From a remote location.

 

pic Bleddyn Butcher.

We have continued our Thursday Night 8pm AEST sets via Stage It and they have been much more enjoyable since we hooked up to the NBN.
Our next show is Thursday July 2nd. Tickets link here. 

We will also be doing another UK Sat Night/Australian Sunday Morning show. That's on Sunday July 5th at 7am in Melbourne WHICH IS OF COURSE 10pm SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE UK.

pic Barry C Douglas

I have also continued to do a weekly radio show at Triple R in Melbourne every Tuesday from 12-2pm.
I talk via Skype from our studio to Andrew Delaney at Triple who comes in as a volunteer to man the desk and keep the show on the tracks. The station is in East Brunswick and the office has been closed - or manned by a skeleton staff- since March/April. It is a community station run by volunteers and driven by sponsorships and subscribers. A lot of the sponsorship came via venues and performances or tours and that has all stopped as well. So a subscription to the station is a must for Melbourne people.

Here is a page which outlines all the benefits for subscribers.

My show? You can listen back to programs via this link.

Melbourne has experienced a surge in Covid 19 which has resulted in an extended lockdown. The State premier, Daniel Andrews, has been pretty amazing in his efforts and has suffered incredible pressure from the Federal government and the filth Murdoch press to open up the economy and get the slaves back to work. They were at him for being too draconian and now, of course, they are at him for not being tough enough.

So these shows are our outlets and we have been loving doing them.

I got a call tonight from a Melbourne venue owner about doing a show. Took me by surprise as it's been a week of rising infections announced every day in Melbourne. It was nice of him to call and everything but I was filled with dread as I'm not really ready to just "get out there" and "snap back".  In some ways I have enjoyed this radical shift in the world and in my life. I was hoping to come back into a different world as well, a better one, not just the same old scene. In our Stage It sets we have been presenting different sets each week from our albums. Doing stuff we haven't done in years or have never done. I have been really digging it. People are up close to us and we are playing from inside our studio - inside our house. The idea of going out as a commodity and identifying and representing the tiny parts of our work that are recognized as being worthy of commodifying in a commercial area was a long way off from my mind.

Here is a clip I found from about 2011 or so. I think. Barry C Douglas filmed and edited it. The song is from our re-recordings album we made for Liberation. It's called We Don't Belong To Anybody.
The clip is full of little dramatic moments as my guitar cuts out and I try to fix it as we play the song. 





We have this digital album out called In Concert. a one off show from Februry this year in Canberra by myself, Clare Moore and Robin Casinader. I made a clip for it. We played three shows in this keys, guitar and mellotron trio amid areas either burning with bushfires or soaked in semi tropical rain so there was no real opportunity to film it.




The album is quite unique and contains a lot of material from our 90s period done in a real concert style with lyrics right up front.



We have just mastered the second of our releases from the vaults which should be out next month. This time its a set from 2017 when Clare Moore and I played a lot of dates in the UK and Europe with Malcolm Ross and Georgio "the dove" Valentino. It will be a 17 track album from shows in London and in Hull. It sounds great.

Otherwise, Clare Moore and I have been learning songs to play and also have begun a recording project which involves the use of a Four track Tascam cassette machine. Its been challenging - and very interesting. I have a lot of songs to get down. Different guitars and tunings.

We have been watching the Persuaders on DVD. A 70s UK show with Tony Curtis and Roger Moore as rich  guys swanning about in Europe fighting crime for kicks. made around the same time and by the same company that made Jason King. (Which was much better).



It does have the most fantastic theme tune by John Barry which I want to play and which we used to walk on stage to when we were playing as Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes. One of those things in that time that I was quite sure no one in our audience knew about. I felt a gulf between what I was throwing out and what people were getting. That was why I was a mixture of recklessness and strict control in those years. I'd blurt stuff out and then retreat into the shadows. perhaps I've always been like that. Excited by trangression but uneasy in the spotlight.

Maxim Porter from Sydney did a podcast interview with me for ART WAR. He is a great young musician and gig producer . Its on Spotify and elsewhere but here it is on Youtube.



Its late on a Tuesday night and the infections are rising. the future is unknown. Australia, like the UK and the USA has in power probably the worst people that they could have chosen for such a critical time. Hopeless student politicians who know nothing but marketing and do the bidding of mining companies and Rupert Murdoch. I hope we get lucky again. Thats all we have ever had here. Luck.

I am reading a  1979 book by Patrick White, our greatest ever author. Its called The Twyborn Affair. I don't know where that is going either. It is pretty great though. Queasy sexuality and manners, rich Australians in Europe in 1914. Who else could take you there?

I saw a picture of a Sydney street online the other day and felt a  wave of emotion. Bittersweet feelings of walking out into a street scene like in the picture. It wasn't that I was young or anything, it was the time that I could walk into a mythic plane of reality. The humid air and the pubs with icy beer open onto the street. A place that existed for itself and was humming there as I was strolling into it. Steak sandwiches. The shops full of books and papers. Stuff to burn.

A bientot comrades!

IN CONCERT - new digital album and Stage It shows

In Concert is the name of a digital album we have out now. Its at Apple Music and bandcamp. A digital release only.

This is our first of a projected trio of live albums from the vaults for 2020. We are working on the next one at the moment.

 

In Concert Elegant partners, hand in hand with a room full of long time, brave listeners

 

One night in Canberra in February 9th 2020.

  In Concert…Dave Graney on guitars, Clare Moore on vibes, keys, backing vocals and percussion and Robin Casinader on piano and Mellotron.

