I called “rock’n’roll is where I hide” our third debut album. That's the record you make when you’ve come together as a wild bunch and have ridden off for a piss and a look around and fooled with all the tempos and the moves and changes so much that when you finally get into the studio, it goes down onto the tape fully realised. Like honey. Everybody knows exactly what they’re doing, no second guessing, no nerves. Its muscle memory and then squelching the changes as they come. Like jazz players doing pop tunes. They’re not playing right at the very edge of their abilities and sensibilities, they’ve got some kind of distance from the crude oil and can stretch out a bit.

Most of the songs come from a period in the first half of the 90s when Clare Moore and I worked with our band the Coral Snakes. Some had radio airplay, some are a bit more obscure and we always just loved playing them. They’ve been remixed by the passing of time and through the inner working and funk of our tight commando unit of a band as we faced rooms big and small, both full and almost empty, all over Australia.
Stuart Perera on guitar, has played with us since 1998, the longest of any person we have ever played with. We were his first band. He came from the VCA and loved George Benson and Slash. Stu Thomas has been playing bass with us since 2004. He also plays his own music with the Stu Thomas Paradox and also plays bass with Kim Salmon and the Surrealists. Mark Fitzgibbon is from the hardcore jazz world and has played keys with us on and off since the latter days of the Moodists. Neither Stu, Stuart or Mark played on any of the original recordings of these songs.Out on the battlefields we are billed as Dave Graney and the mistLY. The band name comes from an old song of mine which was inspired by the ‘50s sci fi flick, “the incredible shrinking man”. In the movie he drives his powerboat through a strange mist and is transformed. It was a black and white film, I imagined the mist was Lurid Yellow. The name also has connotations of the fog that a band or personality appears in after even one or two releases. Associations, assumptions, rumours, reputations. They cling and obscure the performer. He steps in and out of his own shadows and reference points.

So we went into the studio for two days and laid down thirteen tracks. Most of the songs are faster or coast on more of a groove than the original recordings. As I get older I have the urge to make music that moves. There is one song that has not been recorded before, “we don’t belong to anybody”. Its an r&b song set to major seventh chords. Vaulting over the blues to some other place.

we don’t belong to anybody
come on! we’re a sweet ride!
we were in the Moodists, we wuz curious
soft ‘n’ sexy thats us

we work out in the open and when we work we play
we bounce! and when we work we happen
goofin’ off to the sound of music
we don’t belong to anybody

coral snakes,deadly but beautiful
white buffaloes,freaks and omens and signs
hashish and lquor
I speak through a lurid yellow mist
I’m the brother who lived
I got blues! heroic blues
we don’t belong to anybody
come on!
we’re a sweet ride!

The record was mixed in New York City by Victor Van Vugt who left Australia with us as a teen sparky when we were in the Moodists and also produced our 1995 album , “the Soft’n’Sexy Sound”.

Cover art by Tony Mahony