_{The 2025 Coral Snakes.  Meredith O'Shea photo.}

If you were alive to Australian music and culture in the mid-1990s, you couldn't avoid Dave Graney. It wasn't so much that his band dominated the charts - but 'The Soft 'n' Sexy Sound” was unavoidable.

Having been nominated in the Best Male Artist at the 1996 ARIA Music Awards, he wore a hot pink crushed velvet suit (beneath a toe-curling wig) to the award. To the evident astonishment of presenter Chrissy Amphlett, Graney had beaten John Farnham, Paul Kelly, and Tex Perkins to the top spot. Dave began his unrehearsed acceptance speech by declaring himself, with deep irony, to be “King of Pop'” 

Such TV moments are pivotal, iconic, magnificent (and easily locatable on YouTube). Right up there, in my view, with Iggy Pop bouncing up and down on a chair in the “Countdown” studio calling Molly Meldrum “dogface”, and innumerable Norman Gunston interviews. The difference is that Graney possesses an immutable grace, style and a vein of rich, droll humour.

While no alcohol was harmed in the composition of these questions, I decided to get a few Big DG questions off my chest. I've been looking for an excuse to ask them for years, so the announcement that he would be touring ”Soft'n'Sexy Sound” with a reconstituted Coral Snakes is perfect.

When I saw you in The Sputniks, over 45 years ago now, I thought the band should be making waves overseas. Now, you were overseas for several years before returning home: but what keeps your career here in Australia? I mean, it's not as if you don't have the songs or the talent.

Dave Graney: That's very kind. We enjoyed our time in the Moodists, which was time mostly spent in the UK. The band had several different periods, we were young and changed material and songs constantly. Bands fare better if they do one thing over and over. We (myself and Clare Moore) liked to move on. We diverged from most of our contemporaries and peers in the mid-1980s. We didn’t - and don’t - like distortion or angst - which still make up 90 percent of rock music. 

Most of our peers and contemporaries had a few ideas or followed a template early on and stuck to it. The kinds of people who insist they are not musicians. We remain friends but they don’t really know what to make of our music. If they do tune in they mostly think its some kind of a prank. 

_{The un-Ocker Mr Graney.}

Just touching on style, if I may ... when you first started, I imagine much of your dynamic (and very un-Ocker) style was perhaps like “dressing up” for an event. But at what point did “dressing up” become “this is who I am, always”? 

Dave Graney: You’re complicating things here. Everybody wears clothes. Rock'n'roll is all about gear. Clothes and equipment. Everything involves a choice.

I have a couple of great hollow body guitars. I love the sound and hope they will give me a certain sound. But I have one solid body - a Maton Mastersound which is the best to perform with as its simple (two knobs and one switch) and that's best if you are singing. I love electric 12-string but it takes a real study of compression to get that Roger McGuinn sound. The Byrds had the most influence on me as far as bands go and that was hearing them after the Moodists.

Once you tuned into them you were tuned into vocals, songs and guitars. That perfectly chiming 12-string is so addictive. All the individuals in the Byrds were so great. Love their solo albums too. Gene Clark, David Crosby's amazing sense of harmony. Clarence White's beautiful guitar playing with the B Bender invented by Gene Parsons.

I have an acoustic, a nylon string and a 12-string acoustic. And two autoharps. You need all that stuff. Our guitarist Stu Perera had a solid body Rickenbacker; he joined with us in 1998 and that's what he still plays. Rod Hayward in the Coral Snakes played and plays a Stratocaster into a Marshall. Clare plays a Gretsch kit she bought in Tooting Bec in the UK in 1983. It records amazingly well, no fooling around with it needed at all! 

A person I think had style? I would say every member of Daddy Cool, especially Ross Hannaford. And recently Clare and myself sat at a table in Footscray with Kim Salmon and Maxine watching two sets of music from Mike Rudds’ Indelibles. Mike turned 80 the following week. 

It's been a few years ... a very public marriage, and a very public musical career. What constitutes 'normal'? The world around you - has it adjusted to you or does it sort of glance, and look hurriedly away (the way it should to oafs like Boy George)?

Dave Graney: We have lived in the outer suburbs of Melbourne since 1996. Before that we lived in quite deserted South and Port Melbourne. We aren’t inner city people at all. That’s the "normal" thing I avoid. Normal alt indie or normal alt bohemia. I avoid normal alt regulation stuff. Like I said, distortion and angst. Indie music. I like stuff done seriously and well. I never listen to what are considered alt icons. 

_{Surely not everybody was Kung Fu Fighting?}

Every now and then I'm exposed to free-to-air telly. The “personalities” seem to rely on a variety of expensive experts for their wardrobe, wit and accessories. You two seem to be the reverse of this: your style and creativity comes from your personalities rather than a multinational's expense account. How do you react to the telly of this era, with assorted farmers wanting to marry at first sight before cooking up pretty food filled with 'love'? I mean, I'm all for showbiz, but could you comment on the overlap between showbiz and reality?

Dave Graney: You’re on your own there! We like TV, who doesn’t? “First Dates UK” is cool. Brits understand the power of class and sex and awkwardness. They love to wallow in it all. “Farmer Wants a Wife” can’t compete. 

If you want me to recommend a recent masterpiece of a show I would say YOUNG SHELDON. Seven amazing series about a family. Great acting and writing and casting. 

Lately I've noticed increasing numbers of 20-somethings rolling out to gigs and indulging in sticky carpets, liquid yawns, and dirty rock'n'roll (instead of AI, online idents and binge streaming). How are these characters responding to you?

Dave Graney: I love it when younger people respond to our music. They bring obsession and energy to the occasion. Intensity and seriousness. 

Of course, older artists must acknowledge and celebrate their past - especially if they're to survive. What sort of crowds come along to your current shows - and what's their reaction? How do you feel doing these chestnuts - are they still enjoyable? Is there a part of you which compares your circumstances - then and now ..?

Dave Graney: We do lots of different shows and play with different people. Last year we played every city with a different person on bass. We wanted to do power trio rock shows. Drums, bass and guitar. We have been lucky to play with Stu Thomas in Melbourne, Adele Pickvance in Queensland, Greg Thorsby in NSW, Quinton Dunne in Adelaide and Marty Casey in Perth. It was great to play with all of them. 

In Melbourne we also play without Perera on guitar. Otherwise Clare and I play different material as a duo with vibes, keys, rhythm machine and guitars, in rooms and places that don’t fit with a drum kit. 

All very enjoyable situations to drop into.

This tour we are doing as Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes is in bigger rooms and I don’t play any guitar. Just singing and dancing. Maybe guitar on one song that Robin Casinader sings.  Some of the rooms are like theatre shows. The 2023 “Night Of The Wolverine” tour sold out 18 shows. This time it’s a few more places. We play the whole album 'The Soft 'n' Sexy Sound' (which we have never done before) and then a set of songs from other albums. Its’ a high energy show. Mostly the audience is intimately familiar with the songs. Our show in Adelaide last time was primal. 

I've always found a hefty dob of drollery amidst the dead-serious observations in your songs. Is this a difficult balance to maintain..? 

Dave Graney: We reached a commercial peak in the 1990s with “The Soft n Sexy Sound”, whilst swimming against the tide. Our music did not deal with angst in the middle of the grunge wave. Heavy American Irony was everywhere but my songs we’re straight. Especially on this album: “Deep Inside A Song”, “Scorched Earth Love Affair”, “The Birds And The Goats”. There were psychedelic moments like “Apollo 69” and conceptual leaps into pop culture and personal mythology like 'Morrison Floorshow' and “Rock'n'Roll Is Where I Hide” as well .

