Conway Savage - The Honky Tonk On The Hill.

 

Conway Savage and Nick Danyi (sax in the Feral Dinosaurs) at our wedding in Adelaide in 1985. 

 

Conway Savage at our wedding with his then partner, Miriam White (sister to Jim).

Conway Savage  , who played with myself  and Clare Moore all through 1989 and a lot of 1990 with Dave Graney and the White Buffaloes - including the recording of MY LIFE ON THE PLAINS - sadly died just yesterday. He had been true friends of ours since the early 80s. Really early days, scratching out some chords and trying for licks in Melbourne. We loved him in the Feral Dinosaurs and the incredible Dave Last and the Legendary Boy Kings. (He'd been in earlier bands than that but he never talked about them , just as we never talked about our first bands. Getting into shape as a player took time for us all. The early days were both a fight and a fright .....)   

 

Conway at a FROGGA machine in at SING SING studios in Richmond , 1989 when we recorded MY LIFE ON THE PLAINS with producer PHIL VINALL. Cans of VB were ubiquitous in the Melbourne scene then. No craft beer jive - no foreign muck - just MELBOURNE BEER! IN A CAN!

The White Buffaloes were a great band and we just hit on a unique sound. Mostly my songs but covers I chose from Gene Clarke, Fred Neil, Gram Parsons, Doug Sahm, Buffy Saint Marie, the Charlatans and Conways own arrangement of "The Streets Of Laredo" (which I sang) . Nobody else was doing anything close to us then. Kind of buckskin country rock but touched with psychedelia from both sides of the Atlantic. Before Alt Country was a word on some PR assistants lips. 

He started to do his own shows at the time too, very downbeat ballads mixed with crazed rockabilly raveups. We all loved Jerry Lee and George Jones. He'd pretty much destroy his funny old half mechanical electric piano doing a  show stopper called "Honky Tonk On The Hill". He'd kick everything over and walk off. A great period in Melbourne music. He also loved Randy Travis and Guy Clark and had a  peculiar all protein diet. Lots of eggs and chicken wings. And beer and red wine and weed. 

art by Dave Western

Clare and I had arrived back in Melbourne after being away for five or six years and thought we could put a holiday band together. It wasn't meant to last so long or to produce an actual album but it did just that. Conway brought Rod Hayward along to a rehearsal and we played with Rod from 1988 until the end of 1997. We also play occasionally with him to this day. 

pic Wayne O Farrell, White Buffaloes, Melbourne 1989.

Early on Clare had also worked  with Conway in one of those stints in the public service we all did to get some coin in our lives. It was in the tax department in the early 80s. Conway was an assessor as he'd finished High School (Unlike Clare who was a dropout) The country didn't go broke! Nobody died!

David Palliser (then in the People With Chairs Up Their Noses with Jim White, Mark Barry  and Jim Shugg) , Conway and Miriam.

He also played cricket well into his twenties and on the occasions I saw him playing in park games at parties, he enjoyed working on his technique more than trying to hit everything for six.  

 

 He left us to join Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1990 but kept producing his own music all the way. He seemed to break through to a beautiful new lighthearted tone with a  series of EPs in the last decade. Titles like Quicky For Ducky and Pussys Bow. He was working in a unique organ, guitar and electric piano trio with Robert Tickner and Amanda Fox.

He always kept it real and tight with those friends from early days in Melbourne. Bruce Kane (Boy Kings and future director of the tv show RECOVERY)  and Amanda Fox were in Honeymoon in Green (who might have had Conway in them for a short time) along with Andrew Crowder and Shane Walsh (RIP- also of the Boy Kings and Tex, Don and Charlie) . A lot of them came from the Victorian places he'd grown up in. Terang, Orbost, Fish Creek, Port Albert, Marlo. His parents ran pubs in some of those towns. He had three older brothers, Frank, Charlie and Geordie and his sister Meredith. He leaves behind his daughter Grace, who came from Conway and Dinah.

 I tried to write about Conway in my book, 1001 Australian Nights...

