Dave Graney ‘n The Coral Snakes On Celebrating Thirty Years Of ‘The Soft ‘n Sexy Sound’

Gather up folks for one of the best tours coming your way this year. Dave Graney ‘n’ The Coral Snakes are hitting the road this October/November for a national tour to mark 30 years since the release of their iconic, 1995 Gold-selling album, The Soft ‘n’ Sexy Sound.

This anniversary tour is a major moment for the band, who are long celebrated for their stylish mix of art rock, pop, and lounge-inspired grooves. Originally recorded at Metropolis Audio in Melbourne and produced by Victor Van Vugt (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, P.J. Harvey, Sarah Blasko…), The Soft ‘n’ Sexy Sound highlights Graney’s sharp lyrical flair and genre-blending sound, which resulted in him picking up ARIA Award for Best Male Artist back in ’96.

Fast track thirty years, the upcoming Anniversary shows promise to bring the cool and collective sounds of DG & The Coral Snakes’ acclaimed album to life in full on the stage. The set list will dive deep into The Soft ‘n’ Sexy Sound, with standout tracks such as Rock’n’Roll is Where I Hide, I’m Not Afraid to Be Heavy, and I’m Gonna Live in My Own Big World, along with a second set of classics and fan favourites. Featuring Dave Graney, and original Coral Snakes members Clare Moore, Rod Hayward, and Robin Casinader, the tour will be a nostalgic celebration full of energy and authenticity. Whether you’re a longtime follower or discovering their music for the first time, the tour offers a rare chance to experience a band whose style and storytelling have stood the test of time…and Dave Graney is here for it. Dave Graney and Clare Moore talk to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

Another milestone, thirty years of The Soft ‘and ‘n Sexy Sound. How does that milestone sit with you?
Dave: It’s our most commercial moment ever in Australian music. We’re kind of weirdo outsiders, and this is about as far as we could go into the public sphere. We’re not for everybody. We came from the ’80s, happily part of a deep underground music world. But the ’90s put us in a more public realm. We had our own story. We were working with a smaller label attached to Universal, which was a large record company. It was a great experience, we really loved it.

Do you see that era as a kind of golden age for the music industry in Australia?
Clare: Yeah, definitely. It was happening then. A lot of it had to do with independent record companies starting to push out. There were exciting people signing bands that wouldn’t have been touched before. Big labels started working with or absorbing small ones. Other parts of the scene changed too, independent booking agencies popped up. We’d spent most of the ’80s in England and came back to a very different Australia. Then there was the Big Day Out, which really showcased all this local talent. It was a great time.

Did the Big Day Out break the old structures of the industry?
Dave: The Big Day Out was a really a great time for music, it had a lot of Australian band on it. I think the big day out was really what’s the word? You know the word they use for all the tech Bros use it as a
something that crashes through like Donald Trump thinks he is. They see it as a positive, but generally it’s a negative. You know, it’s something that breaks breaks apart when a grid of things is working. There were still a couple of large monopoly booking agencies in Australia, and they didn’t like the Big Day Out at all. They saw it very much as a rival thing. They tried to set up a thing called Alternative nation to destroy it or rival it.

It was very much a different kind of a coalition coalescing of different things like Sydney record labels. Ken West was doing independent tours in the eighties, bringing over New Order and stuff and working with Red Eye records and all that sort of thing, the eighties underground coming into a situation where they could work with large corporations which had these distribution things we’re talking about sounds like boring business stuff. But Triple J going national was quite incredible. I read an interview with Red Symons from Skyhooks and the effect of Countdown, because because until then groups had to just tour relentlessly around Australia, and to get from Melbourne to Sydney was a big thing, and it still is. Lots of Melbourne artists never play in Sydney because of the way Triple J changed its kind of focus on different things, but until Countdown, he was saying, Skyhooks could go on Countdown, and the next gig they would be doing would be a theatre in Sydney. They would never have to play in a pub.

I remember seeing you with The Cruel Sea at Thebarton Theatre during the Three Legged Dog tour. Still one of my favourite gigs.
Dave: We were very close with them. Amazing group. Like us, many of them had worked through the eighties and came into the nineties with skills, energy, attitude and a few grudges. All essential ingredients in music! Scores to settle! Danny, Jim, Ken had been in Secret Secret. Tex was in The Beasts and still is. They just had unstoppable momentum because their music was accessible, danceable, groovy. They were charismatic with a great group identity. Before Black Stick came out, they could fill thousand-seat venues in Melbourne with basically no radio airplay. Just word of mouth. Even acoustic shows could sell out four to five hundred people. Incredible.