Songs drawn mainly from their intense period of music making as three fifths of  Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes in the 90s- along with more recent works. Presented in a minimalist, beat free, freewheeling CONCERT mode.
13 Songs delivered from the stage to a seated, attentive audience peppered with much garrulous wisdom and song related SCIENCE from Dave Graney.

 

LABEL - COCKAIGNE

We had meant to drive up to Hardys Bay from Melbourne with Robin to do the gigs but he got some terrible news regarding  a family member just as he walked down the driveway of the house he stays in when in Melbourne. So Clare and I drove off,  expecting to do the shows as a duo. We got to Sdney and then Robins situation changed and he was able to do the gigs. We picked him up at his Sydney hotel and all drove through pouring rain to Hardys Bay on the Central Coast. Clare and I had been in NSW and Qld late in 2019 and the place was on fire, smoke and flames everywhere and highways shutting and reopening as we approached and drove down them. This time the joint was flooding. Hardys Bay was on a Friday night and we loaded the gear in to the van and then into and out of the venue and then out of the van back in Sydney in torrential rin. The gig itself was really enjoyable. Our trio idea of vibes, guitar and mellotron really hummed along and the seated audience in the club just went with it. A long room with a stage in a really beautiful heavily wooded part of the Central Coast. 

I did  a Parlour show the next day, by myself this time but again dealing with pouring rain to get into and out of the premises. (You couldn't rest anything on the sodden ground, anywhere) . It was Sydney rain. Big fat raindrops that just start to pour and then keep it up for days. (In Melbourne a shower starts and finishes in ten minutes).

Then we drove to Canberra to do the show that was recorded by the house engineer Bevan Noble and which we have released as a digital album. We were at that level of exhaustion and strange fogged focus that is akin to a drugged state. We were in some sort of zone. We hadn't rehearsed a lot due to living in different cities and Robin had been  over some arrangements with headphones on in the back of the van as we drove down the highway. One of those nights, it all just came together.

1 Tuning Up - You're Just Too Hip, Baby - Feelin' Kinda Sporty 12:19
2 Warren Oates 6:58
3 Apollo 69 5:05
 4 You Need A Kleek, Klook 4:27
5 Night Of The Wolverine 5 6:25
6 I’m Gonna Live In My Own Big World 4:48
7 The Birds And the Goats 5:42
 8 I’m Never Off 4:58
9 I Ain't Hi Vis 4:38
10 Be Sad For Me 4:14
11 You’ve Been In My Mind 6:07
12 The Stars, Baby, The Stars 5:04
13 Three Dead Passengers In A Stolen Second Hand Ford 3:52

Dave Graney, vocals, electric, acoustic guitars
Clare Moore, vibes, percussion, keys, backing vocals.
Robin Casinader, keys (organ/piano, Mellotron  

Recorded at Smiths in Canberra February 9^th 2020 by house engineer Bevan Noble.
Mixed at the Ponderosa in Melbourne March 2020 by Dave Graney.
Mastered by Greg Wadley.

All songs written by Dave Graney. Copyright Control except Feelin Kinda Sporty which has music by Dave Graney and Clare Moore, I’m Never Off which has music by Clare Moore, Apollo 69 music by Rod Hayward and Three Dead Passengers which has music by Graney and Stephen Cummings. All words by Dave Graney.

 Those were the only shows we did so there wasn't a real lot of footage available to make a clip. So I put one together with still photos, mostly being the work of Barry C Douglas over the preceeding few years.
Other shots are from the sorts of venues Clare Moore and myself have come to love playing in around Australia. Not regular beer hall rock pubs, just small, boutique, community rooms where people have set up a situation to hear some music. Places like the Junk Bar in suburban Brisbane, the Dusty Attic in Lismore,  The Pelican Playhouse in Grafton, the Dust Temple on the Gold Coast, Scrub Hill 1869 on Ballarat Rd toward Newlyn. All of these places are dark at the moment and I fear many will never open again. 



The clip starts with a shot of the interior of Her Majestys Theatre in Adelaide taken when we were filming some shots for Nick Cowans projected bio on myself and Clare. Early 2019. The facade of the theatre remains but everything else has been torn down to be modernized. It had an amazing wall backstage with generations of actorly scawl across it.

The film? A short "teaser" was shot and edited and I still hope that Nick Cowan will be able to pull it together. 

I might put the teaser up here in  a while. It looked pretty good to me. 

Here are some stills.

STAGE IT SHOWS.

We are doing Thursday nights at 8pm AEST from our studio. Its been going great. Very social in a strange way and we have done about ten shows. Number 11 happens Thursday night.
Thursday June 4th at 8pm. A small fee to access and away we go. Click here. 

For our mates in the USA we are doing a set on your Saturday night. Thats 6pm in Los Angeles, 8pm in Chicago and 9pm in New York. (For us and anybody who's up to it here in Australia it will be Sunday at 11 am). Click here.

We have been doing a different set each show and playing deep cuts of ours as well as some choice covers. Shows go for 30 minutes with an encore time that is 20 minutes. e always play to the limit. 
Covered songs have included Black Stick by the Cruel Sea, Strange I've Seen that Face Before by Grace Jones, Hyacinth House by the Doors, Taboo by Arthur Lyman, 1-2-3 by the Len Barry Combo, The Lowdown by Boz Scaggs, You're Gonna Miss Me by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Dolphins by Fred Neil and Sweet Surrender by Tim Buckley. Probably a few I have forgotten and also dozens of songs of our own. 
Why not Join us? 

davegraney.com