Live Review: Dave Graney & The MistLY

Cabaret rockabilly institution Dave Graney is back in action (did he ever really go away? Of course not), with long-serving partner in musical crime Clare Moore touring Oz alongside in attendant band The MistLY. The Wheatsheaf beer garden, all fairy-lights and paper lanterns, filled up comfortably for the matinee show, the two-part set stacked thick with tracks from across Graney’s long-running career rambling off into the early evening.

Despite the set list spanning decades, it barely scratched the surface of Graney’s prolific songwriting back catalogue. The more widely played tracks, like Feelin’ Kinda Sporty, Warren Oates and Night Of The Wolverine, caught the ears of an engrossed crowd and got many a toe tapping.

From the outset Graney stood and delivered, his trademark pencil moustache and felt hat shaping an iconic silhouette, while he calmly and coolly espoused a thoughtful, retrospective set. It was a talented quartet holding the stage, Graney’s trademark dark droning vocals tempering a rich brace of strings, backed up with Moore’s dual keys/drum duties.

The performance was, perhaps at times, over-wrought: one too many pick-burns tacked on to otherwise completed songs. Even so, it was hard not to get pulled into Graney’s seedy world of winding refrains and narrative poetry with tracks like Everything Was Legendary With Robert and Saturday Night Bath.

It’s easy to imagine Graney on a stormy night past, some peri-urban fork-in-the-road between blues, country and old-fashioned rock’n’roll; he stood, considered and wandered off in another direction entirely, cutting his own path. Unapologetically self-reflective and humbly self-absorbed, Graney’s music is inextricably linked with his personality and his long-running career in the music industry. His inter-song banter gave significant insights into his musical life and philosophy, tagging tracks like Blues Negative as mission statements; explaining how dangerously close he’s come to writing and singing the blues – it being implicit that that would somehow be terrible.

Musically warm and rich, the soulful blend of guitar licks and loungey keys might fit in with some made-up genre like Oz-cowboy rock – but that omits the hollow urban grime woven into so much of Graney’s work. Maybe avant-garde post-blues? Everyone might be best served by letting it be what it is; letting Graney just keep doing his thing as he has done for so many years.