Playing Adelaide at the Wheaty August 10-12th

The last couple of shows we've done have been pretty cool. Just the way I like it, off the beaten track.
In Ballarat - which we always dread returning to - we arrived at the gig and it was situated just as you arrived on the very outskirts of the town. Just past the phony mediaval pile that is Kryal Castle and in behind the Mills vintage clothing sheds. Just a little bit further into a  little redeveloped industrial area through a gate to the MINI GOLF setup.... Clare and I loaded our gear in through some doors past some people playing mini glof. The rooms were and corridors were dark and seemed to be decorated with castoffs from Kryal Castle. Suits of armour and axes and shields here and there. One room seemed to have some actual dummies in there playing golf to make it look busier. It felt good to be in a real showbiz environment.
The actual room we were playing in was fantastically well set up with a raised area for the audience and then a sunken area for other tables and a stage with excellent PA and gear. All very well put together and brand new. The woman running it was a total pro and the night went swimmingly, despite it being an early taste of the bitterly cold, wild and windy winter we are coping with here in Victoria. It was being run as a "cabaret" room and is the sort of space Melbourne could do with a few more of. (Melbourne has nothing like it). Here is a story about it from a Ballarat paper last November.
I guess it's the sort of room I really like to play. Almost like a club you see in pre rock n roll movies with the adult audience mostly sitting at tables but free to move around or stand if they like. Strangely, we seem to find them more in regional centres than big cities. Maybe its a vestige of that thing from my parents generation where people in country towns made their own scenes?
(As long as they don't bang on about food more than the music - there is a hierarchy I hold to. Sometimes we square off backstage with kitchen staff and its like rival gangs in West Side Story)
 
There were people there who had tree changed from Melbourne and others who had seen us play in the late 80s/ very early 90s. A really great night.

 pic by Clare Moore from the drum booth

We then had a few days recording in at Soundpark, which I have to say is one of my favourite studios I've been in. Others have had a more flash surface and all the great theatre and sense of occasion that pre digital recording sessions came with, but Soundpark has its crazy vibe. Idge owns and runs the place and he's a regular guy, a rock'n'roll slacker (in style) with a room full of lovingly collected mics, vintage preamps, guitar amps and drums. Like a mad professor, he can pull the sounds so quickly. So you mightn't have the theatre but you get down to recording pretty quickly as he knows his world intimately. He'd also come along to some of the Croxton shows in April and May so he knew the material we were going to put down.

 

Stu Thomas

So we recorded ULTRAKEEF, Is That What You Did? (two versions) Baby I Wish I'd Been A Better Pop Star, Where's My Buzz?  (two versions) and re-crecorded versions of Song Of Life (because it sounded different with a full band playing) and a song from 1998 called Your Masters which we have been enjoying playing recently and which has lyrical content about the Australian aspirational phantom voters which seems more and more apt today.

 Stuart Perera

I am pretty sure the album will not appear until early next year as there are a few more songs I want to get down and don't want to rush anything. I think it might be a bit of a sprawler. I hope so. Different versions of songs , some with the mistLY and some just myself and Clare Moore.

Here is a clip the Wheeler centre put up from the event at the Atheneum recently. Tied in with an exhibition from GOMA NYC at the Arts Centre, it involved a lot of people talking about New York City. We were there to close the show. Stu Thomas was unavailable but Bryan Colechin stepped in on bass.




The other gig we did that was out of the way was a 6pm Tuesday night gig in the outer Eastern Melbourne suburb of Croydon. This is an area our train line goes through that we refer to as "the badlands". Ringwood, Bayswater, Croydon. An occasional trip to that are convinces you to never go back - usually. Just a whiff of suspician about people arguing in the street in the middle of the day. Ice, booze etc. Generally no place to stroll as its a few unplanned streets hemmed in by fast flowing freeways. Otherwise, a kind of trapped, dormitory area. But we'd seen Henry Wagons do a gig there and were glad to try it ourselves. A room full of people inside a craft brewery/wine cellar in a back street just off of the main drag. They served a beautiful feast of slow cooked meat (though we only had a salad) and we made show for two sets. Again it was a seated audience (a couple walked out early - still got it....) and people were seeing us who had known our music for decades. Had a  wonderful night. I hope the venue continues.


I read Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass recfently and totally enjoyed it. Mainly read it because I got this edition with beautiful illustrations. It was like a dream of a perfect, carefree childhood. A psychedelic masterpiece in two parts.

Since then I've been reading Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing. Oh, is she hardcore! This one is the story of her parents. She writes a novella of their separate lives - if the First World War didn't happen. (She begins by saying how that war destroyed both of them and through them, affected her as well.
Such a lesson in lives. I had never been brought to ideas so closely and intimately of a world of young women - a generation - with no men to partner with. because they were mostly killed. And the ones who returned being so damaged, physically and mentally. It really fucking hit me because we live in such a time and country where they preach the JOYS of that WAR every fucking year! Sanctimonious fuckheads still going to Europe to dig up bones and bring them back. Fucking forget it people! It was shit . And for nothing! Just so people could live in a world run by idiots like you!

