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Work Shy
Legendary Australian showman Dave Graney returns to the page and reveals the lengths he has gone to avoid anything that really feels like work. In his inimitable style, Graney veers from a feckless childhood in blue-collar South Australia, to the punk rock scene of 1980s London, and beer-soaked nights touring Australia where he worked very hard at not working at all.But in slacking off, Graney became one of the hardest working musicians in the industry, constantly evolving, reinventing, staying one step ahead of everyone – even himself. Workshy is half written by Dave Graney the consummate and tireless performer, and half-written by Dave Graney the bludge. The magic is that you’re never sure which is which.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 17, 2018
It's difficult for me to review Workshy really, because I kind of wrote all you need to know about it in my review of 1001 Australian Nights.
Well, that's not exactly true.
The super-short wrap-up is that all the reasons I gave for wanting to read the other book are applicable here. It's more of the same.
That, however, is selling it short. Workshy is a more considered work. It's not identical to the first book but the raw material is the same - though this time there's more attention given to detail. There's more of a sense of coherent thread - rather than a collection of recollections, there's a more structured narrative. A refinement. This year's model, but without a feeling of retread.
There's a bunch of writing in here about the cultural state of Australia, now and then, and a lot of it's poignant and recognisable:
It's not just Australia that's put under the magnifying glass: London, that fabled destination, also comes in for a good glare. I'm pretty certain that this par describes the quintessential experience of that particular place:
It certainly was mine.
Despite the suggestion of the title, there's a good deal of work covered in the book. Graney is a master at summoning odd jobs, and while he's a fan of lairising, there's a good deal of space dedicated to the real muso's gig: surviving in the employable world without letting any of its stank get on you. Anyone who's ever worked while holding their dreams of art in one hand will surely recognise themselves in the work.
Musicianship and the travails thereof is a big part of the book, and I think it hangs together much better than the previous volume. There's a pretty large element of self-critique: if there's things the author thinks he did shonkily, he'll cop to it. But there also is a lot of interesting detail that describes how the man (and bands) we've seen came to be - development, consumption, execution. All these are considered and conveyed, and I found it fascinating to try and match the guy I'd heard or seen through a televisual lens with his own version of the same scene.
I dig it. The portrait we get is of a guy both generous and grateful, a sort of bowerbird with a love for Ballard, crime and country. And flash duds. .
If you're going to read them both, read Workshy second, because it takes all of the good parts of 1001 Australian Nights and polishes them a bit. Dresses them up. And as ever, it's hip as fuck.
Get onto it. Reading it made me wish I were as freewheeling - and as cool - as Dave.
Well, that's not exactly true.
The super-short wrap-up is that all the reasons I gave for wanting to read the other book are applicable here. It's more of the same.
That, however, is selling it short. Workshy is a more considered work. It's not identical to the first book but the raw material is the same - though this time there's more attention given to detail. There's more of a sense of coherent thread - rather than a collection of recollections, there's a more structured narrative. A refinement. This year's model, but without a feeling of retread.
There's a bunch of writing in here about the cultural state of Australia, now and then, and a lot of it's poignant and recognisable:
As a kid, I trusted in colours and themes. Our family had this inner sensibility, which I held hard to for many years. A feeling that we were gifted physically and had some sort of charmed luck running with us. Perhaps that was a general Australian feeling in that second half of the 20th century. That we could just win life. It wasn’t really true, just a way to dodge each other in many ways. It took me decades to realise this.
It's not just Australia that's put under the magnifying glass: London, that fabled destination, also comes in for a good glare. I'm pretty certain that this par describes the quintessential experience of that particular place:
After a day’s work stuffing envelopes, a whole party of us would go to the Union Bar, which was helpfully just down the stairs, and have six pints of beer. That was London life. It was harsh, and you grabbed any pleasure and joy with both hands when it made an appearance. You didn’t take friends for granted. It took hours to get across the city to a social engagement, and you only had a few hours of each other’s company before you had to race to catch a public transport connection back to your cramped, badly carpeted lair.
It certainly was mine.
Despite the suggestion of the title, there's a good deal of work covered in the book. Graney is a master at summoning odd jobs, and while he's a fan of lairising, there's a good deal of space dedicated to the real muso's gig: surviving in the employable world without letting any of its stank get on you. Anyone who's ever worked while holding their dreams of art in one hand will surely recognise themselves in the work.
Everyone who has been a musician knows the score when you’ve got a day gig. Keep your head down and your mouth shut. It’s better for your peace of mind. You just want to show up and get paid. You don’t want those unpleasantly clunky conversations about your band and your pathetic aspirations.