Has that been a huge bonus for you, that you’ve been able to do it your way? No one’s dictated terms, told you to write a single, and you’ve made the music you want and toured how you want?
Dave: Yeah, we’ve always just done what we wanted to do. We’re just made that way. I’m not good at pop songwriting, other people are. We’ve been asked, and it’s great when that happens. If people say no, that’s no good. We need something to get people in, try harder. I think it’s great when those things happen, it might make you upset, it might make you so angry that you do come up with something, and it happened to us with the record after The Soft ‘n’ Sexy Sound, when our main champion had left, and we and we were left within a larger company.

I’d won an ARIA award, we had an album, so they had to do something with it, and said, “Come on, there’s no single on it.” So Claire and I wrote Feelin’ Kinda Sporty.We could’ve gone off in a sulk, and the record would’ve just sat there and fizzled out, but we gave them a song straight away.

Clare: We found it’s best to try and work with large record companies because there is a really great element to them, was which is the the promotion area. You get out to so many more people. Your name gets out there. It’s really great, because they have a huge amount of people working in that area. So if you can utilise that in some way, and we were really trying to do that. But with regard to the single. On, on The Soft ‘n’ Sexy Sound, there is a song on this record that no one thought would be a single, but it’s the one song that people still ask for every time we play now, which is Rock ‘N’ Roll Is Where I Hide, which doesn’t really contain any of the elements of a pop single itself, it’s really long and it’s got this sort of hairy dog story. The title has nothing to do with the song, it’s really hard to pick what what people will latch onto as far as putting out singles goes. You just never know.

Dave: So that’s a basic thing. If everybody knew what what constituted a hit or whatever, there is a element of a large record company can just keep presenting things again and again until people say, relent at radio or whatever I don’t know, things we’re talking about maybe aren’t really relative to 2025. The Soft ‘n’ Sexy Sound was a really great experience for us recording, and we played it for about two years. We put a lot into recording it, because the previous two were pretty much us going into a studio setting up, playing and the tapes rolling. There wasn’t remixing or adding things much later. There were some strings on You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel, but there’s a lot of strings that Robin Casinader did on The Soft ‘n’ Sexy Sound.

Clare: Robin arranged them. We had a quartet come in and play, and we also had many more backing vocalists and vibraphones and things like that, so this album had was a lot.

Dave: There was a lot added to it. I think we had to hire a Moog synthesizer to come in, and Robin was reading, there was no Internet in 1995 that we knew of and he was trying to guess because it had no keyboard. It was just like knobs and faders. It had no manual. That’s on Apollo 69, and a weird old keyboard we got at a junk shop because we were always haunting record shops in regional towns, because previous to that we’d been inner city band, and we started traveling. We did six weeks, opening for Hunters & Collectors, then six weeks, with The Cruel Sea in 93, 94, and then our own national tours.

Clare started going to junk shops and just buying lots of exotic vinyl, because it was just being thrown out like OP Shops were a gold mine, for great vinyl then for classical, modern classical, jazz and country and exotica really and that really affected this album, because all over the world people were doing that. That was the golden era that led to people like DJ Shadow and that kind of thing.

At the time did you know or have the feeling that this was a special group of songs?
I just had tons of songs because we we’d been working with that band. The Coral Snakes started in London in about 1987, and we were working with a British label there, and and we had a band and set up everything to record there. Claire and I got kicked out of the UK and we always had an interrupted sense of our momentum or our musical life, and we came to Melbourne, and we had a kind of a holiday band, which was Dave Graney and the White Buffaloes, and we did an album for our English label of that stuff, and I held back all my songs that were for the Coral Snakes in London. We went back to the UK in about 1990, and and we recorded an album which I thought was the best ever. That was the time I thought this is the best set of songs it was called, I Was The Hunter And I Was The Prey. And so it happened a big indie distribution went under in the U and it dissolved all these labels.

That album disappeared for two years. I was in a great kind of funk and still writing songs. So I had that album, and then that finally came out in 1992. Then we did Night Of The Wolverine, that came out in 1993, and then we’d done one called Lure of the Tropics. In the meantime all this stuff just came out in twelve months, three albums, and then I had all these songs, and we did fourteen of them, for You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel. We must have demoed about sixteen for this one. I just had tons of songs. It was like a bursting kind of thing, so it wasn’t a feeling of working at something. It was just just there. Claire and I had this kind of idea, a concept through listening to all this exotica and things we liked from UK Music like the Beastie Boys and Tricky, I mean the Beastie Boys instrumental album from America, The In Sound from Way Out! and Ill Communication, and I particularly loved Tupac, and Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and The Notorious B.I.G. I absolutely loved gangster rap and Slick Rick, and it was just all the sounds of it, and my voice increasingly. I stopped singing out, and I was singing closer. That’s what all that went into it. The set of songs was like the conceptual one, like Clare said. We put everything into the textures with the vocals and the moog, the vibes and the strings, and then we had Rock ‘N’ Roll Is Where I Hide, which was just our band and that was the song that drove everybody mad.

