All Lit Up Down Under – a chat about words with Dave Graney

With Australia taking a third Man-Booker Prize this year, writer-musician Dave Graney talks to Remy Dean about creative culture, writers' festivals and the mythic quality often found in word-wielding of an Australian origin...

Oz...

The Great Southern Land...

Australia, to me, has long been a place existing only in imagination... a British Romantic idyll of vast empty wild spaces, dwarfed only by the human soul.

From the early films of Peter Weir, I expect ancient bewildering magic or prophetic apocalyptic visions of awesome natural forces. Through films like Encounter at Ravensgate and Razorback, I get the poetically lit isolation and strange, sudden brutality. Dust and close-cropped hair. In Man of Flowers, and other films of Paul Cox - aching poignancy and poeticism spilling out from the sensitive hearts of wise fools across the fountained parklands or shifting sandscapes. The loss, wide open roads and estuary beds of 'The Triffids', the long-gone childhoods, cattle and cane fields of the 'Go-Betweens'... 'Hunters and Collectors' loading their long wide loads with deals and memories that thunder from ghost town to run-down suburbs. Bone-pointing, the shout that kills, kangaroo meat, road warriors, lake monsters, autistic organists, ghost ships sailing on empty seas to the land of the dreaming… Kylie Minogue in denim dungarees with a ‘designer’ smudge of sump oil across her cheek... or was it Vegemite?

Dave Graney drives us through his mythic landscape, whistling

I first interviewed Dave Graney more than twenty years ago, when he had recently finished with the hugely influential combo, ‘The Moodists’, and was exploring new musical territories with his bands, ‘The White Buffalos’ and ‘The Coral Snakes’. And, being the nicest guy in rock’n’roll, he has kept in touch and I have interviewed him several times since, most recently for the ‘Brought to Book’ section of The Scrawl. Over those two decades, he established himself as a prime-time celebrity, was crowned ‘king of pop’, became the housewives’ favourite and now, with two books brimming with his own distinctive writer’s voice, is fast establishing himself as a leading light of the antipodean literary scene, a song-writer and author who has inhabited and helped to build that grand mythic landscape that is so far away, yet has touched me so often.

I have never been to Australia, but at times I have lived there. I know the real Australia is a different place. So, where does all this rich, myth-building imagery come from? What inspired these writers to create such uniquely rich and ‘cinematic’ visions? What marks the Asutralian literary scene apart from others? Who better to ask than Dave Graney?

“I love to collect small print run books of Australian poetry. Especially from the 1970s which was a great period of cultural awakening here. Some great poetic heroes from that time, lived out heroic, doomed junkie lives. One called Michael Dransfield, from Canberra - his poems about being a junkie are full of drama and poise. A woman called Vicki Viidikas also wrote wonderful poems of bohemian travels as a young woman through Melbourne and India. A young guy in Melbourne in the early 1970s called Charles Buckmaster - he apparently appeared on the scene, talking of the place he came from, Gruyere… We used to go for drives outside Melbourne looking for it and that is how we ended up where we live now!

“To me, his poetry is interesting for its self-mythologising. My favourite poet would be Robert Grey, an amazing writer from Northern New South Wales. He published a memoir called The Country I Came Through Last. In a way, it earthed all his writing for me. Before that, it was all hovering and suspended. When he fleshed it out with dates and times and his parents’ lives, it was exciting to follow it with flashes from his poetry I'd known, but it kind of took some of the power away.”

Richard Flannegan won this year’s Booker Prize (as Dave correctly predicted) and is the third Australian to do so. This indicates that there really is something special about, at least some writers, who emerge from the scene there. Is there anything apparent in the Australian culture that may be blamed for the abundance of creative talent and the distinctive poetic voices of its writers?

“Australia’s a pretty brutal country and artists are either cossetted by each other in their little scenes or ridiculed in the wider community.

“There was a famous incident just after the second world war called ‘the Ern Malley Affair’. A modernist magazine was launched called The Angry Penguins. Taken from a line in a Max Harris poem referring to men in tuxedos looking like, ‘angry penguins of the night’. Max was born in the same town I grew up in and was a very interesting character. To see his picture from the time, he looks like something from the early 1980s music scene.”

Max Harris, he was angry with penguins.

…the ‘Ern Malley Affair’?

“Two young poets, both in the army, played a prank where they faked a letter from a woman in the country, saying she'd discovered these poems written by her late brother, an itinerant farm labourer. Max Harris and the painter Sidney Nolan, who ran the magazine, announced the arrival of this poetic voice all over the next issue of Angry Penguins. The two hoaxers stood up and basked in the infamy their outrageous trick. They were James McCauley and Harold Stewart, both staunchly anti-modernist. The story reached the front pages of the daily papers, the only time poetry has ever done so. Instead of retreating, Max and Sidney taunted the hoaxers that, in putting on the mask of 'Ern Malley', they had created a true surrealist Australian poetic voice!

“The hoax knocked all the stuffing out of Max Harris, though he continued to publish some books - of which I have a few. McCauley was a great poet too, more in a pre-modernist style. His epic Captain Quiros's Journey is amazing. He ran a conservative journal called Quadrant, financed by the CIA, which still publishes… Stewart lived in Japan from 1966 to 1995, writing a single long poem!

[ There is an official Ern Malley website. ]

"I refer to a Max Harris poem called, Upon Throwing A Copy Of The New Satesman From The Window Whilst Driving Along The Coorong, in a song from my 2014 record, 'Fearful Wiggings' called Country Roads, Unwinding.



"Personally, I find Australian writers, hit me harder than any others. When they're good. Of course, there's a strain of international cafe bite sized bullshit that probably hogs more of the scene. Easy to ignore!

"I love the poet Les Murray, the historian Henry Reynolds, who was the first to begin writing the history of Australia from the indigenous perspective. He began by asking people to consider aboriginal people seeing ships coming into Sydney cove rather than through the eyes of the sailors cruising in. Simple but very powerful."

Recently, Dave has been appearing regularly on discussion panels at literary conventions. What were his observations at these literary festivals and what did he talk about at them?

“I put out a memoir in 2011, 1001 Australian Nights, through a small publishing house called Affirm Press and it was a very enjoyable experience. Each city is Australia has a Writers Festival and I did most of them over a two year period.

“I felt like an outsider - like a character doing a  cameo scene. I didn't feel encumbered with any notion of ‘career’ type networking or anything. Perth is the most isolated place in the world, let alone Australia - the festival there was lovely. All the writers stayed at the same hotel and travelled to and from a distant university in an old bus. It was like being back at school, but sharing the bus with the brains of the country.

“The Brisbane one was great, I met an Indian writer called Jeet Thayil, who was up for the Booker Prize that same year. He had a great novel about the dope scene in 1970s Bombay. Byron Bay was lovely, of course. It’s a beautiful place. In general, there was a depressing feeling that all writers had to be more like performers so you saw people having to ‘flick the switch to vaudeville’. I craved something serious, mostly.

“In Melbourne I had to do a session chaired by an Australian writer-musician with two other musicians. One was a Canadian who'd written a book about homeless world soccer, called Home and Away. In Australia there is a famous soap opera of the same name. Nobody told him. He read fictional letters he had written to Canada’s biggest musical icon, Gordon Lightfoot. It would have had a great impact - in Canada.

“The American was skinny and young and had his shirt open to his waist and wore a bandana. His name was Simone Felice. I enjoyed his book more than his music. I asked him where he was from. He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I come from a place called Woodstock - they had a festival there once...’ I said, ‘oh yeah.... what sort of music do you like?’ He looked at me and said , ‘I really like a guy called Neil Young...’

“The audience ate up everything he said and read from his book. He was totally authentic to them. The other three - myself included - paddled as hard as we could but failed to get off the ground, really. Australian audiences are toughest to their own. Always have been and always will be. We don't really believe in ourselves much.

“In general, I like the festivals. It doesn't seem like any kind of work to me.”

I have enjoyed the way many Australian singer-songwriters use landscape as a metaphor for emotions and memory - they externalise the internal - and this is something I find really effective. It can be very evocative and poignant. I am probably thinking of a lot of the bands I was listening to in my formative years, yourself included, 'Triffids', 'Go-Betweens', 'Apartments', Nick Cave, etc.,. This seemed to be a characteristic of many Australian creatives - why do you think this is?

"I find that stuff a bit corny. 'The Triffids' had great impact with that geographical colouring. A great unit as a band. Lovely people. Peter Milton Walsh from the 'Apartments' is a great songwriter. He's probably much more literary than me. I get emails from him that are amazing! Nick created his own world and is a fantastic performer.

“My records over the last decade have been more personal. I was just very influenced by the language in the post punk scene. Bands like 'Wire', 'Public Image Limeted' and 'The Fal'l and 'Pere Ubu'. It was a brief and very interesting period.  I've also recently been much more into the musical side of it. I love to play guitar. Shoot me! I play bass with 'Harry Howard and the N D E' too. Also in a hip hop duo, 'Wam and Daz'.”