We played a lot of those Big Day Out Shows, it was a great time for Australian Music. But one year we were on a  bill with Ministry, The Cult and Primal Scream when they were trying to be the Stones. That was when we were developing “Morrison Floorshow”, a song about Jim Morrison coming back from South America to hide out as lead singer of a Doors tribute band. We were building it up in the middle of a bill of all these dead-eyed rock-posturing dung beetles! Some of the other festivals were much more enjoyable with acts like the Beastie Boys, Tricky and Ween ... I guess I'm thinking of the Livid Festival in Brisbane as well as the BDO.  

How did the songs for 'The Soft'n'Sexy Sound' come about? I know you had quite a swag at this time; was there anything in particular which was sparking this purple patch?

Dave Graney: We were putting out records for a small label attached to Universal Records and touring all over Australia after decades of underworld indie label, inner-city-only live shows. This was the third album made in that situation, with expectations and actual demand for what we were doing. 

We'd done “Night Of The Wolverine” and “You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel” with Tony Cohen engineering and more or less co-producing. Those albums were pretty much us coming in with all the songs  arranged and putting them straight to tape. You needed to be ready when you worked with Tony. Studios were still expensive. We lived in South Melbourne, rehearsed in South Melbourne and recorded in South Melbourne, mainly at Armstrongs/AAV, but occasionally also at Atlantis. 

For “You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel” we recorded about six or seven extra songs which didn’t make the album. Extra tracks for singles etc. Many of these were collaborative jams over which I sang. 

By the time we got to “The Soft and Sexy Sound” I had all the songs but also asked everybody to write the music for one. Rod Hayward gave us the music for “Apollo 69”, Gordy Blair gave us the music for “Outward Bound”, and Robin Casinader wrote and sang “Salty Girl”'. We worked with [former Moodists' live mixer; later record producer of many hits] Victor Van Vugt as co-producer. He was a little more hands-on than Tony, and he would offer opinions. Clare and I had talked with him about making more use of or thinking more about the recording. Slower tempos where needed and not hyping the performances up as if it was a live gig. 

“The Birds and The Goats” was around from before the previous album, but was too sparse and soft for it. It's a very simple two or three chord song, with a lyric inspired by the movie “Altered States” where two scientists are flirting. 

I always loved songs where the vocal melody sat with guitar or piano lines almost exactly. Either single licks or arpeggios. I liked it in blues songs like Muddy Waters' “I Can’t Be Satisfied” or Fred McDowell's “You Got To Move”. The vocal and guitar line sitting together. You can hear this on “I’m Gonna Live In My Own Big World” and a few others. “I’m Not Afraid To Be Heavy” had it too. 

'The Pre-Revolutionary Scene” was a bit of an R&B groove. It had a crazy middle eight which I thought was a little like Blur. 

For “Apollo 69”, we hired in an old-school original Moog Synth to get some great squelching noises. It was a sci-fi, erotic homage to the late 1960s set to a boogie beat.

“Morrison Floorshow” came from a B side to “I’m Gonna Release Your Soul” which we kept playing and extemporised into another song. We had to work to get the tempo right down as we had been doing it as a real rave up in our live show. It sounds fast to me now so I’m glad we worked to slow it down. 

“Scorched Earth Love Affair” and “Deep Inside a Song” were really straight ahead melodic dramas. The latter was about a songwriter whose work has been fuelled by a torch he carried for a doomed teenage love. He makes a career writing songs using all this angst and dramatic energy and then he is approached by that long lost love - who is now a singer - to write them some songs. 

“Rock n Roll Is Where I Hide” was the last song I presented to everybody at the rehearsals before we went into the studio. It was written exactly as its recorded, all the stops and rests and dynamics. It has a persistent , ringing guitar figure which I know has all the power. All my Southern rock sounds I took in as a teen. The band played it perfectly. It got thrashed on Triple J and drove the album to Gold status (over a couple of years). The lyric is about how a writer can see the whole world from his vantage point of an inactive observer but he gradually becomes apparent or known or noticed and the world turns to look at him and he is unable to see the world the same way anymore.