Musicianship and the travails thereof is a big part of the book, and I think it hangs together much better than the previous volume. There's a pretty large element of self-critique: if there's things the author thinks he did shonkily, he'll cop to it. But there also is a lot of interesting detail that describes how the man (and bands) we've seen came to be - development, consumption, execution. All these are considered and conveyed, and I found it fascinating to try and match the guy I'd heard or seen through a televisual lens with his own version of the same scene.
I dig it. The portrait we get is of a guy both generous and grateful, a sort of bowerbird with a love for Ballard, crime and country. And flash duds. .
If you're going to read them both, read Workshy second, because it takes all of the good parts of 1001 Australian Nights and polishes them a bit. Dresses them up. And as ever, it's hip as fuck.
Get onto it. Reading it made me wish I were as freewheeling - and as cool - as Dave.
May 29, 2020
Terrific effort by the King Of Pop.
What we have here is the story of Dave’s life, told through the prism of his work.
Those familiar with Dave Graney via his sly, funny, unflappable public persona, particularly over the last 25 years or so, might not be aware that for most of his adult life he has sustained himself and kept his musical roadshow on the blacktop by engaging in a series of day jobs, mainly of a temporary clerical nature. Those jobs provide the framework for this very entertaining and engaging stroll through his life to date.
For fans of coming-of-age stories, there’s something for you, too - in the form of a vivid recapitulation of Dave’s working-class childhood and teenage years in the medium-to-large-sized town of Mt Gambier in South Australia. As a product of a similar working-class upbringing in a slightly smaller town in a different state myself, there was so much that chimed; the footy, the cars, school, hanging out, beer, shitkicking jobs for pocket money, cracking laps, discovering good music, the occasional boredom and sense that all the good stuff is happening elsewhere, the pubs, the old fellas, family, clothes, the whole shebang. Vividly, accurately and amusingly evoked.
For music heads, there’s also plenty. In the last quarter or so of the book, Dave manages to free himself of his daytime clerical gigs, and his work life is all about the music. In that part of the book, there is plenty of meaty stuff about the daily working life of a full time professional musician with a side gig as an author - the work ethic, the practical side of keeping the show on the road, the creative process, the nitty gritty of making recorded music. Again, very vivid and nicely evoked. Of course, woven between the tales of workaday life earlier in the book, there is also plenty about the music. The stuff about life in London, featuring appearances by various luminaries from the Australian and British independent music scene at the time, is very strong. Really gives you a feeling for what life was like for those young creative and ambitious people in that place at that time.
The real meat of the book, though, is the office work stuff. To young people today, forced to keep body and soul together with sketchy, precarious temporary work as a coffee machine jockey or a burger flipper, the idea that a person of decent intelligence could just walk into any amount of reasonably well-paid, fairly cushy, unexacting white collar work must seem like an absurdly luxurious and utopian state of affairs. But it was a state of affairs that was an actuality in the 80s and 90s for people like Dave Graney and myself and thousands of others like us. Before work life became all about cost-cutting and automation and cheese-paring and rationalisation, there was plenty of undemanding clerical work around that a reasonably presentable person with passable numeracy and literacy skills could obtain with a modicum of effort. If you had a brain in your head, like Dave, these gigs were ideally suited to the creative soul, because you could knock off your assigned tasks pretty sharpish and have plenty of time left over for thinking and attending to matters pertaining to your creative life. Dave is very interesting on the subject of the various gigs of this type that he took over the years from the anecdotal point of view, and also in explaining the interaction between the day job work life and night job music life.
That’s the book in a nutshell. Adding to the charm of the narrative is the filtering of it through Dave’s personality. He has always been one of the must-read personalities in the Australian cultural landscape because he is very much his own man. His opinions - forcefully and elegantly expressed - are his own opinions, formed not by fashion and modishness, but by independent thought. The Australian scene is so small and insular that it is very rare to hear someone express an opinion that runs counter to prevailing orthodoxy, and Australians in the creative sphere are normally very slow to throw criticism (of even the mildest sort) the way of a fellow writer or performer. So it is refreshing to read the views of someone with runs on the board who is not afraid to call out phoniness or boringness or bogusness where he sees it.
In short, read this book.
Dave Graney is giving it heaps!
What we have here is the story of Dave’s life, told through the prism of his work.
Those familiar with Dave Graney via his sly, funny, unflappable public persona, particularly over the last 25 years or so, might not be aware that for most of his adult life he has sustained himself and kept his musical roadshow on the blacktop by engaging in a series of day jobs, mainly of a temporary clerical nature. Those jobs provide the framework for this very entertaining and engaging stroll through his life to date.
