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, June 13, 2019

More recovered texts. Words from an old drive.






More words I found while looking for something else. This was for a Brisbane magazine - now defunct - around the time of the album  You'Ve Been In My Mind. 2012-2013. After this album came the digital albums Play mistLY For Me, Night Of the Wolverine Demos, Once I Loved The Torn Oceans Roar - 90s demos part two, Fearful Wiggings, The Dames, Lets Get Tight, Two albums as members of Harry Howard And the NDE,

In the tradition of songs appearing years later with the same titles as albums in the past - we have recorded a song for release later this year called You've Been In My Mind. Its me on slide guitar and Clare on vibes with some magnificent mellotron by Robin Casinader. 


Thanks for the questions back then Dermot Clarke.




1. Your book’s been out for a year or so now. (1001 Australian Nights) Has anything changed?  New fans?  New doors opened?

People have been coming up to me and saying very complimentary and nice things. Just yesterday a music biz gent stopped me and barked " loved the book! I missed out on your career so it was good to catch up!" Things like that stay with me.
Other people sent very heartfelt letters and emails, as if we were old friends, and we were in some ways.
I am still doing some literary type events and write a column for the Melbourne (Adelaide) Review every month. 
In some ways it led to the title of this album, "you've been in my mind". 
I get squeamish when family or close friends mention my book, I scramble to change the subject. They have been in my mind. With around twenty five albums or so I have been opening my brain for a  long time. Its a public space!


2. The new album has a very specific tonal feel. In both production and playing. What were you aiming for?

Well we are in the same studio (Soundpark) and the same engineer (Idge) as our 2011 album of re-recordings "rock'n'roll is where I hide"  so we liked the situation and the approach. Hardly any overdubs, no layering , just panning the approximate placement of the different instruments.
I do most vocal takes once, maybe twice.
Recording songs the band knows their parts and getting a  performance. This time with unrecorded songs of mine. 
A pretty upbeat record. Where we master it, Greg Wadley is always getting out a Radiohead cd to use as some sort of a standard. I'm always telling him to get that shit away from my music. I make him play a  Bobby Womack best-of to tune his ears. 
My musical forms and feels are very much 70s rock. Southern rock, mid seventies Stones. Clean guitars and grooves. Vocals up front. West Coast in some ways with lots of singing.
I love to play electric guitar and love my 12 string. Worked a lot on getting a super clean sound out of a  solid state amp. 
Stuart  Perera's blazing lead is a real feature on the album. Stu Thomas is a great bass player. The album charges along for 6 tracks before we take a breath with "lifes a dream". That song is something I'm very mystified by, I think its something that , in a different music scene, all kinds of people could cover. I've only written a  few songs like that. 


The album does jump out of the gates, although a thing that interests me is, you’ll still throw in a not obvious chord change to keep us guessing.  You don’t go for the big major chord change – why is that?

 Well I did do that with the song "flash in the pantz" which I have been fooling around on for a  while. Its got big , blocked major chords and then flips to a suspended and a minor 7th in the chorus. So, in my mind I was looking for a very 80s, tightly wound and dampened feel for the verse. Something like the Cars or Midnight Oil. Then I wanted the chorus to be like something from a mad jazz musical, something like "its time" by Max Roach.

"we need a champion" is pretty much major chords as well. I am jealous of songwriters who can work with real primary colours. Ron Sexsmith and Robyn Hitchcock and Will Hindmarsh from GoGo Sapien.

Other songs on the album are more in my weird melange of what I would identify as Brazilian / jazz/ r&b chordings and voicings. I like music to be open.


Another quirk I’ve noticed is that your live shows have become Springsteen esque in length.  I don’t know how you do it. I’m a 45 minute man myself – would do less if I could.  What is it about the long show that excites you?  Life is short, there’s much to say?  Or a reaction against the more fashionable punk short sets.

I got too many songs! Over the last few years we've done two albums that were pretty retrospective in tone. "Supermodified



and "rock'n'roll is where I hide" . 

 
In the middle of that I had all these songs and was wanting to start to play them into shape. Usually just getting warmed up after 45 minutes!
A 3 hour gig would be great to do.

Tell me about Stu Perera.  An underrated guitarist if ever there was one. Beyond fashion.



 Stu joined us in 1998, after we finished with the Coral Snakes and Universal records. I saw him playing at a youth jazz workshop concert. I wanted to get a  band of teenagers. Got sick of talking to kids still at high school who were going to have to get their parents permission. Stu sounded great. I wanted to have a "beat combo" with clean and dry guitar sounds and simple songs. We did a great album for Festival called "the dave graneyshow" and he has been on every album ever since. A great guy. Loves jazz and Slash and plays all the time in bars in the inner city. Totally match fit.. He lived in his van in the street for about four years, holding down a job and doing gigs. Very well educated. He plays a left handed solid body Rickenbacker through a small Laney valve combo. He used to drive   a Morris Minor but has had his hot rodded Bedford van for a  while now.
 
And a final one.

Five decades of music.  It’s kinda insane.  One of the things that has always struck me is your and Clare is purity – you have committed to this life – no jobs on the side, etc.
Most people flake out.
What are you most proud of?  Come on, open up, brother.

Pride means hubris. An emotion I am rarely possessed by. I do love playing with the mistLY. I've leaned a lot from Stuart and Stu and Clare. Amazing players and very sophisticated sensibilities. Thats a bit of pride but mostly just happiness I guess.
Mostly proud of some of the songs I've written that I think could be played or sung by other people in other times. On this record I think there's "life's a dream" and "I'm not the guy I tried to be". On previous records there have been others of these "neo-standards". "Saturday night bath" on Hashish and Liquor 


and "don't mess with the blood" on Heroic Blues. 




The other songs on this album and the ones before it I am also proud of. They're highly tuned and stressed patterns of my own peculiar interests and blues. Very rich and strongly flavoured.
"mt gambier night" and "playing chicken" on this album.
My favourite songs I've recorded have usually ended the albums. Long, meditative pieces. Songs like "crime and underwear" from "we wuz curious

 
and "everything flies away" from "I was the hunter and I was the prey". 
So I'm proud of the people I play with and pretty much all of the work, some of it a little bit more than the rest. 


Cheers dave, I love the easy going, cocksure nature of the newie.  See you soon I hope.





Saturday June 15th-Major Toms, Kyneton(Graney and Moore)
Friday June 21st the Bison Bar, Nambour DAVE GRANEY SOLO Saturday June 22nd - the Bearded Lady, Brisbane.DAVE GRANEY SOLO
Saturday June 29th - The Caravan Music Club - Bentleigh Special guest Sean McMahon

July 12th - THE GOV - Adelaide. Special guests The Sunday Reeds


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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