Rock n Roll Is Where I Hide

The Soft 'n' Sexy Sounds loudest

Here is a very short interview I did with the ABC sometime in the last 20 years. I was asked to talk about “muses and or mentors” . I dont talk about fantasy stuff like that but needed to be heard in public areas so I spoke about my own experience which is where I have learned the most.

Just by the by, we are touring this album in October - November. Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes - 30th Anniversaary of The Soft n Sexy Sound.

CD released June 1995 on ID/Mercury. Now available at Apple Music in 30th Anniversary edition with an extra live concert performance.

This record was started and completed at the same rehearsal studio, the same recording studio at the same time of the year as the previous. The only real difference was that we used Victor Van Vugt in the production chair this time. (After the previous two albums being recorded with Tony Cohen engineering).
Victor was an old friend of ours, as a teenager he had been the live sound engineer for the Moodists. He had gone to Britain with us and stayed there, building a strong career as a studio engineer and occasionally working live with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. We caught him at a strange time, he had just come back to Australia after years in the UK and he was back in familiar surroundings after a long time away. He was, of course, a much different person. (in the same year he worked on Mick Harveys Intoxicated Man and the Walkabouts. The next year he worked on Nick Caves Murder Ballads and Beth Ortons Trailer Park.)

Everything went right on this record. Tony Mahony did a stunning hand drawn and coloured cover. The whole package was sent out in a mock seventies Holden muscle car colour promo folder set up by our A&R man, Adam Yazxhi, and the music was totally focussed, planned and executed.

Clare and I had been amusing ourselves on all our touring by collecting exotic vinyl everywhere we could. We were entranced by the sounds of "Martin Denny" and "Les Baxter". Latin music was big for us and making another rock record was not on our agenda. I had the feeling that I could now go back to my own interests and conceits and forget about making sense to "the industry" or make music that suited the pub environment we were playing in. It was a tough recording session as I don't think we communicated our ideas or intentions at all well and everybody else thought we were to pick up from where we left off at the "Unbuttoned" sessions. (the extra disc that came out with "you wanna bet there...")Strangely, it was the record with the most compositions not by myself. Robin wrote a song called "Salty Girls" and everybody else co-wrote a song with me.

The cd was emblazoned with our new genre imprint, AO Art. The whole sleeve was awash with sly slogans, "whiskey fast'n'honey slow", "woe is you" and of course, "music for colourful racing identities". The back of the sleeve featured the words "tenez le droit , baby" which was a reference to the motto of the Victorian police who had been involved in a spate of murderous shooting that year. At the time, it had quite a Clint Eastwood ring about it for me.

As we waited for the album to come out, Clare began playing with Astrid Munday, Rosie Westbrook and Penny Ikinger in "Blush".
"I'm Not Afraid To Be Heavy" was our choice as the first single. We really wanted to get the flavour of the whole album across. We thought we could bypass rock radio and go straight for the adult scenes. Sadly, none existed in Australia that we could approach. Eventually, "Rock'n'Roll Is Where I Hide", the only song with really predominant guitar on the record, was released as a single and drove the album to our widest ever audience through extensive airplay.

Original single art by Tony Mahony. He was in tune with me as far as being in the music world but commenting on it at the same time. In the UK, people assumed this was me - of course.

The second single cover with a bad photo of me at the 1996 ARIA awards. A very public moment for me but as it happened, I was in total disguise.

We played about 63 gigs around Australia through the second half of the year. The album kept its legs all through the next year as well, eventually going gold. (In Australia, 35, 000 copies). All our records seemed to get to people slowly.

In October 1995, Clare and I flew to the UK to meet with This Way Up who were expressing interest in putting out our stuff in the UK. We went through a series of job interview situations with their parent distributor, Island. Dave Bedford at This way up had worked at Fire records, where we had put out two albums and an ep in 1988-1990.
The biggest act in the UK at the time was Pulp, who had spent much of the same time as we did, at Fire before finding greener pastures. All the signs looked cool to us.
In 1996 we continued to play "Soft'n'sexy" shows around Australia. "I'm gonna live in my own big world" was released as a single with a scratch'n'sniff sleeve".
(The lyric featured the lines "I wear New West man, eau de toilette....". We contacted the people at New West who let us have some scent but did not want to sponsor us as we seemed a bit weird. Megan Short at Mercury had to personally spray every copy, she stank out the building and came out in hives.) We did 65 shows in 1996, about twenty of them in the UK and Europe where we went to tour and promote "Night of the Wolverine" in April, May and "the Soft'n'Sexy sound" in October.

Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes 2025 - photo by Meredith O’Shea

"The Soft'n'sexy sound" has the most co writes of any Coral Snakes cd. Robin wrote (and sang) all of "Salty Girls", Gordy wrote the music to "Outward Bound", Rod wrote the music to "Apollo 69" and everybody wrote the music to "Morrison Floorshow". My favourite songs on it, "the Birds and the Goats" , "deep inside a song" and "I'm not afraid to be heavy" are all major 7th although by this time I was trying different keys to sing in. "Rock'n'roll is where I hide" was written at the last part of the session. (I had demoed almost everything else on acoustic guitar again). I came up with the chord sequence of B9th /DMaj7th/Gmaj7th/Dmaj7th (the alternating last chord being F#m7th) in the verses going to a chorus part where it was just vamping on F#m7th so the whole song would have a single droning F# note going through from beginning to end. The chiming two note figure after each chord sounded cool as it resolved on the last chord.

