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.