Do you still listen to the album and is there anything you want to change about it?
Clare: Yeah, sometimes you do. You have the idea of it in your head, and then you actually hear it, particularly if you hear it say you walk into a club or some someone’s playing it over a PA system. You go, Whoa! It doesn’t sound the way I remember it, you know your idea of it can change over the time, but I think that the mixing of it was really good, because that would have been really difficult. So those are the sort of things that I pick out when I do hear some of our older stuff. I think, wow, those guys did a really good job getting all of that stuff onto a record, and you can hear it all, Tony Cohen and and then on this one Victor Van Vugt, the producer, did really fantastic work I think

Dave: Victor was an old friend of ours. He’d left Australia with us as a teenager, as a live sound engineer in the early eighties, and he just stayed in the UK because he was really in demand. He was a very can-do, positive young guy. He was immediately working with The Fall, New Order, and with The Pogues, and
and then a lot of times with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. But he wanted to get into the studio, and I don’t know whether it was then or just a bit later he did Beth Orton’s first album, Trailer Park and he did two albums for her and PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. But yeah, Victor was both an old friend and really a guy just at the right time, us wanting to do something and him being able to. He really knew what we wanted. It was the album I asked everybody to write music for a song. Rod Hayward wrote the music for Apollo, 69, Robin Casinader wrote and sang one called Salty Girls, which is about mermaids and and ever since all these kind of really strange men are often coming up to me and asking me about that, do you do that song about what a girl tastes like, and the salty girls? I’m thinking, wow, this guy’s a pervert get away from me! Robin is intent on playing this album in order so he will have to sing this song and then tell people what!

How do you think you’ll go playing the album start to end? Is that the intention?
Dave: We’re going to do one set of the whole album, and then another set of songs from albums before and after it.

Clare: We’re really looking forward to it. I mean, we have played a lot of the songs, I think, but mainly a lot of it we haven’t ever played before. We’re in that continuum then of like doing an album tour, and you keep a set of songs that worked live.

Clare: I don’t think we ever did a gig for this where we did all the songs. We went out on tour also with people like Hunters & Collectors, and we found out fairly quickly, if you’re supporting a sort of heavier, louder rock band, soft stuff doesn’t go down too well in some places. So a lot of the softer songs left the set at that moment.

Dave: But we were really happy when, because Robin lives in Canberra, Rod Hayward our guitarist lives in Melbourne, and we’ll be joined by The MistLY’s, Stu Thomas on bass. We were really happy when Robin said, “Yeah, I want to do the album in order, and I want to do all the string parts.” So it’ll be demanding in a way, because it starts off very slowly. Yeah, we’re looking forward to that.

Do you get nostalgic on tours like this?
Dave: Not really. No, it’s usually great fun for us. We’ve only done one like this, back in 2023 we did an eighteen-city tour around Australia for Night of the Wolverine, and sold out eighteen shows. That album, we’d never played most of the songs before, so it was like doing something new. It was interesting, the feeling the audience had for it and it was different for me and Clare playing music where everybody knew the notes and the words. We’re used to presenting new music to people.

Clare: It was wonderful playing with Rod and Robin again and hearing that sound. It’s a specific sound. Dave wasn’t playing guitar, so you had the one lead guitar and the keyboards, that’s quite different to other bands. Usually there are two guitars. I really love playing and hearing them play again. And I love meeting the audiences again. Some of the people hadn’t seen us since back then. For example, in Adelaide at The Gov, it was quite an incredible crowd. Every time Dave mentioned one of the towns in South Australia from Night of the Wolverine, the crowd would react, it was very exuberant.

Dave: It’s a close relationship. Playing with Rod and Robin is great. We haven’t had much to do with them ever since. We’ve gone on to have different lives. We’ve played occasionally with Robin Casinader when we were in Canberra, and seen him plays his wonderful music in Melbourne, but that’s rare now. Rod Hayward is an amazing guitar player, he plays through a Marshall JC-100, and he’s like a guitar hero. He’s not from a punk school, he’s a blazing guitar player. And Robin, it was like getting to know them again, more than I did because back when we did this originally, I felt under pressure, working within a kind of industrial situation. Back in the day with the record company and touring, it was all new to me. I was responding to it. We previously just worked in the underworld. So no, it’s not nostalgic and the songs aren’t really tied to youth culture of 1995 at all. Maybe apart from Morrison Floor Show, which is a conceptual song about Jim Morrison coming back to hide out in the Australian Doors show, that might have been from its time, I think.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Photo Credit Meredith O’Shea

Catch Dave Graney ‘n’ The Coral Snakes on the following dates, tickets on sale via www.davegraney.com