Dave Graney & Clare Moore

The Dave Graney ShowCD Released November 1998. Available on Festival Records in Australia.
Produced by Clare Moore and Dave Graney.
Recorded at the Ponderosa and at Sing Sing South, Melbourne.
Mixed by Duffiled, Miller and Kenihan at their Clarendon street studios.
Cover designed by Tony Mahony.
Video for "Your masters must be pleased with you" devised and directed by Tony Mahony.
Short film to accompany release of the album, "Smile and wave", written and directed by Tony Mahony and starring Angus Sampson, Dave Graney and Clare Moore.

We finished up with Mercury records (where we had been for four cds) and the Coral Snakes (who we had been for ten years)in December 1997. Everything, the whole structure and shared momentum fell away at the same time. We came out of the experience with a strong feeling that we wanted to keep things at a more manageable level in the future. We wanted, for instance, not to give a fuck about "popular" music and just do music. We wanted to kiss goodbye to big recording budgets and studios and the hassles of making sense to a whole combine of people and just play some tunes. To that end We (Clare Moore and myself) began working in a small studio in the outer suburbs of Melbourne called "the Ponderosa". "Working" really meant reading a manual for the keyboard and sequencer we had gotten hold of, reading a manual and getting a handle on the computer and music software we had also dragged into our scheme of things. Clare was more in tune with the technology, I was sitting in another room going over the songs I wanted to record. I had had an idea for a while that I should get a bunch of songs together that I could actually sit down and play like folk songs. They were meant to be simple, strong and immediate. We had both really loved the album by British singer songwriter Beth Orton, "Trailer Park", which had coincidentally been produced by Victor Van Vugt just before he had worked on our "soft'n'sexy" cd. (We had planned to make this Dave Graney Show cd with Victor but, ironically, he went back to the UK to make Beths second cd). It was a rough and folky electronica record we had in mind.

2020 reflections...I love this album. One of our best. Created after I split up the Coral Snakes. Clare and I cooking it up with a keyboard and a computer. The other half we played with our new beat combo of Adele Pickvance on bass and teen jazz prodigy Stuart Perera on guitar. He played a left handed solid body Rickenbacker- and still does. Very lucky to find these players. Much harder to get even one band going , let alone two or three. Its luck and timing and ambition. Recorded for Festival. Their A&R people were all ingenues with attitudes. We got a great advance though. paid the price in having to work with some flakey people. Not all of them, just a couple. Disfuncctional company anyway. We were totally together though, gagging to get to grips with new band members and new technology. All these strange ideas about flying around the world to work with exotic "name" biz people were floated. I just wanted to rock it in our tight unit. Keep the costs down and play a lot. AHEAD OF OUR TIME! Great working on the album with Andrew Duffield, Phil Kenihan and Billy Miller. We had started working with them the year before on "feelin kinda sporty" and a remix of "the sheriff of hell". Songs from this album drove the show we did later on called "point blank". Got back in touch with Mark Fitzgibbon for this album too. The first single ,"Between times" was a track I'd demo'd in London in 1987 with Mark on keys. We brought a lot of continuity to Festival but .....

Fave lyrics..."gimme your ears / Gimme your heart and minds / your brain has just been commandeered
we are going to find an open field / sit and wait for the enemy to show itself / we shall march, drill and manoeuvre till they arrive
we will be flanking the opposition forces / a feinting pincer movement / there will be no question, no surrender
you will be my players / you will be my foot soldiers / you will die for my song / you will die in my son"
( I'm a commander)

art tony mahony

The whole process had a strange stop and start, hurry up and wait, leaping and falling on your arse quality to it. Like learning to ski or surf. The recording on to the hard disc turned out to be just as immediate as we had hoped but the continual need for further boxes of hardware to make the next step was a continual occurrence. By the middle of the year we had recorded about 70 % of the music which now comprises "The Dave Graney Show" cd. The major drawback in the sessions we had done in the small studio was that you could not really record any live drums (none that sounded any good anyway) so we went into Sing Sing in Melbourne to do another five tracks with our live band. These tracks were then dropped into the digital domain and given to Andrew Duffield and Phil Kenihan to mix in their super duper Pro tools system. Phil and Andrew had previously remixed "Feelin Kinda sporty" for us and were keen to be involved in a project from a more formative stage. In a way they were perfect for us as they are total outsiders to the music business but know how it operates (Andrew was a member of Melbournes "the Models"). Doing most of their work in sound collage and music for cutting edge advertising they have an incredibly high tech studio setup. The amount of money they could be paid for a mix job as compared to their usual scene was not even in the picture and they were also not in the business of making something that would guarantee them work in the music business in the future. They were going to be doing it for fun, it was a relief for them to be dealing with pieces of music that were longer than thirty seconds for a change. It soon turned out to be a bonus to have the third member of the crew, Bill Miller on hand. Andrew and Phil worked strictly daylight hours and at nights Clare and I would work back with Bill redoing vocals and guitar. The whole experience was totally off of the rock'n' roll mainstream recording aesthetic. Their studio is on the second story above Clarendon street in South Melbourne. All white and flooded with light we sat and listened to the songs in a relaxed, switched on, engaged with the outside world way. Normal recording sessions are conducted in tense underground bunkers where you lose track of time but at the same time keep a nervous eye on the studio clock. This session was a new experience in every way. Phil guided the console, Andrew listened and subtracted or added parts where needed and Bill had an ear and perspective that came from another dimension.