Oh I've got to try and rise above the daily barrage of Trumpian neo liberal shit we get buried under every day. I know I'm not alone in that though. Doris' book is so good in the story of people trying to do good as well, building better civic life for the community - IN PEACETIME.


We have some shows coming up and I'm doing some events at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Actually, speaking of shows. I'd love to find a small cafe to play in every so often. Just me and my amp. I put a mic into it as well as my guitar.  I did a spot at Pascalle Burtons poetry book launch last night and I loved the sound. Also great just to be in a  room on my own terms, just me and an amp. Jonathan Richman style. If you know of a place in Melbourne, tell me.

Dave Graney and the mistLY play ADELAIDE at the Wheatsheaf Hotel August 10th/11th/12th - BOOK HERE

Dave Graney and the mistLY play the FYREFLY (Newmarket Hotel) St Kilda August 17th.

Dave Graney has three events at the Melbourne Writers Festival. 

August 25th with Andrew P Street, Christopher Hollow and Jenny Valentish at the Mission To Seafarers in Port Melbourne.
September 1st - 1pm at ACMI Cinema 1 with comedian and memoirist Hung Le (violin) and literary fiction author John Tesarsch (cello) – discuss the influence of music on their writing, with live performances. Hosted by Lee Kofman.
September 1st - 7pm
Dave Graney At the Mission To Seafarers in Port Melbourne. Dave Graney performs selected readings from the works of controversial genius John Cowper Powys – described by critics as both ‘the only novelist in English comparable to Dostoyevsky’ and ‘a tedious, long-winded bore.’

September 2nd,9th, 16th and 30th we will be back in the front room of the Croxton Bandroom.Tickets here (choose a date) 

October 11th Dave Graney and the mistLY play at Coogee Diggers.NSW
October 12th Dave Graney and the mistLY play LazyBones in Sydney, NSW.
October 13th Dave Graney and the mistLY play Hardys Bay Club in NSW.
October 14th Dave Graney and the mistLY Smiths Alternative in Canberra

November 9th Dave Graney and Clare Moore will be playing the Bison Bar in Nambour, QLD.
Nov 10th and Nov 11th Dave Graney and Clare Moore play the Junk Bar in Brisbane, Qld.

Gloria Grahame- manifest-manifestly-manifesto.

A clip for our July digital release. The music starts at about 1:39.

Here's a picture of Gloria Grahame and Nicholas Ray. They were married in 1948 when she was 25. He cast her in the film, In A Lonely Place, opposite Humphrey Bogart. This is quite an adult, sophisticated and disturbing movie, filmed in LA and set among backroom Hollywood writers and workers. A post ward filmfull of that weird searching for the bottom, falling morality ound in the best UK and US films of the time. Everything was still all mixed up and new voices were being heard. In the UK it produced beautifullly bitter films like The League Of Gentlemen where every character seems to feel like they've ben cheated and they're already looking back to the war as being the sweet time oftheir lives. In In A Lonely Place there's been a  killing and Humphrey Bogart is a writer who just doesn't seem right. The film and story seem close to Camus' The Outsider.

Gloria and Nicholas were married for four years. Their story seems so mad , to write about it is to retell dark , nylon gossip and innuendo. I wrote this song after reading an encapsulation of it in the London Review Of Books.I you don't want to read it, I'll leave a greasy detail. He hired a private dick and found her in bed with his 14 year old son from his first marriage. They divorced, eight years later, she married her erstwhile stepson and their relationship was the longerst she ever had.

 

Thats her on the left in a war time shot with Ava Gardner on the right.  I wrote vaguely around Ava in the song Mogambo in late 1992.

"shit you could really wear a white towel

the mysterious woman from out of town

a swaggering pirate

a rolling stone

a wild girl

you saw my ship

my life was a storm

I felt you move with me along the shore

I'd hear things about you

people would talk

got a kind of phantom picture of you

I learned your nickname

what you were called by the crowd

I learned what your mother called you in a  conversation about MOGAMBO

I walked around

picking up your trail

picking out your  shape

lovers and catfights overlaid the map

treasure island

MOGAMBO

I was like a private eye who couldn't move couldn't ask a  question

Phillip Marlowe waiting for another door to open by itself

I learned your nickname

what you were called by the crowd

I learned what your mother called you in a  conversation about MOGAMBO"

I was thinking of her movies like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and MOGAMBO.  She was the focus of thrilling gossip and infamy as well. Her relationship with Frank Sinatra as well as marriages to Micky Rooney (?) and Artie Shaw. She left Frank for a Spanish bullfighter and he made most of his greatest recordings while holding a torch for her. Like Gloria, she also made no effort to fit the role of how a female actor should conduct herself. Yes, they wore FUCK YOU shoes.

We are heading into the studio next week and I am looking forward to that immensely. I have plenty of music I could make, just feeling full of inertia about the ways to get it to peoples ears. We get so little support from any kind of media or radio. (Though that is common with older musicians and Australian musicians in general). Nothing holds in Australia. It's a perrenially light topsoil. I have always liked music to be abstract, unresolved and full of suspension but it also has to belong to some kind of territory. Doesn't have to be earthed or earthy, but it needs to be part of a culture. In the mainstream, Australian culture is pretty International in a timid, beige non committal kind of way. Beards, Brooklyn, Indie shit by 40 year olds.

