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

dave graney - Moodists-Coral Snakes-mistLY-FEARFUL WIGGINGS
Cds available via links below. Your support for our music is greatly appreciated.

About Me

My photo
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.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

peter lillies wake

this was published in a recent issue of the Melbourne Review



I was speaking to a mutual friend of Peter Lillies when the terrible news came that he'd died up in Sydney. Quite sudden news. My friend was wondering aloud how to have a wake of some sorts and being unsure how to get in touch with people, indeed, who to get in touch with. 
Turns out he needn't have worried. Paul Madigan organized a wake at the St Kilda Bowling Club. I turned up at the designated time of 4:30 pm, maybe a bit later, and it was already pretty packed. They came from right out of the very woodwork of Melbourne. Johnny Topper was talking, and continued to talk for longer than I'd ever heard him talk. That strange, high, warbling tone of his. Very funny tales of working in the night rail yards along Flinders and Spencer Street with peter Lillie, lining up for the work like something out of "On The Waterfront". Also, stories of arts grants and spending them on old cars and guitars and starting a band playing at the Pram Factory and La Mama instead of in pubs. Anarchist bookshops and the like. This is early 70s Melbourne stuff. Jane Clifton was sitting near to the stage and Topper kept turning in her direction for corroboration of details. Paul Madigan was also on stage, drinking a pot and interjecting occasionally. The room was full of grey ghosts from that Carlton/Sunbury period. Some had had commercial success, or at the least, access to the public outside the bohemian village, like Greg McCainsh and Bob Starkie and Barry Dickins. Others were more from the world of poetry, theatre and inner city legendary rockabilly and western swing bands. There were also people from that late 70s Melbourne punk scene like Chris Walsh, Andrew Duffield, Ash Wednesday, Greg Ades, Lucky Last and Conway Savage and Amanda. Jim Shugg from the Feral Dinosaurs/People with Chairs up their noses. I had a chat with a bloke who used to do live sound and now runs a pub in Warburton. He was talking of the family who ran the Tote before it was the Tote. Paul, who ended up leaving the family and jumping over the bar to play guitar with the Johnnies, apparently named it. Said it should have something to do with the betting that used to go on there in John Wrens days. He asked if I was working much. "A lot", I said and added that it was hard work. He agreed that it was plain hard work getting people out of their teched up caves nowadays. This gathering was mostly talk of simpler times. People were never in for a while there. Maybe so far in they were out.
Mitchell Fairclough aka Slim Whittle gave a great talk and sang a song accompanying himself on a ukelele shaped like a Les Paul. The song was great. It had a line going something like " I sent a snail to his maker today- you can't always know what you're treadin' on". He had a face and tone of voice like many uncles of mine years ago in the country. They've all turned up their toes now, too. Tracey Harvey aka Tammy Whittle walked past. Johnny Von Goes sang a Lillie tune, Mark Ferrie spoke about going to see the Pelaco brothers at the Kingston Hotel in 1975 or 76. He said it was the coolest crowd he'd ever seen. Some of ' em would've been looking back at him now.
There was a man playing guitar who looked like that ghostly character from Twin Peaks. A passing friend told me he was the father of a kid he knew and he hadn’t seen him for 30 years. I sat with another friend who is not talking to Paul Madigan, who is ten feet away in front of him, playing the guitar.
Fred Negro sang a very respectful version of a Lillie song, as respectful as you can be holding a broomstick with a plastic horses head on one end and strumming it like a guitar. 
People spoke of the person they knew. All being very close to him. All telling their truth. I met him much later on. I’d heard his name. He’d heard mine. We talked across a mess of reputations and bullshit. Ran into him in different places. Melbourne, in the city street the last time. Byron Bay in the mid nineties. Having sudden, spirited conversations about Ern Malley, Max Harris, Fender guitars and amplifiers, Don Dunstan’s vision of the satellite city MONARTO. He wrote songs about all that stuff.
Garry Adams read a wonderful telegram (how quaint) from Peter in heaven where he was in the band and saying that Hendrix was ok on guitar but “not really the sort of thing (I) was looking for…” Everybody laughed too easily. Must have been a raw truth there. My friend said it was great how short and succinct the musicians were when they spoke.
Then Topper was singing. Almost dancing. Never seen him put out so much in years!
I spoke to some of my friends, a decade younger than this lot. The older ones were living and eating healthier is all I can say.  Must have gotten some good dietary habits when a  brief window of common sense opened up there in bohemia.
Madigan sang "new road to Gundagai" and I shed a tear because that song always does that to me. Wistful tune of a delicate sensibility. Peter's and that whole scene of freaks. That crew saw and imagined everyday iconic lolly wrappings and ice cream brands as psychedelical shapes out of time. They celebrated  dumb dead ends and non sequiturs. The new Road to Gundagai mentions staying a night in the TV Motel. The TV motel was in Gundagai and has been torn down now. It was shaped like a tv set! On legs which you parked underneath. Thing is gone and the sensibility and the reaction is gone too. All so delicate. Seemed so solid and powerful for a while.
Rick Dempster did a dance and twirl on his Cuban heel boots because Topper asked him to. A hat was passed around. There was an auction of some Fred Negro artwork. I left early, I guess, crossed the river and sat and watched the Hired Guns playing at the Standard. It was great to sit in a room and hear some music. Let the songs, old and new link up all those mismatched, half imagined and isolated scenes in your mind. In your life.






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