Dave Graney isn’t a musician that you like, or love, or even get. Dave, you can only dig, and I really dig the Dave.

From the first time I heard his world-weary, get-me-the-hell-outta-this-small-town vibe, I was hooked. The clothes, the laid-back yet wildly pretentious sensibility, and the smooth smooth tunes, all these things combined and created a world in which my twenty-something idiocy could finally feel comfortable. Does that sound dumb? Stiff shit.

Dave has always given us music that speaks of late nights, hangovers, lazy afternoons, and a relentless dedication to The Self. He takes his art so seriously that it’s kind of silly, and he takes the silliness to extreme, yet sublime places. Noone who saw it can forget his ARIA award for Most Popular Male Artist. Resplendent in a pink crushed velvet suit, wig and porno moustache, he sauntered up to the dais, leaned into the mic, and burped “King of Pop”.

Some fifteen years later, the Coral Snakes are no more, and Dave tours the Lurid Yellow Mist with Clare Moore, his wife and long-time collaborator and drummer. Occasionally he feels the need to break out and do some stuff that’s purely Dave, which is how we found ourselves at the Butterfly Club a couple of Saturday nights ago, for his show MC Bits.

The Butterfly Club is a fantastic small venue; a converted Victorian terrace house, the bar is simply the kitchen, and the lounge looks like forty drag queens were given a hundred dollars each to go berserk at knick-knack shops. It's extreme kitsch, carried of with insouciant panache. The performance space is tiny, and this intimacy works perfectly for the kind of show Dave put on.

With support from Mark Fitzgibbon on piano, Dave played guitar and sang some of the songs that he says Destroyed him. Most of them I’ve never heard, or even heard of, so it was a revelation to me that, for example, folk music could be so good and so dark. Most of the playlist is here on Dave’s blog, and I urge you to go out and give this stuff a listen. Back to the show.

Dave, for all his silliness, is an extremely talented musician, and a wonderful singer. I’ll never get over the fact, however, that when he's singing he seems to space out and start watching leprechauns splitting the atom while Sandra Bernhardt and Dorothy Parker take dancing lessons from Bettie Page. Maybe that’s just me, but think about it next time you see him live.

Every song has its own story; music doesn’t just appear from a vacuum, so along with his interpretation and arrangement of the music and the vocals, Dave dug through the backstory and told us both where a song came from, and what it meant to him. With his usual wit, he told us about artists such as Kevin Ayres and Robyn Hitchcock, and we were all richer for the knowledge, and for his glorious performance.

No doubt Dave will Keep Digging, just as the rest of us will Keep Digging Dave.

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