“Dandies Are Never Unbuttoned”: I loved to read books about dandies, Regency era characters who ruled London society in the late 18th century. Though none of the main figures like Beau Brummell would have ever written anything as they professed to have no inner life.

Beau was not born into the upper class but ruled it for a few years just by being the supreme face of the scene. Dandies were buttoned-up. They weren’t madly pissed or angry or emotional about anything at all. It was hard to find stuff about them. One book was written after a box of papers was discovered in a London bank which had belonged to a character called Scrope Berdmore Davies. All it consisted of were bills for clothes, wine and snuff. They told their own kind of story. Beau Brummell did not dress like a fop, but more like a classic mod in later years; he wore the same outfit every day and tried to perfect it. A dark suit. He pretty much invented the modern suit. One of the things he is quoted as saying was that if people remarked on what you were wearing it meant that you had done something terribly wrong. I totally agree. I can’t stand talking about clothes. Just wear stuff and own it. 

What songs give you the most pleasure to play live?

Dave Graney: “Rock n Roll Is Where I Hide” is a beast of a song which is different every time you get on it. Cannot be done in a half-hearted way. I can do it solo and it’s the same. It has power. The first chord of the verse is B9. There is no way to strum that chord in a laid back way, you have to make the shape and let it ring out.

We never really played half the songs on “The Soft and Sexy Sound'”live at the time of its release so they are really fresh to all of us now. 

It's been said that most folk tend to keep their musical taste to when they were growing up, not investigating new music as they get older. Do you agree, and if so, what do you think causes this?

Dave Graney: Sounds only natural. You take stuff in when you are young. You are open and vulnerable. 

Is there another Graney book of memoirs on the way? or a Moore-ish one?

Dave Graney: Be good if Clare wrote one, yes! 

Fast-forward to today, in the last six years you've released six new LPs, and they're all high-class. Now, look most rock'n'rollers seem to either slow down as they get over 50, or park themselves in their couch and complain about the dog poo in the kitchen. They don't speed up production! What's happening? What are you guys on, and is it available over the counter?

Dave Graney: Personally, I have a kind of argument with the world which is why I keep writing songs I guess. I’m trying to right the ship, put things right, correct the record or something.

I’m a singer songwriter with an electric band. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be. Our records have been mostly credited to Dave Graney and Clare Moore since the album  “Let’s Get Tight” in 2016/7. I have always worked with Clare and have been lucky to do so. The image of a lone wolf singer songwriter is probably more dramatic and cool but in our case it’s never really been true.

Not everyone collects things. My dad had some books, and too many screws and nails in tins which “might come in handy”. Today, self-appointed “life counsellors”, real estate agents, feng sui gurus and other mental pygmies advocate the empty, uncluttered house. I like choice in my life, and I suspect you two both have collections. What are they? What is it about these forms of human expression which draws you to them?

Dave Graney: I’m more in a stage of getting rid of things or letting go. Books I guess. I love books on London of any type or era and also San Francisco. I love Australian poetry books, especially ‘60s and ‘70s ones. I always hope to find more John Cowper Powys, Doris Lessing, Wyndham Lewis. I have a wall of pulp paperbacks from the ‘30s to the ‘80s. It’s my brain on the shelves. Otherwise, its clothes. I don’t need any more but would buy a pair of 1970s square-toed boots or a good V-necked jumper. In general, I don’t want for anything. 

What do you hear and see in rap - and does Clare share your obvious love for the genre?

Dave Graney: I don’t keep up with hip-hop, really. Everybody loves hip-hop! Since the first releases in the late 1970s. I love the voices, the characters, the different periods with all the swift uptake of different technology, the regional variations and the challenge it brings to the listener. I saw a RAGE playlist by a band called Lamb of God - a US metal band - and it was mostly hip-hop. Its completely, naturally a part of the scene there. 

Top ten Western soundtracks?