From my book 1001 AUSTRALIAN NIGHTS (2011)

We played a lot in London and the UK. Often in the company of Goth bands and bills. They were mostly from Northern England where that strain ran deep. We went our own way, kind of bemused by the “Carry on Drac” elements of the scene. I started to wear white jeans and striped surfer tops to stake out some of my own territory amid the top hats and long black coats.

We travelled and played through Europe, crossing path with other fellow travellers from the underworld . From the American chapters. One night we found ourselves in Hamburg in a 24 hour discotech. The opening band had, quite horribly, six bass players and a single drummer. They were German and all the bassists had a bank of pedals and wore track pants with no underwear. Macho types. Alpha Males as Joni Mitchell referred to Jaco Pastorius. Here were 6 of them , all in charge. That was spectacular. The second act were from East Germany. They were the government sanctioned band and were suposed to be a representation of the vitality of that culture. They looked like any lite metal band of that or any period to me. Fluffy , poodle headed , jackets with the sleeves rolled up types. We were escaping the bass player band (they were called “Bass Ballet!”) in the dressing room. The East German band were on the other side of the room and there seemed to be a lot of security around them. They went on and played a set of regulation lite metal music. After they played they took what seemed to be the entire pa system down and left for the East, leaving us with probably what the Beatles played through when they were in Hamburg.

Outside the club, in a sea of sailors and transexual hookers, people were betting on two dogs who had started to fight in the street.

From my book WORKSHY (2017)

All this unease with my surroundings and the general pop zeitgeist fed into a song called ‘Rock’n’Roll is Where I Hide’, which eventually drove the album to Gold Status in Australia and kept us touring it for two years. This song was actually the raw sound of our band; it had none of the textures and production or arrangement quirks we approached on the other songs on The Soft ’N’ Sexy Sound.

I’d walked around the streets and experienced a couple of years of people clocking me as some sort of face they had seen recently in the paper or on TV. That sort of attention is maddening. Because you enjoy it – it’s flattering, but weird. It creeps you out and rots your poise. I had always been the sort to stand back and observe people and situations, like a crime writer. I was never jumping on tables and wanting to be the centre of attention. Now I was feeling that power, or that way of being, being taken away from me. People were looking at me. They’d sit behind me at cafés …

There was also the uncomfortable way I sat with the rest of the grunge-era music life. The scene was all these long-haired, cargo-shorted, tribal-tattooed, dreadlocked, shirtless young athletic men yelling about ‘awesome’ things and acting out in ‘full on’ prankish manners. I wouldn’t say I was contrarian in nature, I just preferred to identify as a country man than a dude. Not that new kind of a dude anyway.

The music for ‘Rock’n’roll is Where I Hide’ was a three-chord trick with one note pedalling throughout, all the way, for six minutes. It was coming from some sort of a hypnotic mantra direction. In other ways, it was totally springing from my youthful listening to Southern Rock, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. I had the perfect band to bring it to life. Rod Hayward’s guitar skills were so great. Beautiful tone from his old Strat and his Marshall amp. Precise chording and stellar soloing. The groove from Gordy and Clare Moore was amazing, and Robin Casinader built the electric piano dynamics like a true player. It was one of the easiest tracks to put down for the album. There was no other way to play it than how it was. It became the main song that people associate with me. Its my mysterious blues. Just like I said in the song.

Tony Mahony art for the 2011 Liberation album of re recordings.

Here are some links to blogs and online sites over the years where either people have talked about the album or I have talked about it.

https://shespeaksadifferentlanguage.wordpress.com/2018/08/21/dave-graney/

Tony Mahony artwork for the 1999 compilation, THE BADDEST. ( I took the name from a Stanley Turrentine CTI album)

An interview with Andrew McMillen from 2011 when I put out my book 1001 Australian Nights.

Tony Mahony art for four disc Universal Music compilation - The Mercury Years.

The box set included a disc of rarities.

Interview with Gerard Elson at Literary Minded from 2011.

Tony Mahony art for The Devil Drives - 1997. The final Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes album.

Tony Mahony art for The Dave Graney Show in 1999.

Ticket links....

Friday Oct 3rd Factory Theatre, Marrickville, Sydney

Saturday Oct 4th Waves, Wollongong, NSW

Sunday Oct 5th The Street Theatre, Canberra

Friday Oct 10th, The Corner Hotel, Richmond, Vic

Saturday Oct 11th, Bundy Hall, Bundalaguah VIC

Friday Oct 24th Freo Social, Fremantle WA

Saturday Oct 25th, The River Hotel, Margaret River WA

Friday Oct 31st, Brisbane Crowbar QLD

Saturday Nov 1st, The Imperial, Eumundi QLD

Sunday Nov 2nd, Mo's Desert Clubhouse, Gold Coast QLD

Friday Nov 7th, Byron Bay Theatre NSW

Saturday Nov 8th, Bellingen Memorial Hall NSW

Thursday Nov 13th, King Street Bandroom, Newcastle

Friday Nov 14th, Avoca Beach Theatre NSW

Saturday Nov 15th, The Lounge, Chatswood NSW

Sunday afternoon Nov 16th, Dangar Island Bowlo NSW

Friday Nov 21st, The Gov, Adelaide SA

Friday Nov 28th, Royal Oak, Launceston TAS

Saturday Nov 29th, The Pier, Ulverstone TAS

Sunday Nov 30th, Longley International Hotel, Longley TAS

*************