating
the 40th Anniversary of Tom Waits’ ‘Rain Dogs’ with 10 Years of Tom is a homage
to Tom Waits from 1977- 1987. Performed by Dave Graney, Lachlan Bryan,
Brooke Taylor, Delsinki and Maggie Alley. Backed by richly talented band"
Dave Graney and Clare
Moore – featuring Stuart Perera.
Digital album, out Now
14 songs. All new studio
affair, no songs written as chords and lyrics on a guitar. Cover image by Izabella Shaw.
"The sign of a good
album is that you immediately want to go back and listen to it again. As
someone who listens to at least three new albums a day as part of the process
of creating the World of Jazz and Different Noises Shows the chances these days
of listening to a new album more than once are small. With this one there is a
compulsion to return to it - the verbal dexterity alone is sufficient to
warrant repeat listenings but the difference in the music on offer this time
from Dave and Clare also draws me back to it. ".
Could be called our basement tapes album. (Our
studio is downstairs). Could also be our most post punkest of
albums. Certainly our most auto-harped album.
Some songs started life twenty years ago, some six
or seven years ago, two built from processed and distorted sounds recorded
almost thirty years ago. Four began life as bass and drum improvisations into a
single mic four months before the albums release and two as fresh as two months
before it was pronounced cut and printed.
“After we finished our April 2024 album (strangely)(emotional) Clare Moore suggested I do an album of
freewheeling lyrics and perhaps even talking/speaking. That’s where it kind of
started”.
Dave Graney – guitars,
bass, autoharp, some keys and some beats and lead vocals.
Clare Moore – keys,
vibes, drums, percussion, backing vocals.
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