Dave Graney: I can’t really hack Westerns much. America’s fantasy history. By the time there were big cattle drives, the Native Americans had been swept away from the Great Plains into reservations or had gone up to Canada. Horrible. I like the attempts to deconstruct Westerns like Marlon Brando's “The Missouri Breaks”, or “Judge Roy Bean'' or “The Culpepper Cattle Co”, “McCabe and Mrs Miller”, “Soldier Blue”. The weirdest would be “Zachariah”, the psychedelic western with Elvin Jones, Country Joe and the Fish and The James Gang. “The Long Ryders” had a brilliant soundtrack by Ry Cooder. 

Favourite bands of the last twenty years?

Dave Graney: Queens Of The Stone Age, The Fauves, The Stress Of Leisure, On Diamond, Cold Hands Warm Heart, Go Go Sapien, Machine Translations, Peter Milton Walsh, Robyn Hitchcock, Paul Westerberg, The Ancients, Gargoyle, King Gizzard, The Lost Ragas, Pulp, The Divine Comedy, PJ Harvey, anything Kim Salmon has done.

Favourite 1970s bands?

Dave Graney: Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Little Feat, Wizzard, Audience, Genesis, Family, Streetwalker, Mark-Almond Band, Pentangle, Kevin Ayers, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop solo albums, Richrd Hell, Pere Ubu, Wire, Television, Ariel/Spectrum, Dragon, Skyhooks, Rose Tattoo, Roxy Music, Blue Oyster Cult, New York Dolls, David Johansen, Johnny Thunders Heartbreakers, Sex Pistols, Vic Godard and Subway Sect, The Pop Group, Mark Stewart and the Maffia. 

Could you list five preferred places to eat in Melbourne, four in Sydney, three in Queensland, two in Adelaide, and two others anywhere?

Dave Graney: I like Vietnamese pho places and fish and chip shops. I am not fussy!

How does one hide in rock'n'roll? Is DG really a Mossad operative?

Dave Graney: Free Palestine.

Ten favourite soundtrack LPs - go!

Dave Graney: For instrumental music I prefer jazz albums but Michel LeGrand’s soundtrack to “The Thomas Crown Affair” was great as I think they cut the film to the music as opposed to the other way around.

Other soundtracks? “Shaft”, “Across 110th Street”, “The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg”…. probably more TV themes as well, “Ironside”, “Callan”, “Streets Of San Francisco”, “The Avengers”, “The Persuaders”, “Mission Impossible” ... 

Ten favourite rap LPs?

Dave Graney: Tupac –“'All Eyez On Me”.  Slick Rick – “Behind Bars”. Nas - (the untitled one). Lil Wayne – “Tha Carter IV”. Dr Dre – “The Chronic”. Wu Tang Clan – “Forever”.

Ghostface Killer – “Ironman”. Schooly D - any collection of his first EPs

I have a great comp of 90s East Side LA Latino rap on THUMP records, it's the best

Outkast – “The Speaker Box”/ “The Love Below”.  Dr Dooom.

 Ten favourite C&W singers?

Dave Graney: Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Randy Travis, Bobbie Gentry, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Charlie Rich.

How did your education differ to what kids are taught today?

Dave Graney: No difference. Kids can tune out anybody and everything and I had that magic power too. Old people suck and talk a load of cobblers.

Were there any gigs at which you were frightened, either by the behaviour of the crowd or the band, or their roadcrew?

Dave Graney: Not really, no. 

Just touching on The Moodists: there was a period where the band completely altered musical terrain. I know there were several factors; could you elaborate on them? Was Edwyn Collins one of them..?

Dave Graney: No, more David McClymont and Malcolm Ross in the second or third iteration of the band. But they'd played with Edwin in Orange Juice. 

That'll do for now, I really need to get in the shower.

Dave Graney: Too Much information.

* * * *

If you don't have tickets for “The Soft'n'Sexy Show”, by now you should know what to do.

Also, it came as a bit of a shock to realise that Dave and Clare have released far more LPs in the last few years - so my poor credit card - and yours - is about to take a beating here.