Dave Graney and Clare Moore inducted into SA Hall of Fame
After four decades of soft and sexy sounds, Dave Graney and Clare Moore are getting some recognition in their home state.
SA News
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Dave Graney grew up in Mt Gambier, the working-class son of a house painter.
Clare Moore grew up above The Tivoli hotel, the daughter of Adelaide publicans. She once played drums for Sr Janet Mead.
If there’s a more quintessentially South Australian story in rock ’n’ roll, then it’s yet to be written.
Together Graney and Moore have made 33 records.
From their time in The Moodists, through an odd-but-excellent period of mainstream acceptance with the Coral Snakes, to today’s incarnation as the mistLY, the husband and wife team has taken us on wild 40-year ride through post punk, lounge-tinged blues and good old fashioned rock ’n’ roll.
And now the couple’s contribution to this musical life is to be recognised with an induction into the SA Music Hall of Fame.
A newly expanded Hall of Fame, mind, withthe display moving into a much larger area of the St Paul’s Creative Centre on Pulteney St.
There’s an official opening next Friday, and it will open to the public early in the new year.
Music Confidential tracks down Graney and Moore in Colac, where they’ve pulled over to the side of the road to have a chat on the way back to Melbourne from Mount Gambier.
“I was just down there on a family matter, seeing some relatives,” Graney, 60, says.
“I get down there every once in a while.”
The last time was to play in a historic woolshed, a new venue the likes of which are popping up across regional Australia.
“The normal used to be pubs or clubs, and they’re run along old fashioned lines – they’re open too late and the performances are too late.
“We don’t want to be playing in a bar to people who aren’t interested in the music. We’d rather play a smaller place full of people who are interested.”
It’s hard, though, to imagine punters ignoring Graney and Moore – they paint such a striking picture. Graney, usually behind a big, hollow-bodied guitar, dressed in a vintage suit and hat, sporting an equally vintage pencil moustache, and Moore, with a mane of wild hair, laying down a groove on her drum kit or vibraphone.
They’re not your run-of-the-mill rock band.
The development of this signature look, inspired by everything from crime noir novels to old bluesmen, is explained in Graney’s book 1001 Nights.
Its follow up, Workshy: My Life as a Bludge, looks more closely at the singer’s upbringing in the South-East town.
“The first book was about all of the things I was trying to steal, the tone I was trying to get and where I got it from,” Graney says.
“Workshy was more personal and about all the options I saw opening to me.
“I grew up in a very blue collar situation in Mt Gambier, my dad was a house painter for the Public Buildings Departmentand the main influences on me in my early life were the Catholic Church and the football club.
“After that it was rock ’n’ roll music, mostly. We (Graney and Moore) didn’t go to university, we’re rock ’n’ roll people, and the stuff we learned was through music culture.
“We’re authentic people from that world – we didn’t study it and we weren’t born into it, we made ourselves up.”
Graney says that while he may have grown up isolated from the big city music scenes, there was still a rock education to be had, often under the tutelage of the town’s “bohemian freaks”.
“People now talk about alternative music or you know, music that only people of a lower class or ‘bogans’ listen to, but growing up things were a lot more open,” he says.
“It wasn’t elitist in any way – we listened to the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tim Buckley, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Burning Spear … there was no alternative music, there was just music.”
The other difference between now and then, Graney says, was that Australian music used to have a regional feel.
Adelaide bands sounded different from Melbourne bands which sounded different from Sydney bands.
“Music was a lot better when it had regional variations,” he says.
“In South Australia we had people like John Dowler, who had Young Modern, early Masters Apprentices, and I do have a taste for LRB, which annoys Clare a lot.”
So what happened? What smoothed off all those rough edges and made all of our music sound the same?
“Well, Triple J going national didn’t help, Graney says.
“Triple J might be the worst thing that ever happened,” he laughs.
“We felt the power of it when we were with the Coral Snakes, and being broadcast nationally was great.
“But when Triple J went national it took all the oxygen out of the Sydney music scene, and I think it’s more important to have a Sydney music scene than it is to hear music from other cities.
“If you want to come out of those cities then you have to come out and tour, or use your own community radio.”
Touring is something Graney and Moore haven’t stopped doing since the late seventies, making a mockery of the My Life as a Bludge subtitle of Graney’s latest book.
“It was always my ambition to be a bludger,” he says.
“But I guess I wanted to highlight how great Australia used to be when it valued bludgers and honoured them. If somebody found a good lurk then we cheered them on. We live in meaner times now, where people like to punch down.”
For Moore, and induction into the SA Music Hall of Fame is welcome recognition from her home state, a state she still has a lot of affection for.
“I do love South Australia,” Moore says. “I really like living in Melbourne, and career-wise we have to live where there’s a lot of work, but South Australia is a really different place and we’re switched on to understanding what those differences are. There’s a feeling of civic pride in a lot of South Australian towns, and in Adelaide too. It’s always very pleasant to come back.”
For Moore, entertaining Crow-eaters is in the blood.
“My parents ran pubs, so we were very much part of the local community,” she says.
“Mum and dad had the National hotel, which became the Tivoli, and my grandfather had the Earl of Leicester Hotel in Parkside.
“There were always social clubs, which were important to the local community. Mum and dad were very connected to the community.”
HEAR: One Million Years DC, out now
SEE: Dave Graney and Clare Moore, December 20, The Jade
TICKETS: trybooking.com