For fans of coming-of-age stories, there’s something for you, too - in the form of a vivid recapitulation of Dave’s working-class childhood and teenage years in the medium-to-large-sized town of Mt Gambier in South Australia. As a product of a similar working-class upbringing in a slightly smaller town in a different state myself, there was so much that chimed; the footy, the cars, school, hanging out, beer, shitkicking jobs for pocket money, cracking laps, discovering good music, the occasional boredom and sense that all the good stuff is happening elsewhere, the pubs, the old fellas, family, clothes, the whole shebang. Vividly, accurately and amusingly evoked.
For music heads, there’s also plenty. In the last quarter or so of the book, Dave manages to free himself of his daytime clerical gigs, and his work life is all about the music. In that part of the book, there is plenty of meaty stuff about the daily working life of a full time professional musician with a side gig as an author - the work ethic, the practical side of keeping the show on the road, the creative process, the nitty gritty of making recorded music. Again, very vivid and nicely evoked. Of course, woven between the tales of workaday life earlier in the book, there is also plenty about the music. The stuff about life in London, featuring appearances by various luminaries from the Australian and British independent music scene at the time, is very strong. Really gives you a feeling for what life was like for those young creative and ambitious people in that place at that time.
The real meat of the book, though, is the office work stuff. To young people today, forced to keep body and soul together with sketchy, precarious temporary work as a coffee machine jockey or a burger flipper, the idea that a person of decent intelligence could just walk into any amount of reasonably well-paid, fairly cushy, unexacting white collar work must seem like an absurdly luxurious and utopian state of affairs. But it was a state of affairs that was an actuality in the 80s and 90s for people like Dave Graney and myself and thousands of others like us. Before work life became all about cost-cutting and automation and cheese-paring and rationalisation, there was plenty of undemanding clerical work around that a reasonably presentable person with passable numeracy and literacy skills could obtain with a modicum of effort. If you had a brain in your head, like Dave, these gigs were ideally suited to the creative soul, because you could knock off your assigned tasks pretty sharpish and have plenty of time left over for thinking and attending to matters pertaining to your creative life. Dave is very interesting on the subject of the various gigs of this type that he took over the years from the anecdotal point of view, and also in explaining the interaction between the day job work life and night job music life.
That’s the book in a nutshell. Adding to the charm of the narrative is the filtering of it through Dave’s personality. He has always been one of the must-read personalities in the Australian cultural landscape because he is very much his own man. His opinions - forcefully and elegantly expressed - are his own opinions, formed not by fashion and modishness, but by independent thought. The Australian scene is so small and insular that it is very rare to hear someone express an opinion that runs counter to prevailing orthodoxy, and Australians in the creative sphere are normally very slow to throw criticism (of even the mildest sort) the way of a fellow writer or performer. So it is refreshing to read the views of someone with runs on the board who is not afraid to call out phoniness or boringness or bogusness where he sees it.
In short, read this book.
Dave Graney is giving it heaps!
January 5, 2020
I really enjoyed this, imagine someone telling you yarns at a pub, then condense it into book form, that's what this book basically is.
I loved the bits about trying to make it in the music world and having to do day jobs to pay your way while you wait for rock stardom. Should be read by every aspirational artist.
I loved the bits about trying to make it in the music world and having to do day jobs to pay your way while you wait for rock stardom. Should be read by every aspirational artist.
March 18, 2021
Dave Graney is the coolest artist in the Aussie rock auditorium!! He is also a very good writer .
November 23, 2019
For someone who claims to be a ‘bludge’ , Dave Graney worked pretty hard to achieve his position as the underground ‘king’ of Ozzie rock and still does to this day. Slaving away in menial jobs in London and Melbourne for years to subsidise his music career doesn’t sound like a bludgey life, but Graney delivers it with a cruisey, je ne sais quous sense of humour. A true ‘working class’ hero,his auspicious life started in rural Mt.Gambier where he spent his time drinking, smoking weed, working in sawmills and dagging sheep. You don’t really get much sense of what motivated Graney to get into underground music, besides the Sex Pistols, Alan Vega and Richard Hell, and their caustic sounds dont seem to translate into his own ‘soft and sexy’ sound. He seemed to have no master plan, like the b-grade Brechtian private school pomp of Nick Cave, rather he just fell to a scene a riffed from there. Regardless, he created a rich and idiosyncratic career, carving a unique cult that has fans all over the world. A true Aussie original, and an important player in the 'oz rock' cannon, this book takes the mundane and tells it to get fucked.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews