Dave Graney – Autobiography

CHRONOLOGY

1974  Discovered Music

All my friends were into Hard Rock, like Blue Oyster Cult, Led Zeppelin and The Allman Brothers. I remember walking to training for under-16’s football (in Mount Gambier SA) with my best friend, and I started going on about Mississippi Fred McDowell, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. It was all just tumbling out of me and he said “where do you know all this shit from?”  We were both Catholic, from the working man’s side of town and both our fathers had played for the same football team – it was a different world; football, booze, hot-rods and demolition derbies – that was entertainment. I had other pals who said “fuck you”, and dropped out of school, because they didn’t like it – that was very cool, I thought. I had classic delinquent aspirations. I used to go to the pool hall, where the sharpies and layabouts gambled all day, playing ‘Kelly pool’ – I loved it.

1978  Embraced Punk Rock

The Punk Rock scene was a big thing in Australia. It was the world of inner-city scenes – small enclaves of very young people in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane, making up a story. We gravitated towards Melbourne and the glamour of people like the Boys Next Door (Nick Cave’s first band). We were very conscious of coming from South Australia and we liked that identity. Because we came from a tougher place. We knew a lot of the people in the Melbourne scene were just having a Summer of slumming it in the ‘underground’, but we made choices for a particular life that was real – we didn’t have any way back to a comfortable existence with rich parents. To be young and inventing this kind of private mythology, it was what it must have been like to be involved in the Communist revolutions in the earlier part of the century, but in a different kind of psychological way. To be a musician, you had to be severe in your likes and dislikes, just like belonging to a political party. It was hardcore and it was self-righteous. I liked all that.

1978  Met Clare Moore

I met Clare on the Adelaide Rock scene, and we’ve worked together ever since. That was the greatest milestone in my life, because she’s very influential. Clare always had an amazing sense of herself right from the word go, and she’s allowed me to become a musician and a songwriter in a very peculiar way. Through working with Clare, I’ve never had to play the role of the heroic, mystical solitary man on a journey of discovery. Most of the time, I’ve been really happy. Clare and I have been like a partnership, a tight gang, us against the world. Other than Lux and Ivy from The Cramps, the only kind of other people you’d find like us are the couple in the 1930’s movie The Thin Man – a husband and wife detective team.

1983  Moved To London

A British record company (Red Flame) came to Australia to see our band The Moodists play. They said “come to the UK, we’ll make records”, and we said, “why not?” The Australian music scene then was the golden page of pub rock – it was really dull. All our dreams were fired by imported things, import records, imported magazines. The world was happening somewhere else. I borrowed some money and got to London with £50. It was cold, late November, and I went out and bought and bought a pair of leather pants and a leather jacket, just like the Black Panthers wore, and that was it. I had some duty-free cigarettes so I was happy. We had no return tickets: we were never going to come back. We loved to sit around and drink beer, and watch television. There were only three stations and broadcasting finished around 10pm. Everything shut at 10pm. This huge city would be dark. Amphetamine use was incredibly popular, and we’d wonder why people would take something to stay awake in a place where it was so hard to find something to do. But we liked the way people scrambled around for a bit of excitement and made the most of it, rather than the easy life in Melbourne.

1995  Appeared On Hey Hey It’s Saturday

We were on Hey Hey It’s Saturday a few times. Everyone saw it, although everyone we knew said they never watched it. You had to be tough to appear on it, because they were top of the heap in showbiz, and they made sure you knew it. Afterwards, Daryl Somers would send you a card – those little touches made a difference. We didn’t have any snobbishness about it. I enjoyed leaping out of the strange little world of indie-rock and waltzing into people’s lounge-rooms, where they didn’t have to join a little inner-city club to hear your music. I knew we were never going to get massive radio airplay, so I had to send other messages out, that I was a performer and not just a songwriter.