It was a short walk across to one of the performance tents but a sudden shower brought sheets of rain toward us, sideways. Everybody huddled in even tighter.Clammy folk! . There were annoying people holding onto their positions with deck chairs, reading books. (To be fair, last years festival was apparently 40 degrees and the stages were outdoors. More of a folk festival scene.) Conway Savage sits on stage left, facing in with an electric piano, an ashtray and a bottle of red, Robbie stands dead centre with an electric guitar and Amanda Fox sits on stage right, facing in, with an organ and an accordion. It is a great sound they have and they were the main act I wanted to see. The two keys and the guitar playing alternately, rhythm and bass runs as well as chords sat so well together. It is also an unpredictable sound which makes them an experience whenever they play. Conway sings on and off mic, drifting in and out of your hearing. More like a jazz band than anything else. Conway is also, jarringly, a very country guy. He is tough and wiry and kooky in a George Jones/ Hank Williams kind of way. Upbeat and unpredictable. In short, he is a real Bad Seed. To this end he displays flashes of personality in a scene which can be a bit of a museum display. (Please leave personality at the door) He tells people to amuse themselves while he pours a drink and then talks of the instability of his piano and the stage, rather than the lyrics of the next song. He is a wildman. It was stellar.

A week later we saw Conway and his posse again, we were keen to catch them in a club. It is a cool venue, upstairs, with a lot of space and a good stage. Conway adds some drama by falling backwards from the said stage before beginning. (Mistaking a cloth hanging curtain which goes the length of the stage, for a wall). He seems to hurt himself but springs to his feet and yells "nobody saw that!"

It is a great sound. Bass and drums would ruin it. A perfect sound. The feels of the songs are very varied, some being so light hearted and upbeat. In one lilting tune with a rocksteady/ska beat Conway sings "let the good times roll" and smiles. He is in the ZONE to be getting away with some of that stuff! Really, they have something going on and Conways enjoying himself so much. He started playing solo gigs back in 88/89 when he was in the Boy Kings and also playing with us in the White Buffaloes. He was all hopped up on Randy Travis and Jerry Lee Lewis back then. Wild, rollicking songs like "honky tonk on the hill" and "honky tonk road" as well as great arrangements of songs in the public domain like " the steets of Laredo" and "fair and tender ladies". He then ran away with the Bad Seeds but all the while he's been sitting in rooms somewhere, practicing his licks and going over and over old and new songs. He must have recorded three or four albums ( as well as being a full time Bad Seeds) in the ensuing years so his material is aged single malt stuff. His demeanour onstage is also 190 proof country. He is unpredictable and unmediated. Squares could take offence, or get bamboozled, or come along for the ride. He has a funny kind of "hey people!" way of relating talking about his songs, sometimes into the mic and mostly off mic and makes great play of lighting cigarettes and putting a harmonica around his neck. People laugh as he mumbles and drawls, he keeps it up until one line too far, then, to the silent breathing, he asks "where's the laughs now?" and trills a few notes. He really is a honky tonk man and is beyond that kind of city appropriation of country music for its gauche and exotic trappings and surreal formalities that springs up every ten years or so. Tall and stringy with flecks of grey in his hair, he is the real deal. The honkytonk on the hill he once wrote and sang about himself. His accompanists, Amanda and Robert are perfectly poised and alive to the playfulness of his songs. They hear him and anticipate and can match him. They are old friends and have really found something rich in the current setup. It works. The songs are short but strangely meandering and willful all at once. Ephemeral and light.

 We saw him at a party in March. Chris Walsh's birthday. He was quite positive that he had survived his brain tumour and treatment and was talking about coming to our studio to record. Then we heard nothing until last month. The bad news was that hed gone into a rapid decline. We got to see him a few times. His sister Meredith and her partner Dean took incredible care of Conway in his last months. Right up to the end.

Harsh winter and its tolling bells. Vale Chris Fay.

Well its been a long and mean winter. Here in the hills it's been pretty dry but exceptionally windy and cold. Being surrounded by tall trees a persons mind listens for crashing Mountain ash or gumtree branches to fall. It happens pretty spectacularly around the neighbourhood. And did for a poor family a few houses up.