THE TRACKS

Lt Colonel,Cavalry
Years ago I had a silly idea about being in a band of musicians that was captured and interrogated by a foreign power. Each member of the troupe was trained to only divulge their name, their rank and their rock scene. The title of this alludes to my rank and rock scene. The cavalry is kind of old fashioned yet linked to heroic , foolish charges and aristocratic, personalised uniforms. They are also, of course the modern day tank corps so underestimate the cavalryman at your peril. The music was really reminiscent of some of the actor Richard Harris's grand follies such as "the yard goes on forever" so we tried to heighten that feeling in the vocal arrangements. Sean Kelly was upstairs working in another studio so Bill, he and Andrew threw a lot of deep male voices at the bottom end of the chorus.

Your masters must be pleased with you
Right from the start this seemed to be a very anthemic, grand tune. It didn't suit the digital approach, it needed the swing and movement of a band playing. Lyrically it is a song addressed to a traitor, a suck and a dog.
I'm a commander
Every once in a while you get to realise an idea perfectly and I am very, very pleased with this tune. It was tough, everybody we played it to from the rough stages got really annoyed by it. It's my kind of psychedelia, giddy and high with feelings that are kind of funny yet kind of heavy and important all at once. Clare did all the music save for the strings which Andrew threw on. I thought she went a bit far in the bugle track with "the last post" but it was her call. At one stage she had a couple of bars from the "3 way turf talk" theme, it sounded kind of military but got the chop for some reason.
Aristocratic jive
It's a vague, jazzy song about those people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become members of society by aping the manners of their betters. Strangely they always become very conservative as they get older and seem to be completely cut adrift from their common beginnings. I was thinking of the dandy cowboys like Wild Bill Hickock and the Yankee Poms such as Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Errol Flynn , Slick Rick and Jimi Hendrix.
Am I wearing something of yours?
This is the kind of tune that shows how Clare starts off a few miles ahead of most programmers and sequence freaks. Instead of sampling a groove and hanging everything around it she can play a rhythm on the keyboard like she plays a kit, the bass drum, the hi hats, the cymbals, she has the skills in the real dimension as well. It's a tough talkin tune , delivered in a Clint Eastwood style clenched tooth whisper. When I was a kid "am I wearing something of yours was something a person would say to another as a preamble to a fight. Offence had been taken.
No pockets in a jumpsuit
There was once a book I read called "no pockets in a shroud" and also a rockabilly tune called "coffins have no pockets". This tune is a bit of an R&B rumination on the dynamic of walking on to a stage to sing. It's about what you wear in that situation and how you can't drag a lot of shit like car keys and mobile phones with you. In a way you are passing through to another dimension and its mad to try to hang on to anything from back where you were.