Hey, I'm just worrying out loud. Melbourne all of a sudden has 5 million people in it. It has grown by a million in the last seven years.  You got to keep moving, right? 

I put all of my lyrics in one place on our website. The Moodists part is incomplete and will probably remain so.As Lee Marvin kept saying in Don Siegels version of THE KILLERS, "Lady I don't have the time..." (Then he'd - very satisfyingly - shoot someone)

David McClymont, who invented indie rock while a member of Orange Juice in the late 70s, early 80s Glasgow post punk scene and was later in the Moodists, has been releasing music of late. (He lives in Melbourne) . Here is his latest.

Clare Moore and I performed the other night as a  part of MEL&NYC at the Atheneum theatre. (also part of an exhibition at the NGV) The event was organized by the Wheeler Centre and featured writers and musicians talking about their times in New York. Stu Thomas was unavailable so we were joined by Bryan Colechin on bass to play a version of DIAMNONDS, FUR COAT, CHAMPAGNE by SUICIDE to close the night. It was a really nice evening and I wish I could perform exclusively in old theatres for the rest of my life. 

 thanks to Janenne Cosier for the photos.

Here is our 2006 recording of this song.

July 7th Dave Graney and the mistLY play - The Cabaret Club - Ballarat.

4/9367 Western Highway Warrenheip, Ballarat 33520353348150 
 

Tuesday July 17th - Dave Graney and Clare Moore will be playing 6-10pm at the Public Brewery - 13 Lacey st, Croydon

Tuesday July 24th - a screening of Donna McRaes film LOST GULLY ROAD at Cinema Nova in Carlton. Dave Graney and Clare Moore did the soundtrack for this film and will be part of a Q&A after the show.

Dave Graney and the mistLY play ADELAIDE at the Wheatsheaf Hotel August 10th/11th/12th

Dave Graney and the mistLY play the FIREFLY (Newmarket Hotel) St Kilda August 17th.

In the last month or so I have read Doris Lessings "A Ripple From The Storm" and "Landlocked". Both are parts of a FIVE NOVEL series called Children of Violence. It was amazing to get a sense of the difficulties of women in my mothers and Clare late mothers generation to express themselves in public life. How diplomatic and politically astute they had to be in a  world of strutting, self important men. How they had to lead their horses to water and get them to drink. How frustrating it must have been.

I also read THE SYMPATHIZER by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Incredibly good novel of a communist agent leaving Vietnam with other Southerners at the end of the war and living in the USA. It features a story line where he works as an advisor ona film project not a  million miles away from APOCALYPSE NOW. If you read that, you will be embarased if you were ever impressed by Hollywoods Vietnam. 

Right now I am reading John Cowper Powys's third novel, AFTER MY FASHION. Uncharacteristically, parts are set in New York among 1930s bohemians. I love to read of experimental living decades before it becomes identified. Like the character played by Tyrone Power in THE RAZORS EDGE. A man seeking wisdom from the East in the 40s, decades before the hippy trail led people there.

If you know anybody in Ballarat, send them to our show. That place has a history of taunting and torturing us.

Clare Moore posting in regard to the passing of her mother Moya Moore

On Friday Moya Moore's funeral was held at St Raphaels church in Adelaide. She had passed away the previous Sunday, in a nursing home.
I thought I'd post Clare Moore's words here which - with much trepidation- she posted on social media. Trepidation because it still sems strange to share such intimate events in such an open area. But we have learned that people need to find out things somehow and not everybody reads the newspapers. Posting it here because, well not everybody is connected on scoial media either.

Luckily Clare had justby chance been in Adelaide  just the week before doing a show and all of her brothers and sisters were as well. (Half of whom live in Sydney and Melbourne).
Clare's father Brian passed away in January.

"My wonderful, gorgeous,witty and wise mother, Moya died on Sunday. Born in 1929, in Streaky Bay,  great granddaughter of the first Greek person to migrate to SA, her family moved to Prospect where her first job after leaving SAC was as personal assisstant to RM Williams at the Percy st factory. She and dad were publicans, firstly at the National Hotel Pirie St Adelaide (later named The Tivoli) and then at The Earl of Leicester Parkside.
Running the daily countermeals, taking care of all the bookwork and staff and did I mention she had 6 children !!! She cared about the local community and always donated food to the Daughters of Charity and also hand delivered food to people in need in the area. Both pubs had social clubs which had weekly cabaret shows, regular bus trips, picnics and were very important in regard to keeping the local communities together.
Mum managed all this while at the same time looking like Elizabeth Taylor and was NEVER seen in public without her trademark Helena Rubenstein Red Lipstick and high heels !!!
Miss you mum, say hi to dad ..xxxxxxxxxx"

After the ceremony at the graveside, all the family and friends gathered for a send off at the Earl Of Leicester hotel, which Brian andd Moya ran for many years and where most of the family grew up.

Thanks to my brother Phil and his wife Janet for driving all the way from Canberra and Steve Miller for driving from Melbourne for the funeral.