On the flip side however, our nine week stint in the front room of the Croxton Bandroom in April May was so inspiring and energizing that we are going back there for every Sunday 4-6pm in September. All the shows have been so positive this year, I’ve been enjoying playing with the mistLY so much. I feel like I’ve finally become what I’ve always wanted to be which is a kind of Elektra period electric r&b singer songwriter with an absolute CRACK band. Its all come together.

Our shows in Adelaide were a treat. Three sold out nights at the Wheatsheaf. We played a wide range of songs, some unrecorded and a lot from the Post Coral Snakes period. But we played two 60 minute sets each night so the shows drifted all over the roads, the main street and many byways down by the side as well.

I picked up a new hat this young fellow made for me. Blakesby Hats. The man that makes them is  one living ornament to a mid century American ideal. 19th or 20th century - hard to pick. Living there in a beige brick Adelaide suburban street. He looks a bit overdone in this clip but its a year or so ago and you know how far someone in their early twenties can go in that period. LIGHT YEARS!

Our guitarist Stuart Perera lost his mother at the start of the year.  Then Brian Moore left us in February and Moya Moore in July. Clare had been helping our elderly neighbour into Aged care for most of the last year and she died suddenly in early August. Brian Hooper from the Surrealists and the Beasts went down and then it was Spencer P Jones. We have also been spending time when allowed with a gravely ill friend. A rough year on that front.

One that hit really hard was a character and friend whose been coming to see us play in Sydney since the late 80s and probably earlier. Chris Fay. Sudden death. One of those things that really takes the wind out of you. He was always showing up at our gigs, talking a mile a minute. He'd sometimes turn up after we'd played with wild stories of his mad commute. On his bicycle. He'd always be asking if he could help with gear but we'd always beg off as he was really never any help.  He was a funny charmer. Seemed to live quite harshly, for a long time in a hostel taking care of all these busted old blokes who'd washed up there. Chris was there when times were fat and lean, high and low. I remember playing the Annandale in 1990 or 1991 and we were talking in the bar off to the side. Well I was listening to his mad tales. The Coral Snakes were on stage and starting up a song, vamping it. Just when Lure Of the Tropics was coming out. I walked to the stage with Chris in my ear and then just jumped up sang into the mic. Never had that smooth shift from OFF to ON happen so quickly.
A few years later we were chilling after a big show in a  bandroom at the Metro, me Clare Moore, Chris and Dave Wray aka Frank Bennett. Dave suddenly said "c'mon dave, lets go get some hookers and some blow!" Chris looked at me and Clare and said "Isn't it funny how Dave always says exactly what everybodys thinking!"

Thats him in the middle with Clinton walker on the left and Robin Casinader (rare shot with beer can) on the right. Sydney early 90s. 

In 1995 or 96 we did shows in Melbourne and Sydney where we wanted to have Jim Morrison supporting us . (We had a  song on the Soft N Sexy Sound called Morrison Floorshow about Jim coming back from the dead and joining a  tribute band to the Doors) . I just wanted to have "Jim Morrison (unplugged)" on our posters.

In Melbourne Malcolm Hill did a spot as "Revolutionary Jim", coming on and haranguing the crowd to "love my ass!"

Chris stumbled onto the stage at the Metro in Sydney as "Drunk Jim" in enormous mirror shades and leather pants and mumbled his way through some key lines, entangling himself hopelessly in mic leads and knocking stands over. People got really upset, yelling "You're not Jim!". It was a triumph, in my rarely humble opinion.

He also told stories of being asked to be in a  Birthday Party tribute band called THE BIRTHDAY PARTY BOYS.  He declined as he thought it would be uncool but I always loved the idea.

Many times we gave him a  lift back from a show with him directing us through his city of Sydney, getting lost in conversation in the back or distracted or simply seeming to want to show us something that was miles off our course. Then just getting us lost.

About four years ago we stopped for late night food on such a drive around Sydney, myself and Clare and Chris. We ate Falafel. As he got out of the back door we all stared at the Houmous, Tabouli and salad strewn all over the bench seat where he'd been the only one sitting. "That was not me!" he declared in wide eyed innocence and indignation. "That was not me!" . Eventually, like somebody said, you just went with the chaos.

