A new album, a memoir and an Archibald portrait later, the safari suited troubadour ponders his small town roots before his upcoming tour.
Dave Graney disagrees with all the stylish, witty or cool tags often pinned to his name. Many fans would probably disagree. While this may or may not be true, there was a distant time in a place where that argument would have been daft.
There was a time of growing up in a country town with nothing to do but pot, booze and music, Dave explains.
“When you’re outside the big city you can see it. When you’re inside you can’t. That’s why not much interesting music comes out of New York or London. Most people from smaller places have great grand fantasies about the world and it fires their vision. They want in on a great party and it gives them stuff to say.
“It [Mt Gambier] wasn’t a crude place and I wasn’t alone. I was part of a group of people that were really into music. There was no live music – there was none accessible – we listened to records and we had parties with kegs of beer. We were all getting high on pot and booze. There was nothing to do in a way but there was lots. There was the drive-in, the speedway, football and booze. The people you looked up to were bikers and we’d hang out at the pool hall.
“The party scene when I was in my teens was hip and the music was much hipper than people presume. You know, we live in a world where people just rabbit on about AC/DC all the time but it was nothing like that. They were around but they were just a novelty kind of act and that’s the way I still look at them in a way – they were cute, a cute band.
“The music we listened to was incredibly modern. There was no plastic rock. It was all new music all the time. Not like now where there’s a swamp of reissued, little cults of shit here and there.”
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