Dave Graney

Dave Graney is one of Australia's three great, and of the worlds seven great songwriters. Certainly as good as any who have ever lived. He is also one of the wildest performers. He qualifies as the weirdest and the most regular. As above, so below. Only in the context of rock music does his obdurate regularity/straightness become weird and his weirdness seem straight. Straight rock exotic opposed to the passive denim mob (on stage). He strives for an art or an effect that is opaque. He wants to draw your attention to things he has found to be interesting. He is not dealing in the normal currency of anguished confession and queasy emotion as true and enduring forms. He question these forms being authentic. To get your attention he has become a master and a fool for sensation and trickery. Sometimes, thats all he likes. They are his forms which he finds to be transitory and thrilling. He likes suspense and suspension, music that doesn’t resolve. It hangs in the air . Critics throw stones at him but most often ignore him as he makes their game redundant.He likes to work big. he tried, in the early 000’s, to work small, with the times, wielding a small acoustic guitar and sporting a denim suit (though with a matching slouch hat- a nod to the mad nationalism in the air) . He was noted for talking a lot in the early days of the Coral Snakes in London and Melbourne. After the Moodists. He thought it was a way to present a lot of material with different moods and feels. A way to isolate each song , you could surround each piece with an atmosphere of lightness and incongruity. It kept up the suspension. He saw words as a way to create more confusion. A fog. A Lurid Yellow Mist. He wrote a song in 1990 called “everybody does what they want to” where he said, “the more you say the less people hear/the less you say the more people see”. As his audience expanded with the Coral Snakes he talked less and became interested in symbols and slogans. On the last tour with that band, in 1997, for the album “the Devil Drives”, he held up signs saying things like “ta”, “nice one”, good one” and “yeah”. (Inspired by seeing Miles Davis hold up the names of his players after any solo he approved of).Dave Graney and Clare Moore had been playing music since punk rock in the late 70s and found the Nirvanic period to be the last waves of that swell, crashing exhausted onto the shore, bodies everywhere and people like the Screaming Trees blinking hard in the dazzling sunlight of rock festivals rather than dank, tiny rock clubs.Graney and Moore have never put out a bad album. They have suffered from being ahead of the pack. Always. In a country where the loudest opinions in the room always refer to points US or UK in defining the position of anything Australian, they are true originals. You with the mouth! Suffer in your jocks and admit their greatness!They broke ranks with all Indie Orthodoxy decades ago. They like to arrange songs rather than semi religious faith in inspiration and spontaneity. They hate loud guitars ( though they both play in SALMON which features six electric guitarists and two drummers). They resile from emotive spewing forth. They love authors and people who claim authority as opposed to people who wish to exist completely within defined boundaries of particular genres or forms, people who aspire to disappear within the deathly folds of “folk” or “public domain”.The old stories that surround many of their peers from the early 80s, the sad postscript that always laments that such and such were “cruelly ignored” and that their music was too good for the cretinous public does not wash with Graney and Moore. When exposed to the Middle Mass, they have vaulted right into the main square of the village and HAPPENED. They use the vernacular and modes of NOW and always have. Only within rock music, the inert, dead whale, has their argot clashed. They have never spoken rock, they talk to it and about it and sometimes with it but always with that post punk awareness of a bigger dimension that they carry within them and walk around in. Rock Music, provincial village of rich kids and squares. When they came from out of South Australia they had known real tough guys and girls. Here they were supposed to be impressed by these pip-squeaks having a summer down South. they gave them the heebs. Graney grew up ina world of pool halls, bikers and country football. Moore grew up in a pub. Tough joints. Tough rooms. Dave Graney and Clare Moore, tougher than the rest!dave graney, clare moore , the moodists, dave graney and the coral snakes, dave graney and the white buffaloes, the dave graney show, the royal dave graney show, dave graney and the lurid yellow mist, dave graney and clare moore...featuring the lurid yellow mist.THE LURID YELLOW MIST...FEATURING DAVE GRANEY AND CLARE MOORE.Rock Formations (SALMON - Bang! 2007) Keepin' it Unreal, (Cockaigne/Reverberation 2006/7) Hashish and Liquor,(double disc w/Clare Moore.Reverberation 2005) The Brother who lived, (the Royal Dave Graney Show, Cockaigne 2003) The soundtrack to the movie Bad Eggs (David Graney and Clare Moore,Liberation,2003) Two Fisted Art (the Moodists, WMinc, 2003) Heroic Blues (the Dave Graney Show, Cockaigne 2002) The Third Woman (Clare Moore solo CD, Chapter Music 2001) Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (the Dave Graney Show, Cockaigne 2000) The Dave Graney Show (the Dave Graney Show, Festival 1998) The Devil Drives (Coral Snakes, Universal 1997) The Soft'n'Sexy Sound (Coral Snakes, Universal 1995) You wanna be there (Coral Snakes, Universal 1994) Night of the wolverine (Coral Snakes, Universal 1993) Lure of the tropics (Coral Snakes, Torn and Frayed 1992) I was the hunter and I was the prey (Coral Snakes, Fire 1992) My life on the plains (White Buffaloes, Fire, 1990) Double Life (the Moodists, 1985) Thirstys Calling (the Moodists, 1984) Engine Shudder (the Moodists, 1982)Dave Graney 'n' the Coral Snakes- 1993- "you're just too hip baby"