For some of your EPKs, you ventured into little films - not to mention your brief cameos for Neighbours and some imdb surprises - is this an area you would like to get more into?

“Film is tough! We did a soundtrack for a comedy called Bad Eggs, in 2003, and absolutely loved doing that. I loved being a part of a big machine. More please!”

In terms of prose on a page, what books can we expect from you in the near future? Will you venture into pure fiction, or keep it, at least loosely, 'biographical'?

“I am trying a longer piece. It's painful. I like the thrill of steering very close between fiction and not so much...”

'The MistLY' … 'Fearful Wiggings' - you change the name of your band projects almost with each album - please tell us a bit about your recent releases and how they differ whilst remaining indelibly stamped with your personality?

Dave Graney and Clare Moore

“I've played with Clare Moore all the way from 'The Moodists'. We had some success here in Australia with 'The Coral Snakes' in the 1990s. Since then, have had very little support or contact with what thinks it is ‘the industry’.

“Everything we do is very self-generated. We put out an album pretty much every year. We have been such a constant we have NO nostalgic power at all. Our activities having stretched across decades. All the albums we have done, since 'The Moodists', have been of a very high quality. So we have also never ‘returned to form’!

“The 2014 album is 'Fearful Wiggings' and is the second to be credited a s a ‘solo’ album - Clare is on it a lot on vibes. I did most of it, and recorded the vocals at Lisa Gerard’s studio (Dead Can Dance). The 2013 CD was Clare’s band 'The Dames' which was mixed by Barry Adamson in the UK
.
“The 2012 album was the best pop-rock recording of my band called, You’ve Been In My Mind. Previous to that we'd done Knock Yourself Out, which was the first ‘solo’ album, a lyrical explosion and filthy R’n’B pealer. Before that - apart from a couple of remix/re-recordings albums - was one called We Wuz Curious in 2007. It was an R’n’B masterpiece! In my humble opinion. Probably twenty albums before that....”

…and we’re looking forward to the next twenty! Yet again, thank you Dave Graney!

You can read an archive Scrawl interview with Dave Graney here... 

(PDF from newsstand edition)...

Info on all things Dave and Clare related can be found at The Dave Graney Show official website.

- Dave Graney was talking with Remy Dean

Dave Graney - Brought to Book

What was the first book you can remember reading that really grabbed you and carried you along?

I grew up in a house with three bedrooms and eight people living in it, so there was very little in the way of privacy or a little place to be by yourself. Mostly, we ran in and out of the house, madly playing football and cricket.

I read books at school but they made you read things that perhaps weren't right for a teen. I must mention here the Australian author Patrick White whose novel, about two strange brothers, The Solid Mandala, was given to us to read when I was about 15 or 16. It was too weird and slow and interior for us. I read it a  couple of years ago and - like all his work- it's pretty much a  total masterpiece.

I think, growing up, I read little bits of things here and there, and took them in quite hungrily. Things like J D Salinger’s For Esme With Love and Squalor. When a young adult, I read a lot of crime fiction. It was hard to find, mostly out of print. That made it good too. So I would say, The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M Cain, had a big effect on me - made me think of ways to express things and illuminated my mind with thoughts of a wide open California. A definite adult world of drifters and working people. It was good to put my head in it when I was just moving into the rock music world which was becoming institutionalised youth culture.

Dave Graney, book-lover...

Do you have a favourite book, one that changed you or that you have re-read a few times?

I don't think I've ever read many books twice. I used to collect all the Richard Stark books involving the character, Parker. Lee Marvin played him in a film called Point Blank. The books were all very formulaic, written by Donald E Westlake under the ‘Stark’ pseudonym. I loved all the masks involved. Each book had the same format, so it was almost like the same one! We did an album called The Devil Drives with an image of Lee on the cover and I did a live show called Point Blank as well. There is an amazing hard-boiled novel by Paul Cain called Fast One that I have actually read two or three times.

What was the most recent book you read and thoroughly enjoyed?

It was either a book about Captain Bligh’s trip in an open boat after the mutiny on his ship, The Bounty, and then the subsequent mutiny in New South Wales, when he came here to be governor... or a book about an explorer called McDowell Stuart, who walked from Adelaide to the top end for the first time. I probably most enjoyed Somebody Else, a book about the poet Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, after he'd given up writing.

Actually, I just remembered - I loved, A Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan. It’s just been listed – deservedly, too! - for the Booker prize. (Since announced as the 2014 winner - ed.) An absolutely monumental, epic novel set in Adelaide during the Second World War and the Burma Railway. I highly recommend it - a masterpiece!

