Dave Graney and Clare Moore started playing music together when they were teenagers in Adelaide. It was the late-70s and a post punk scene was ripening in the city. When they formed their first band, Moore was already an accomplished drummer, Graney was an introspective kid freshly-arrived from Mount Gambier.
A long musical union was to follow. The couple have since played together in The Moodists, White Buffaloes, The Coral Snakes, The Lurid Yellow Mist, as rhythm section for Harry Howard’s NDE. Current outfit dave graney and the mistLY are rehearsing ahead of an upcoming European tour, including a coveted slot at this year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties in Wales.
Graney has always cut a strange figure across the Australian cultural landscape — a mysterious musical cowboy with a sonorous drawl and pencil-thin moustache — the majority of the nation has tended to regard him with a sense of tickled confusion. This is just the way Graney seems to like it, of course, or at least the only way he knows. “I am a bit confusing for people, yeah. But that’s just the kind of person that I am, I think,” he says over the phone, killing time before his band’s rehearsal, “I try not to carry a lot of baggage about things I can and can’t do”.
There were dalliances with fame in the 90s. Dressed in platform shoes and a powder pink suit, Graney accepted an ARIA for Best Male Artist, leaning slowly into the microphone to declare himself ‘King of Pop’. There was a cameo on Neighbours (featuring a kidnapping plot instigated by DJ Jared Rebecchi) and talk show interviews relished Graney’s deliberate eccentricity.
Musically, the output has been ever-changing. The Moodists sat comfortably within the brooding early-80s post punk milieu; the White Buffaloes made a psych-country gambit; The Coral Snakes broached absurdist lounge territory and reached a level of commercial success. The Night of the Wolverine, the band’s third album, is often lauded as an Australian independent classic. This constant evolution has prompted an illusiveness in the collective consciousness, as a figure, Graney is conceptually difficult to grasp on to.
An upcoming film aims to simultaneously demystify and perpetuate this confusion. Director, Nick Cowan, says the film, I’m Not Afraid to be Heavy, will aim to be as much about Moore as it is about Graney. “It’s definitely going to be about the trajectory of the two of them,” Cowan says, “They’re kind of an inseparable force—one requires the other.”
Cowan met Graney and Moore several years ago whilst he was a student and has maintained a close friendship with the couple. He says the straight-talking Moore, who spent a childhood playing music and growing up in Adelaide pubs, was integral to Graney’s musical evolution. “Everything changed from then on,” Cowan says of the pair’s meeting. “It took [Graney] a long time to become this outlandish, ego-tripping kind of persona”. Graney agrees: “Clare was a very good musician and she was always the most competent out of the pathetic bunch that we were. She’d been playing music and performing from her mid-teens, so it wasn’t a big deal to her and she knew about having good gear and she knew about being prepared and that sort of stuff. The rest of us were just hicks, especially me.”
In keeping with the experimental inclinations of its subject, the film will be part documentary, part biographical fiction. Unfolding over five acts, the narrative will trace the musicians’ respective beginnings in Mount Gambier and Adelaide, then follow the pair to the UK (an almost obligatory rite of passage for Australian post punk musicians at the time) and onwards throughout Europe.
Cowan says it won’t be a histrionic punk rock tragedy. “[It]isn’t a Sid & Nancy story, that’s what people like and glorify, but I think this will be a refreshing point of difference… they’ve got such a warm relationship, they’re really kind to each other.” Beneath the outward theatre of the strange there is an underpinning normalcy to Graney, says Cowan. “He’s a contrarian—there’s total pretension in his performance, but then as a person, there’s a lack of it.”
There should be no shortage of celebrity proselytising either. In a teaser trailer for the film, Gareth Liddiard of The Drones offers his two cents: “If [Graney] was an American or an Englishman he would be celebrated—the lyrics are insane”. A Pozible campaign is currently up and running, collecting funds to send the filmmakers to Europe with the band, to document their tour and interview significant fans and figures from their past: Noah Taylor, Stewart Lee, Barry Adamson.
Cowan says there has been an overwhelming response to the crowd-funding campaign so far, evidence of the deep affection for the musicians, and the desire for the story to be told.
It is easy to draw parallels to another recent Australian documentary, Richard Lowenstein’s Autoluminescent, which details the life of Rowland S Howard. That film looked through the long shadow cast over the Australian post punk scene by Nick Cave to solidify Howard’s status as a musical icon in his own right—indeed, one worthy of his own laneway. Following the film’s release, Howard’s records were reissued, anthologies released—it helped usher an introduction to a new generation of fans.
Cowan says the tone of his film will be very different to Lowenstein’s, but his aim is also to pay tribute to Australian musical talent deserving of wider recognition. “People have little moments of Dave that they might like or be aware of, but the totality of his work will speak for itself when it’s presented in the film.”
Graney seems relatively nonchalant about the whole affair. “I’m flattered that someone thinks there’s an interesting narrative or story there.” He says he’s waiting for Moore to drive in to town to meet for their rehearsal. “Often people are portrayed as heroic individuals,” he muses, “but music’s a really great thing if you’ve got someone who understands you.”
The Pozible campaign raising funds for the film’s production is online now.