Speak to my medium
Mark Fitzgibbon came out to play the extraordinary piano on this track. It was just a simple two chord drifting melody till he gave it a whole load of swelling , grand class. He was an old friend of ours from living in London during the eighties. He plays all the time in many situations in the tight Australian jazz scene. In a disconcerting way he sits at the keyboard and stares straight at you while he plays, his face blank but his arms and fingers flying. He listened to the track once, wrote down a whole lot of fly shit on his notation paper and put down what you hear on this cd. Lyrically I was referring to spirit mediums and seances. I was trying to suggest that making a cd is in many ways similar to talking to people through a gypsy woman who can just see you in the endless atmosphere of a crystal ball. She then translates what you are attempting to communicate through to the rest of the outside world.
Twixt this world and the next
Clare did a hell of an arrangement on this number. We always dug the grandiose sounds of Scott Walker and we tried to reach for those stars in the backing vocals . Bill MiIller takes care of the ball busting high C's while we both tackled the bottom end. Clare was conducting. Like the last song, it was heavily influence by a book I was reading about TE Lawrence (of Arabia). The book was dictated from the after world to a mediumistic English country woman who then put it out. When the lyric refers to "country" it's alluding to more of a psychological territory.
I'm gonna do ya slowly
Paul Keating turned to the execrable John Hewson and dropped him with these words one day in parliament. I thought it was worth a song. Adele Pickvance plays a particularly funky line on the bass.
Driving through his mythic country,whistling
This is a story of a trip I took from Mt Gambier to Townsville in my FC Holden in 1977. Stuart Perera , who plays guitar with us was born in the same year. It was a long drive at 80k's an hour by myself. A long time alone and experiencing the world new each day. As I moved around Australia and the world it became kind of mythological event for me. There are other drives I take that go through some of the same country. At different times in my life I let it all swamp me. Overpowering melancholy. Now I have some power that I can use to pull away from these negative, sentimental forces but as I walk past the graveyard, I still whistle.
Between times
This is a song I had in my cupboard for a long time, I just never had the right collection of songs that I could put it with. "My life on the plains" was too buckskin and suede, "I was the hunter and I was the Prey" was too jarring and electric, "Lure of the tropics" was all adrift and epic, too drunk, "Night of the Wolverine" was almost acoustic, "You wanna be there but you don't wanna travel" was built for hard touring, "the Soft'n' sexy sound" was boudoir psychedelia, "the Devil Drives" was exotic and international. This is the first time we have recorded without the Coral Snakes so it seemed right to do a song from before they existed. I must have spent a good part of the eighties living on a diet of beer, sardines, tobacco and toast. I loved pulp thrillers and especially got to love anything written by the Californian writer James M. Cain. "Between times" is an attempt to put his story "the postman always rings twice" into song form.
They wanted to be players
This is a song that tries to take an anthropological view of rock musicians and rock scenes, a detached observer describing a nightclub scene like say, David Attenborough describes a family of apes in the jungle. . . . "the singer wore a torn t shirt. . . . "
Smile and wave
After I won the King of pop award in 1996 I was walking through the after show party with Ian Turpie and people were yelling out stuff, some abusive to him and/or me. "Smile and wave Dave, it costs nothing to smile and wave. . . " was Turps" sage advice. I took it as good advice and ordered another bottle of champagne.

Click here for the Lyrics

"Closer to Soft 'n' sexy....Dave takes a sardonic look at electronica. No cowboys here, it is all military personnel, champagne and caviar and living life without a care in the world...."
BEAT magazine, November

"This is a reborn Graney, apparently more content, stripped of responsibilities to a band and his old record label. The result is a gentler, prettier collection of songs than we have ever heard from Graney................Graney might have come up with his most enduring album...."
THE AGE, November

"The Dave Graney Show belies its title, downplaying the theatrics and falling somewhere between "Wolverine" and the full lushness of "The Soft'n'Sexy Sound"
ROLLING STONE , December

"....It's a credit to partner Clare Moores programming skills that the results still sound so organic and alive..........The majestic '70's style social commentary of your masters must be pleased with you......the sweet harmonies of between times....the watery bass line for Driving through his mythic country...."
THE ADELAIDE ADVERTISER, December

"....returns with a new collection of 13 tunes that may surprise many of his loyal followers..... expect a rougher'n'folksier sound this time around..... songs such as Aristocratic Jive and Your masters must be pleased with you are indicative of the new direction...."
CITY SEARCH, November

"Those who love the swagger and style of Australias self professed King of Pop will not be disappointed by his latest offering... "
HOBART EXAMINER,December

"... a quick listen to their latest album, "the Dave Graney Show", will reveal a simple sound that captures the ethereal beauty of the epic orchestra combined with an acoustic guitar...."
EXPRESS MAGAZINE, December

"The album combines elements of all of Graneys previous offerings while still managing to veer off in new directions at the same time....... It's odd because while the new album is a little more experimental than previous records, the new band is a lot more traditional in it's line up... "
THE WEST AUSTRALIAN, December

"No longer a showman but a show. , It all makes perfect sense..... The Dave Graney Show is not to be missed by Graney fans, and any new recruits might find it a good 'in' to this remarkable artists work... "
THE BIG ISSUE, December

"$29. 95, 50 min 3sec, ....B"
WHO, December

"The Dave Graney Show ..... rewards your attention with its masterful production and uniquely Australian lyrical flights of fancy... "
INPRESS, November

"Graney snarls some, but the wit is self reflexive. And who else has such an ear for the nuances of masculine bluff and counter bluff?Steeped in the tropes of noir fiction, it's downbeat despair and laconic nihilism, Dave Graney is smart enough to know where it is he fits. He is not Prince Hamlet, nor was he meant to be. He writes about Warren Oates but he is really Kevin Spacey. He is the gimpy one, lurking among the usual suspects. "
The ADELAIDE REVIEW, January

See The Moodists and Coral Snakes sections for discography and archival information pre 1998.

the dave graney show- an outstanding album recorded for Festival in 1998

Kiss tomorrow goodbye (2000)

heroic blues(2001)

the third woman (2002)

the brother who lived ? (2003)

Liquor?
Hashish ? (2005)

Keepin' it Unreal (2006)

We wuz curious (2008)

Knock yourself out (2009)

SUPERMODIFIED (2010)

rock'n'roll is where I hide (2011