2002  The Moodists Reunited

We all played again as a band, and it was like a sensational privilege for us. Being in The Moodists from 1978 to 1986 was like living out a story; a story where we just expected things to happen. Later I had some public success in Australia, but that 90’s scene was like the wave crashing of 80’s underground music. Clare loved the reunion, because she had become invisible behind me, so she loved being part of a band again. Everybody was still alive, everybody clicked into it and kicked into it.

INTRODUCING DAVE GRANEY…….

All the music I’ve done, I’ve liked to be in my own context. After The Moodists split up, I wanted to be in a context of singer/songwriters. At the time, in the late 80’s in London, there were hardly any other around. I wanted to make a point of like, you know, I’m a singer/songwriter like Tim Buckley, Fred Neil and Lou Reed. I liked Lou Reed when he was kinky, and ‘hopped up’ on all manner of dope, and I guess I really liked his sense of humour.

There was a brief period in the mid ‘90’s, when there were musicians like me who were seen as marginal, eccentric horses that shouldn’t be in the race. But all over the world, record companies were backing artists like me, and people like Tricky and Pulp in the UK. For me to win best male artist at the ARIA Awards (Australia’s Brit Awards), is a measure of how hip the music scene was then. The previous winners had been far more conventional rock artists.

I had just been in the UK and I really liked this actor Peter Wyngarde, who was in the TV shows Jason King and Department S. He was an older guy with a bouffant wig, and leather jump suits. I was dressed like that when I went to the ARIA Awards. It was a light was shone on me when I was having the most fun. I was out on my own, but all of a sudden, also at the centre of things. When I walked down the aisle to accept my award from Garbage’s Shirley Manson, she worryingly thought I was just some nutter from the audience.

I was in a moment of power. The day after the ARIAs, we went to London to mix the next album, The Devil Drives. We had all these guest musicians and the record was incredibly languid and dreamy, and more to do with a psychedelic, interior kind of life. The release of The Devil Drives was a moment when there was all this expectation on me to be a pop artist, with all this (self-dubbed) King of Pop wave that was happening…..and I presented an artistic statement.

I look around at other artists who have a moment of power and I want them to do a great folly. Most artists do it. Lou Reed did it with Metal Machine Music. Radiohead tried to do it but their audience still loved whatever shit they came up with, you know. They tried to be so esoteric to rebuff public acceptance, but the public accepted them even more.

With me, there is a difference between writing and performing. Most people perform as writers – singer/songwriters are seen as earnest types who don’t perform. And then there is Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown – great performers. I always wanted to be like Jerry Lee Lewis – he was too fucking cool to write songs, so was Elvis. Somebody wrote a great article about Bob Dylan, at his most confused, going to see Elvis and asking him how to get out of his writers’ block. And Elvis was like “what’s this crazy idiot asking ma?” Elvis came from a different era where people wrote songs for you – The Beatles fucked that up!

Most of my peers are into roots music, which I think is terrifically dull. I only like music that’s kind of experimental with artsy, great ambitions beyond their capabilities.

A lot of my friends took drugs when they were younger. I didn’t screw myself up. I was strictly alcohol when I was a kid. But now, I’m self-prescribed. Life certainly needs a bit of help when you’re older.

I’ve never felt comfortable writing songs about things that happen to me. I understand that people respond to crude emotional pleas in music, but I find songs about love and wanting people really dull. It’s very easy for people to fake it too. I’m always looking to work out different ways to present music.

I think it would be bad to talk about shit like self-doubt. Squares talk about stuff like that. There are some people who have great anxieties on display and people love it. I find people like that irritating to be around. You do it once and then you do it twice and it’s an act.

Some displays of weakness? I was talking with Stephen Cummings when we were watching a performer, and he was saying that the performer was shameless. He then said “You used to be shameless, but you’ve got shame now. I used to be shameless too but then I got shame….then I got shameless again. We’ve passed through the barriers of shame.” Or maybe shame is part of our shamelessness. It becomes complicated as you become an older, more decrepit performer to remember what you stand for and what you represent.

Thank you Dave Graney