He did the occasional acting job on stage and for film and was always sketching people in his pad.

A delightful Sydney character and his sudden passing really hit us hard. Vale Chris Fay. Dude, majorly.

 We have shows coming up in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, the Central Coast , Nambour on the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane . Bring it all on!

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.

Gloria Grahame (fuck or die) June digital release

Minimal keys and less guitar over a beat reversed and driven over by Dave Graney



"Gloria Grahame-manifest--manifestly-manifesto..”

A new digital single from Dave Graney. The third for 2018. This time it’s a breakout keys driven groover called Gloria Grahame (fuck or die). Its vintage Graney.

In the 90s there was the paen to the laconic and beat actor Warren Oates (1991), the instrumental Confessions Of Serge Gainsbourg (1994) and the tribute to Ava Gardner that was Mogambo (1993).

On the last physical album, 2017’s  LETS GET TIGHT, there was the Charlie Parker jazz punning wonder that was  DRIFTING DONNA REED.

This time Dave Graney drops down to his mean pulp groundwater with a pulsing, keys driven celebration of film noir icon Gloria Grahame, star of the Big Heat and In A Lonely Place recently the subject of the movie “Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool”. The song celebrates her cold power and resilience and enigmatic, restless persona. It touches on an apocryphal incident where, as they watched a couple having sex in a hotel room, she allegedly pulled a gun on her then husband , director Nicholas Ray and gave him the choice, fuck or die!

A Universal link to access Gloria Grahame (fuck or die) via itunes- spotify etc...

Recorded and mixed at the Ponderosa by Dave Graney, May 2018.

"Gloria Grahame - manifest

manifestly - manifesto

Nicholas Ray

take off your eye patch and give us a spray

I've got this gun in your eye

fuck or die

hashtag rebel - of course

hashtag me too - whatcha gonna do?

a jug of boiling coffee

freestyle to the face

fuck or die

I've got this gun in your eye

I've got this gun in your eye

fuck or die

you put me in a Lonely Place and made me love the killer

fuck or die

where's your son been?

fuck or die…”

An album with the mistLY is planned for release later in 2018. Still unsure about its content. Will probably be remastering some tracks we have released this year. Longer versions. I have a half dozen tracks I've recorded with Clare Moore. These include ET TU DOUDOU?, YOU CAN'T HAVE YOUR BOOGIE, YOU'VE BEEN IN MY MIND, OLD FRIENDS and WHEN MIAMI VICE CAME TO TOWN. We'll be going in to rehearse  and arrange some new tracks July 9th with the mistLY and then recording them July 10th and 11th. These include ULTRAKEEF, IS THAT WHAT YOU DID?, WHERE"S MY BUZZ? and BABY I WISH I'D BEEN A BETTER POP STAR. 

Hopefully out this year. Still thinking on it.  We're gonna have to get something physical out because we'll be playing a lot of this 2018 stuff.

July 2nd - Dave Graney is part of an event at the Atheneum (but by the Wheeler centre) in Melbourne which is all about New York.As in "whats so good/bad about it".

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

July 17^th Dave Graney and Clare Moore play the Public Cellars Brewery in Croydon, Victoria.

Tuesday July 24^th, a screening of the film by Donna McRae, Lost Gully Road, at Cinema Nova in Carlton. Soundtrack by Dave Graney and Clare Moore.

August 10-12th Dave Graney and the mistLY play the Wheatsheaf Hotel in Adelaide. Two nights and one late afternoon. 

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

Dave Graney and Clare Moore CD Let's Get Tight available at iTunes and Bandcamp now

Dave Graney 2018 memoir – WORKSHY – out on Affirm Press.

" a pulsing new groove of a track from the twenty minute egg of hardboiled Australian rock singers”

A piece I wrote on Mark E Smith for the Triple R magazine in April

An edited version of this appeared in the April edition of the RRR magazine for subscribers, THE TRIP.

“He was some kind of man… What does it matter what you say about people?”

Marlene Dietrich at the end of the Orson Welles classic film, A Touch Of Evil.

“Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writing, and so their house – and street – life was trivial and commonplace”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“So Queen Victoria
Is a large black slug in Piccadilly, Manchester
Our city hobgoblins
Our city hobgoblins
And they say
We cannot walk the floor at night in peace”

CITY HOBGOBLINS by the FALL

It feels good to write a note about Mark E Smith in The Trip. A lot of people who subscribe to Triple R would know more about the work of the Fall than me. Others would know some of their sounds. Many others would at least know of their caustic mystique. Many might be interested in listening to them now that Mark E Smith has left the building.

Because it’s the work, the music, that will live on with the Fall. It was a powerful brew. If you’ve heard early Pavement or Arctic Monkeys, you’ve heard the Fall. Or at least sounds, licks, chords and arrangements put through a strong Fall Filter.

Mark passed away in late January. He’d been ill for a year or so but had continued to perform – up until late December, in a wheelchair.

He was still burning up life- or it was blasting through him – and was still unfinished business. He defied shit. He was definite. Very funny in a dry way. I always remember him saying, when asked about Live Aid, and Ethiopia, “any country that could be invaded by the Italians must be a right load of cobblers”. He also didn’t shy away from being positive about the Falklands War when he was touring here in 1982.   He was like a latter day Wyndham Lewis (who declared himself the “enemy of everything” and founded the modernist magazine BLAST).

I don’t pretend to know how to talk all around him. Maybe I’ll just tell you of the few times our paths crossed. 

The Moodists played with the Fall in Melbourne in 1982 when they toured. The venues were the Seaview hotel in St Kilda and the Mt Erica Hotel in Prahran. I absolutely loved their singles and albums at the time, Grotesque (1980) , the fantastic 10” SLATES (1981) and the then current HEX ENDUCTION HOUR. An incredible racket. Singles like City Hobgoblins (with the amazing b side How I Wrote Elastic Man) .

They also invented “Country and Northern” with blasts of power like “Fiery Jack”, “The Container Drivers” and “T-t-t-totally Wired”.  

The band were really nice to us in 1982- though Kaye Carroll tried to set my hair on fire (in mockery of its bouffed up trendiness). We played with them several times the next few years in the UK . Our young mixer Victor Van Vugt was much in demand in the UK and worked with them and the Pogues and then the Bad Seeds.
Clare Moore and I took a bus down from London to the Hacienda for its third birthday in 1985.

I dunno why I didn't write about it in WORKSHY but there was a funny party in London with the FALL there and Karl Burns was giving me shit about my jacket and seemed to want a fight while Genesis P Orridge was giving Clare the evil eye from across the room. Years passed and I played at Livid in Sydney in 1990 when Redhead Kingpin was the headliner but wouldn't play so the FALL stepped up and did it. Always a powerful live band . Went to say hello to them then. The band very quiet and Mark the cold ruler.

There was a bogus “meeting of three giants”  in a UK with Nick Cave, Shane McGowan and Mark in 1985 or so. It was notable only for Mark seemingly travelling at three times the pace of the other two and them having to take all his wild raving because – he was MARK E SMITH - he had the mozz on them.

When we did Night of the Wolverine , our then manager Mick Geyer took me aside to play me the new Fall LP, The Infotainment Scan, which had a song going on about time of the Wolverines... great minds! 

The Fall worked their own seam, unique. Unfollowable , really. I met a young friend in Hobart in the mid 2000s. In their early 20s, they had tuned into the FALL and proudly held strong opinions and views on many of their then 25 album releases. (My own opinions and views being limited to their early 80s works). I was impressed. In later years Mark E was held up by conservative curmudgeons as a type of shield against all other pop vagaries they may have been forced to grapple with. They hid behind Marks trouser legs. (Like others do with Bob Dylan – Mark was fresher yet dryer. Pretty much powdered, actually).

But don’t let that grim lot put you off.

Mark was a hero and a villain. There was lots of drama you heard reports about. The version of the band that walked out on him in New York in 2006 and how he replaced them immediately and finished the tour, famously quipping, “if its me and yer granny on bongos – its the Fall.”

He was probably, often, a bastard. Who isn’t?

