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

dave graney - Moodists-Coral Snakes-mistLY-FEARFUL WIGGINGS
photo by Charlie Kinross. Cds available via links below (or click this picture above). Your support for our music is greatly appreciated.

About Me

My photo
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.

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes Soft and Sexy Sound 30th Anniversary Tour October-November 2025

 

 

“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!” 
 

Friday Oct 3rd Factory Theatre, Marrickville, Sydney

Saturday Oct 4th Waves, Wollongong, NSW

Sunday Oct 5th The Street Theatre, Canberra

Friday Oct 10th, The Corner Hoyel, Richmond, Vic

Saturday Oct 11th, Bundy Hall, Bundalaguah VIC

Friday Oct 24th Freo Social, Fremantle WA

Saturday Oct 25th, The River Hotel, Margaret River WA

Friday Oct 31st, Brisbane Crowbar QLD

Saturday Nov 1st, The Imperial, Eumundi QLD

Sunday Nov 2nd, Mo's Desert Clubhouse, Gold Coast QLD

Friday Nov 7th, Byron Bay Theatre NSW

Saturday Nov 8th, Bellingen Memorial Hall NSW

Thursday Nov 13th, King Street Bandroom, Newcastle

Friday Nov 14th, Avoca Beach Theatre NSW

Saturday Nov 15th, The Lounge, Chatswood NSW

Sunday afternoon Nov 16th, Dangar Island Bowlo NSW

Friday Nov 21st, The Gov, Adelaide SA

Friday Nov 28th, Royal Oak, Launceston TAS

Saturday Nov 29th, The Pier, Ulverstone TAS

Sunday Nov 30th, Longley International Hotel, Longley TAS

                                            *************

 

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 The Soft ’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.







No comments:

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