Dave Graney'n'the Coral Snakes
THE SOFT'N'SEXY SOUND
CD released June 1995 on ID/Mercury. Now available on Universal Music Australia.

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.
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 completing Beth Ortons "trailer park" album and he was back in familiar surroundings after a long time away. He was, of course, a much different person.

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 Pennie 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.
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 seem to get to people slowly and none have been deleted.
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.
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'n'the Coral Snakes
THE DEVIL DRIVES
CD released June 1997. Available on Universal Music Australia.

In January 1996, Clare Moore and myself demoed songs for this album with Simon Grounds at his Collingwood studios. About eight of the songs ended up being used, the rest were written later.
I had an idea that what people mistook as "production" was mainly all the stuff that happened before you entered a studio. In that time the whole approach as to what constituted a "song" and how long or fast or tight those songs were was determined. I wanted to produce the record and my first thought was to keep the songs as close to the original germ of an idea as possible. I didn't want to play any of the songs live. I especially didn't want to rehearse the songs too much as I thought the songs should have each players first reaction within it rather than all the usual objectivity of recording. I wanted that objectivity to belong to someone else, someone who wasn't even there at the recording and didn't know any of the performer or bands history. I wanted to take it to London and have David Ruffy mix it from his perspective.
He was to provide another fresh and fast response. We had three rehearsals and spent 14 days in July recording the album. In September, I won an ARIA (Australian record industry association) award for best male artist. (I made a speech pointing out that I wasn't really a solo artist and gave due credit to Clare and the Coral Snakes) and thanked Christ we had the album in the can as so much more attention became focussed on us by the record industry.
The day after the ARIA awards we flew to London with the tapes to mix the album. We came back to Australia in November and resumed playing around the "Soft'n'Sexy" album. The crowds and venues were our biggest ever. We still weren't playing any new numbers.
We delivered the record to Mercury and the angst of what was to be a single began. The worst of it was that our A&R champion, Adam Yazxhi, had left and the album landed on an empty desk. Several people came in to pick it up and, after several meetings , an idea was suggested that we "record a song for radio".
We weighed up the options and thought, "why not!". In January we went into Kiss and put down "feelin Kinda Sporty". To keep it in line with the rest of the album aesthetic we gave the tapes to Andrew Duffield and Phil Kenihan to mix. They came up with a dynamite, stomping glam sound and it got the nod as the single. Unfortunately, it had little to do with the dreamy, exotic nature of the rest of the record and overshadowed it completely.
In the meantime we toured right from the start of the year with the national Big Day out festival. We did two national tours of our own during the year, doing about 50 shows.
During the year I also put out a book about my songwriting called "It is written, baby", through Random House, made a two episode appearance on the soap opera, "Neighbours" and tried, with Clare and Tony Mahony, to get an adult tv show off the ground.

Dave Graney'n'the Coral Snakes did their last shows at the Continental cafe in Prahran, Melbourne on the 20th and 21st of December. It had been a long trip that started in London in 1987 . It was great to finish up on such an artistic high point as "the Devil Drives".

In October 1999 a compilation of Dave Graney 'n' the Coral Snakes material was issued by Universal Music Australia. It is called
"the Baddest"

The sheriff of hell (hang 'em high mix) - unreleased Morricone style treatment from late 1997
Showbusiness - An also unreleased AC/DC cover
A million dollars in a red velvet suit
Warren Oates
You're just too hip, baby
Night of the wolverine
You wanna be love
I'm gonna release your soul
The stars, baby, the stars
The confessions of Serge Gainsbourg
I'm not afraid to be heavy
Morrison floorshow
Rock'n'roll is where I hide
The devil drives
Feelin kinda sporty
I dig the pioneers