TV Week June 97
In 1997, myself, Clare Moore and Tony Mahony had a mad idea to get a tv show happening. It was to be a late night show called "AO", and for the briefest of moments it looked like it was going to become a reality. We released The Devil Drives album and I put out my book of lyrics (with abundant accompanying imagery by Tony Mahony) It Is Written, Baby (title taken from a line in The Birds and Goats from the previous album The Soft n Sexy Sound).
The Situation and the motivation.
Six months before, I had won the ARIA (Australian record induatry award) for Best Male vocalist. The awards had been going for ten years and previously had been won by Johnny Farnham, Diesel and Jimmy Barnes. We had our records coming out in Europe and our meisterwork, "the Devil Drives" was just about to come out. We felt like we should try anything. (There is a time in the life of some musicians which can be described as "the Imperial Period". The time when all seems possible.) I tried to talk the show into a reality in all of the interviews I did for either the Devil Drives or for the book. I wasn’t generally talking with rock culture people in cosy rock magazines (they treated me with suspicion generally anyway). These were magazines you’d get in the supermarket queue or daily papers. Pretty crude in their language.
WHO magazine June 97.
The Concept.
AO was to be set in the vast mansion of a disillusioned rock singer. Rather like "the Great Gatsby" he wanders the endless corridors while an equally endless party (which he has thrown) goes on. He is very down and seeking answers to his funk, his malaise. He keep opening doors to find different people in different rooms and situations. Some of these people have been invited to stay and have been in the mansion for months. Dave Graney (for he is the disillusioned singer) is able to stop and talk to each of these people and ask them for advice, for directions out of the dead end he finds himself in.
The guests.
In general the guests were going to be the main focus – the feature. Dave Graney was going to be asking them for advice and they would be performing and doing their thing. Dave was not going to be a "wild and crazy guy”, he was down and everybody else was up. ( In retrospect, this was actually based on reality. I enjoyed the moment and all these doors opening but in some ways I was just coasting on inertia as a moving force. All the ideas I’d had in the early 90s - my aesthetic – were being used up. I was in a quite passive state, despite still pulling a lot of ideas out of my bag…) The main idea was to feature people who rarely ever get onto tv . These people would be poets, actors, activists, musicians (whether they had a record out at the moment or not) and other people from outside the usual media window frame.
Sydney METRO Oct 97
Adelaide Advertiser June 97
The Vibe.
There was to be a general vibe of artifice and unreality. A house, an endless party and a search for advice and inspiration. Musicians were to just suddenly be playing in the corner of the room. Miming only. We thought it would be great if all the performers only had to worry about projecting for the camera, the sound would be that of their cd. To make it all look great on the screen.
Dave Wray, (Frank Bennett) was to be my embittered offsider who was working all manner of scams around the mansion, selling stuff of mine out the back door and bootlegging the artists.
The Reality
We filmed two segments as a sort of pilot. These were to be the "interview" situations and most of the show would have been done in post production. We got access to the building that is known as the Forum Theatre in Flinders street in the city. Nowadays it is a regular venue for rock shows of about 2000 people capacity. Previously a cinema, I had seen a movie there in 1985. From 1986 to 1996 it had been used by a Christian group who called it The Melbourne Revival Centre and it fell into disrepair and was quite gloomy and dusty. The carpets were all dirty but it retained some Roxy glamour with all the fake Roman statues all over the place.
The first interview we filmed – as if I was a depressed player walking through the corridors of his enormous palatial crib whilst a party was in full sway – involved me walking into the mansions gym where Henry Rollins was lifting some weights. I talked to him about jazz, music, Black Flag, who else was at the party and his days as a manager of a Haagen Daaz ice cream store. Clare Moore also backed him on vibes while he read a poem to camera. It was during his perhaps second tour of Australia as a spoken word performer.
We then filmed an interview with Perth socialite Rose Porteus Hancock (who was at the time in a seemingly never ending battle for her late husbands multi million dollar estate with the rest of his family – Gina Hancock. The papers being full of intimations of bad behaviour and foul play). She took 3 hours to get her make up on and then came blasting out onto the "set". I hardly had to ask a question. It was all stuff like "Look at my ass Dave! Yeah! I still got it!" She also dispensed a few homilies like "when I meet a man I look at his shoes and I look at his crotch!". Tony Mahony was killing himself behind the camera and came up to me and said, "I can see what happened to old Lang, fucked to death". She also made us buy her new cookbook and invited us all to her house, "Prix d'Amore" whenever we were over in the West.
The tapes went to a convoluted string of people at the ABC and the response was, generally, "why is Dave being so quiet?". It didn't get the nod and we ditched the idea.
None of the filmed segments survived.
I enjoyed this period of walking through any doors that opened for me. It was a bummer we never got played on any commercial radio. I might have been deluded but thats what I wanted. But there were so many opportunities to appear on live tv - and we took all that were offered - that we actually bounced into many lounge rooms over that period.
In the next year or two, a lot of stylistic devices from AO were used on the tv show "Recovery" such as filming the second series in a big house and the anchor of the show having an evil, disgruntled offsider that had a ring of familiarity about them. Oh well. After that little adventure we confirmed ourselves to just playing and writing music from then on. The rest of it was too collaborative and too hard.
Melbourne 2018
pic Tony Mahony
By the end of the year we had finished with Universal Music and I also decided that I should end the Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes period. I mean that I decided our shows at the Continental Cafe in Prahran in December would be our last. I did that badly. I just had a feeling we were going to be starting again at the bottom of a steep hill.
There was then talk of us going to Festival records and we had started to think about becoming a smaller, tighter operation. We bought a Protools setup including a Mac 7500 computer. I think it had a one GB hard drive.
It was second hand and cost $4500.
But we were intending to record with it and we started on a steep learning curve.
Away from the album/tour cycle we had been working to for the last five years we just wanted to have small, tight, beat combo and play lots of small shows as opposed to a few large ones. We intended to enjoy it more. When you played high pressure gigs once a year it involved too much botheration to enjoy it.
1998 Stuart Perera, Clare Moore, Adele Pickvance and me. The Dave Graney Show. pic Tony Mahony