Heartland Rock: Dave Graney Re-Visits Night of the Wolverine
It’s been 30 years since Dave Graney & The Coral Snakes released Night Of The Wolverine. Dave reflects on the album’s build, its South Australian roots and how it shaped the band’s sound.
Image @davegraneymusic
You’re heading on a 30th anniversary tour of Night of the Wolverine with The Coral Snakes. Why was it important for you and the band to celebrate this album with listeners?
Our agent came up with the idea! Important? I guess. We saw many other people doing this kind of thing and thought, ‘Yeah, why not? We can say we’re important too!’
You were born in Mount Gambier but made a name for yourself in Melbourne. Does playing an Adelaide gig feel like a hometown show for you?
I do feel very South Australian. I lived in Adelaide for a couple of years. We’ve played a lot of different venues in Adelaide, from the Tivoli (where Clare Moore grew up) to the Semaphore Workers Club. I always have a funny feeling people can tune into my lyrical flow better in Adelaide. [But] I don’t really play to ‘Adelaide’ or ‘Melbourne’ crowds. I play to people who like my music, and they’ve heard it at many different times over the years. I’m not a real inner-city player. People who like my music are pretty blue collar and often come from regional areas. Truckers! I keep telling people I’m ‘heartland rock’.
What can we expect from this show?
It’s high energy. A decade of licks and moves distilled into a couple of hours.
Night of the Wolverine was a seminal record for you and The Coral Snakes. Tell us about the build of the LP. What influenced its direction?
It was influenced by growing up in the south east of South Australia – playing music in the post-punk scene and spending five years living in London, thinking of where and how I grew up. I had a taste for 30s/40s crime writers and got educated in modern black pop music in the UK. Australia, when we came back, was still in thrall to guitar rock, when we were more into voices, grooves and clean sounds.
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Lyrically, Night of the Wolverine is rooted in fantasy. Classic cinema, historical figures and comics collide with your childhood memories. Why were you drawn to using fantasy on this record?
Hey! I’m allowed to refer to it as fantasy, but you aren’t! It’s not as much fantasy as Bryan Adams or Bruce Springsteen! We all live in fantasy worlds. It’s what reality is made of. We are only here to keep wheat growing!
The album has a kind of flow to it. Childhood and family and then adulthood and thwarted ambition and a roll call of heroes and archetypal inspirations – names like Ava Gardner, Wallace Beery, Serge Gainsbourg, Terry Southern, Jack Kerouac, Keith, Bordertown… Tell me more about the first time you toured Night of the Wolverine.
The album was recorded in December 1992 and released in the first half of 1993 on Compact Disc. We got a support slot for Hunters & Collectors for a six-week tour. They played all through regional NSW, Queensland and Victoria. They could set up and play anywhere and a couple of thousand people would show up. [At the ] first gig in Traralgon, the audience screamed so hard for us to get off that we just started playing louder and only the songs with drums. It all led to our next album in 1994 – You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel – which was a real rock album. So, we never really got to play Night Of The Wolverine as such [except] perhaps a few months before it was recorded, when we played a lot of the songs opening for Bob Dylan in Melbourne.
Reflecting on the last 30 years of Night of the Wolverine, why do you think the album has struck such a legacy chord with listeners?
It actually got played on the radio. We had the luck to be out touring when triple j was going national, and they needed people like us at the time, so it worked out well. It’s also a quite good collection of songs. We were a tight unit. Tony Cohen worked on it with us. The music scene at the time in Melbourne was really humming. We didn’t have much, but we had the songs and conviction and scores to settle. So, the album has some energy in it.
See Dave Graney & The Coral Snakes perform Night Of The Wolverine at The Gov on August 19. Tickets on sale now.
