Dave Graney On The Music Of Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground & Nico

The Man. The Myth. The Music. Celebrating Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground & Nico! An evening honouring a true Rock ’n’ roll original with a setlist that explores his ground-breaking years with the Velvets into his idiosyncratic Solo career

This stellar evening pays homage to one of rock’s most important singer/songwriters enduring influence as well as the timeless, enduring appeal of his songs. Performances by Robert Forster (The Go-Betweens), Mick Harvey (The Bad Seeds, The Birthday Party), Dave Graney (Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes), Rob Snarski (The Blackeyed Susans, SnarskiCircusLindyBand) and Stefanie Duzel with the band including Robbie Warren (Died Pretty), Barton Price (Models), Roger Mason (Models), Paul McDonald (Glide, the Gin Palace, Steve Kilbey) and Mark Tobin (Caligula, the Gin Palace, Steve Kilbey).

All eras of Lou Reed will be celebrated including everything from I’m Waiting For The Man to Perfect Day, from Venus In Furs to Satellite of Love, from Sweet Jane to Vicious, from Pale Blue Eyes to Walk On The Wild Side, from Femme Fatale to Coney Island Baby and so much more! The legend himself Dave Graney talks to Hi Fi Way about the show.

Another good challenge for you being the music of Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground and Nico. Are you looking forward to it?
Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I’m one of four singers, so it’s not all up to me, and I know the people who do the music, I’ve done a show with them before. They’re do these kinds of shows all the time. So it starts in January. Seemed like something fun to do.

So what is it about the music of Lou Reed in particular that sort of really drew to this?
Well, I’ve always liked Lou Reed’s music. I’m laughing because it just seems like fun, easy work, you know? I haven’t thought about it that much. The songs I’m doing are from his solo period, the era I grew up with. I enjoyed that music as it was coming out. I’m not approaching Lou Reed from the outside or treating him as an object; I loved his records when they were released. I actually heard his solo work before I knew about The Velvet Underground, so Transformer and Rock and Roll Animal were what Lou Reed was to me. They asked us to choose a few songs, and mine are all from that 1973 to 1979 period.

Did you have much influence over the songs your singing?
Tribute and homage shows can be delicate kinds of things. There’s so much of it around that it can feel a bit strange to do, but I really like Lou Reed, so it’s easy for me to step into this one. I do feel ambivalent about tribute shows sometimes, you look at the Adelaide Fringe Festival and it’s like a phone book of acts, and two‑thirds of them are pretty shoddy‑looking tribute shows. A friend of mine once recreated the first gig he ever went to, the Pretty Things, The Who, and I think Manfred Mann. He put together a great band, and he had the voice to do that Roger Daltrey‑style singing, plus the guitar chops to handle later Who material. He reproduced the whole set list, and it was a fantastic show because it was personal. That’s when I realised some of that music deserves to be heard again. When it’s done really well, it’s great, isn’t it? So I’m looking forward to doing the Lou Reed songs.

What is it about Transformer that resonates with you?
I was a teenager, it was the world of rock music in 1972-73, and there was nothing retrospective about it, everything was new, constantly coming at you. And this was a new thing. It was a Lou Reed record. It had a monster hit single, I guess, but I didn’t really hear it on the radio; I heard records at friends’ houses. That was what music was like then. It was still a kind of secret world, but huge, much bigger than it is now, I think, with a powerful, monolithic audience.

And yeah, it had that David Bowie production, that Bowie aura, the Mick Ronson guitar. This is me looking back on it now, at the time, I didn’t think about any of that. I just liked it. It was simply something I liked.
So it was a pop thing to me. I heard it as a pop record in the middle of everything else, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Slade, T‑Rex, all of that. Looking at it now, it’s got Mick Ronson’s great guitar, Bowie’s production and backing vocals, but it’s also got Lou Reed’s songs. Walk on the Wild Side is a great song, all truth, just a roll call of characters from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene. And it’s got Andy’s Chest, about Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol.

It’s full of great, cool, slightly bitchy songs like You Keep Hangin’ Round and Vicious, and those very 70s‑meets‑30s cabaret things like New York Conversation. I couldn’t really get into that one as a kid, I didn’t know what that oom‑pah beat was all about. But I just liked the record, yeah.

How do you approach it? Do you do a lot of rehearsing, or do you go in a little bit raw, and have that edginess to the performance?
All those decisions aren’t made by me. I live in Melbourne, Mick Harvey lives in Melbourne, and Rob Snarsky and Robert Forster are in Brisbane, while most of the band are in Sydney. So we’re meeting up a couple of days before the first Sydney gig.

Narrowing down the list of songs would have been a tough job?
Yeah, I was just asked what songs I wanted to do, and one of them somebody else was doing. I said, well, they’re brave, and I’m just doing a few. Nobody wanted to do the ones I chose. I just wanted to do upbeat, kind of groovers. I didn’t want to play guitar, because on Lou Reed’s first tour here in ’74 he wasn’t playing guitar, he was really just dancing around. Before that he was always the guitar player in The Velvet Underground, and after that he was always hanging on to a guitar.

Can you see yourself doing more of these shows?
Well, I’ve done a Scott Walker one in Melbourne a few years ago that Rob Snarsky was involved in, and it had a few other people in it, four singers. We were sweating over the Scott Walker stuff because we thought, wow, the audience is going to be right onto this, they’re going to know every fucking note. But what they actually knew was one song by the Walker Brothers. The arrangements were extremely complex, wordy, and beautiful, and we did a really great job. In a way, it was a great project just to be part of, working out the music together as a group. And the performances, I think we did two, were really great to do, but afterwards I was speaking to people and they didn’t know any of the material we were playing.

What’s next for you?
We did twenty one dates last year, two months of Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes, Soft and Sexy Sound shows. It was one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever done: very enjoyable, a joyful celebration. Everybody in the band was really into it, loved it, and it was great playing the music, some of it for the first time in this sequence of the original album. It was challenging, too, the way it had to start from a very slow, quiet place and then build through lots of peaks was fantastic. Fun to do, and the audience really got behind it, absolutely loved it.

Over the last couple of years, Clare Moore and I have been finishing an album. We did two albums in 2024, and we recorded tracks for another one because we wanted to do a rock album, and we’re going to put that out next year. It’ll be called Liburnum of the Mind. It’s a really great rock album, and we’re putting it out on vinyl, too. We’ve never done a vinyl release, except for the re‑release of Night of the Wolverine, we haven’t put out a new album on vinyl since about 1984.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Celebrating Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground & Nico! at The Gov tonight, tickets from Metropolis Touring…