Who have been your favourite authors, and what have you learnt from them?

I bought four Patrick White books in hardback a few years ago and absolutely roared through them. He won a Nobel Prize for literature - the only Australian, and deservedly so. His books are unpopular - Too Good! An amazing writer. Everything I've read: The Vivisector, The Tree of Man, The Cockatoos, Voss - about a German explorer - Riders in the Chariot... Amazing.

I love a lot of Australian writers. David Foster is quite experimental and wrote a recent book called Sons of the Rumour, where he tried to tell the thousand and one nights in contemporary colloquial language. Two women, under the name 'M Barnard Eldershaw' wrote a great modernist- futuristic novel in 1945 called Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow - amazing work. A contemporary writer called Delia Falconer wrote about Custer’s last battle in a great novel called The Company of Soldiers. I have read two great novels set in convict era Hobart which seemed to be a reconstruction of Georgian London of thirty years before - one by Christopher Koch called Out of Ireland. The other was by a writer with a very shady reputation called Hal Porter. It is magnificently ragged and raw but electrifying. It’s called The Tilted Cross. It’s about British class, seen through the Tasmanian reproduction.

Do you have a writing ritual, regimen or a tried and tested process?

I wish I did! Something like George Simenon or Zane Grey who seemed to be machines! I just avoid it like everybody and then panic and sit down for hours. Feel great and then feel shit. The usual!

So, what motivates you to write?

Its quite enjoyable! I don't know whether it’s as enjoyable for me as playing music or singing. That’s quite an unconscious thing that I really love, also the camaraderie of fellow players. Writing to order for stories is enjoyable. Trying to write an extended piece is a great challenge. I'm suffering that challenge at the moment.

What are the major differences between your approach to writing prose for a book and writing songs for an album?

Well, musical things are just dumb luck or mistakes for the most part. Also very intuitive and you make your own rules. Australian artists all make themselves up, we have very few archetypes to model ourselves after. I don't know what the business side of it is like or how its going to hold together in either pursuit. There's no retiring in music.

Do you think a writer has any social or moral responsibilities?

Well writers are mostly just scratching out a life yeah? Like everybody. These are pretty brutal times and the days of self destruction are pretty much over. Nobody cares much for that sort of thing, do they? It’s also a world of cheap sensation and buzz. It’s easy to stir up a lot of people but it’s hard to get a lot of sustained momentum from that sort of thing. I'm talking about outraging the mob. The mob just drifts away don't they? I live in Australia which at the moment is run by Rupert Murdoch and several mining magnates and companies. It is being destroyed. Ravaged. I guess artists have a responsibility to at least express their cognisance of the great scams that are going on.

Who do you admire, who would be your heroes / heroines?

I admire some people from a distance who would have probably been pretty hard work up close. The explorer Richard Burton, the dandy Beau Brummel. Those two mainly for their notoriety and the fact that people know so little about them. Jerry Lee Lewis, Jim Morrison, Hank Williams, Charlie Rich, Charlie Chaplin, Mick Jagger, the guitar players Grant green, Davy Graham, Kenny Burrell. I love some early TV shows like the Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan and the Avengers series. I love Dave Chappelle and a lot of British comedians. I think they're amazing actually. Those long shows by Stewart Lee and those Fast Show guys, Higson and White, Mitchell and Webb. I love the drama of Apollinaire and Rimbaud and the great, compact writing of the mysterious A E Coppard.

Now you have a long and successful writing career, do you have any advice or ‘words of wisdom’ for aspiring young writers of songs or prose?

My advice is to BE LUCKY. And also happy. Why ever not!

Why ever not, indeed! Thank you, Dave Graney! 

Dave Graney - King of Pop

UPDATE: we have since added a more recent Scrawl interview with Dave Graney here 
...and you can also read an archive Scrawl interview with Dave Graney here 
(PDF from newsstand edition)

STOP PRESS: Dave Graney is currently playing select venues in the UK with his band 'The MistLY':

October 2014 dates include:

Tuesday 14th at the Brixton Windmill, London. 

Thursday 16th  at the 12bar Club, London. 

Saturday 18th  at the Mucky Pup Islington.

Tuesday 21st  at the Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh

For more info on the music and books of Dave Graney, go to his official website.

Click here to read reviews, hear samples or to purchase Dave's latest album, Fearful Wiggings.

Check out Dave Graney's Facebook for more info and any additional live dates...

- Dave Graney was talking to Remy Dean.