There was a book called “The Fallen”, written solely about ex members of the Fall. All bruised and still tender from the experience, all recognize being in the band with Mark to be a peak experience of the lives. There is  also a band led by Brix Smith-Start of some of those ex members called The Extricated.

Brix wrote a memoir, “the Rise the Fall and the Rise”,  as did bass player Steve Hanley with his “The Big Mid-Week”.

Mark wrote a biography in 2009 called Renegade.

Marc Riley, guitarist in the Falls “Hex/Grotesque” period and currently a dj at BBC6 said that Brix and Steve Hanleys books could be made into a a great tv show, as one was like Dallas and one was like Coronation Street. 

What did Mark seem to like? He spoke highly of Link Wray and the Stooges and Dr Karl from Neighbours (especially his band) and the Fall covered songs by Sister Sledge, the Saints, Charlie Feathers, Pete Seeger, Lee Perry, Tommy Blake, Iggy Pop, Nervous Norvous, The Groundhogs, Wanda Jackson, R Dean Taylor, Gene Vincent and The Blue Caps, The Other Half, The Searchers, the Sonics, The Monks and The Kinks. He loved a British writer by the name of Arthur Machen.

But before all else you should dive into some of their music. 

https://thefall.xyz/ 

In 2010 they toured here and I opened for them again with Adele Pickvance and Tim Byron in Brisbane and in Sydney and with the mistLY in Melbourne. At the latter Mark pretty much made us go on as the doors were opening. He was acting up with the mics and all, turning amps on and off etc. I went to their band room after the Melbourne show, expecting to see a big sulking post argument scene. The band were all quite happy and Mark was sitting by himself. He was being very funny about mutual acquaintances. Evil humour. He asked me to go with them to Golden Plains the next day but we had a gig booked to play a private party and I wanted to be able to pay my band properly before Xmas. He would have understood. Like Howling Wolf, he valued being a  “pro” more than anything.
Saw them play again in 2016 at the last ATP Festival in Wales.
He brought all the drama and noise.

A terrific influence on me.  On their classic album Grotesque,there is a track called “C and C S mithering”. Mark lays into his then ambitious peers , saying

“All the English groups
Act like peasants with free milk
On a route
On a route to the loot
To candy mountain
Five wacky English proletariat idiots”

He then lampoons the false bonhomie of travelling bands  years before Spinal Tap , saying

"see ya mate- yeah see ya mate" in a parodic, matey tone.

Oh he was harsh. And unfair. RIP to the Hip Priest.

Australian – New Zealand dates 1982 by the Fall.

Thursday, 22 July 1982   Musician's Club, Sydney

Saturday, 24 July 1982   Family Inn, Sydney

Sunday, 25 July 1982   Stranded, Sydney

Monday, 26 July 1982   Stranded, Sydney

Tuesday, 27 July 1982   Canberra

Thursday, 29 July 1982   West Town Hall, Geelong

Friday, 30 July 1982   Jump Club, Collingwood, Melbourne

Saturday, 31 July 1982   Crystal Ballroom, Seaview Hotel, St. Kilda,

Monday, 2 August 1982   Prince of Wales, Melbourne

Thursday, 5 August 1982   Prospect Hill, Melbourne

Friday, 6 August 1982   Mt. Erica Hotel, Melbourne

Saturday, 7 August 1982   Crystal Ballroom, Seaview Hotel, St. Kilda,

Tuesday, 10 August 1982   Trade Union Club, Sydney

Wednesday, 11 August 1982   Trade Union Club, Sydney

Thursday, 12 August 1982   Wollongong University, Wollongong

Friday, 13 August 1982   Old University, Brisbane

Saturday, 14 August 1982   Manly Vale, Sydney

Tuesday, 17 August 1982   University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Wednesday, 18 August 1982   Town Hall, Christchurch

Thursday, 19 August 1982   Victoria University, Wellington

Friday, 20 August 1982   Main Street, Auckland

Saturday, 21 August 1982   Main Street, Auckland, New Zealand

1990 LIVID Festival

2010 Australlian tour , including Golden Plains

2015 Australian tour including Melbourne Festival