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the moles

Indie-psych-orch-garage-rock practitioner Richard Davies, a/k/a the moles, has held a seminal but secret role in the history of the alternative music scene since the 1990’s. He’s a songwriter’s favorite songwriter, appreciated by Kurt Cobain, the Flaming Lips, Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices, and Gruff Rhys of the Super Furry Animals, and many others.

The story of the moles is a globe-trotting labyrinth that started in the late 1980’s in Sydney, Australia. Davies, born to Welsh immigrants, never felt like he belonged to a place, or a scene. He had an outsider’s perspective. He’d read music magazines to discover bands, without hearing them – literally – since he was born hearing-impaired. Bands from the other side of the world were like mysteries for him to solve.

He formed the moles in the late ‘80s with friends from school. They put out their first album, Untune the Sky, in 1990, and their sophomore release Tendrils & Paracetamol in 1991. They built a foundation and found initial success a long way from home in then-prominent mags like CMJ and Melody Maker. After playing the same four Sydney pubs from ‘88-’92, they decided to cross the sea.

“We were on this label called Seaside,” says Davies. “They were part of Waterfront Record Shop, this little fantasy-land. One of the few places where you could find independent records. Waterfront had handwritten labels and wrote a little narrative about each of the records in the shop. They told us that the only choice for the moles was to go to London. It would be an adventure if nothing else. The moles hopped on a plane with backpacks, toothbrushes and 20 moles t-shirts.”

They stopped in the U.S. before London, and landed in Los Angeles the day of the Rodney King riots in ‘92. The smell of smoke and danger was in the air. They saw the national guard heading into L.A. on a drive between L.A. and San Francisco. In SF, they watched a boy with a baseball bat smash a plate glass window and steal a TV. They stayed at a YMCA youth hostel above a gay leather biker bar, where they’d play pool with the locals.This Aussie band got a wild first impression of what America was like.

They popped over to New York where they played CBGBs, and recorded their garage-orchestra hit single “What’s the New Mary Jane” with Jim Waters in the Meat District, around the same time Waters was finishing up Jon Spencer Blues Explosions’ Extra Width. The fires were being stoked.

When they arrived in London, things hit fast. Melody Maker and NME declared the moles to be Band of the Week. The following Band of the Week was Radiohead. Things took off. The moles at this point were four friends, with Davies as the primary songwriter, who just liked to laugh and joke. However, the Dickensian circumstances that were their reality ended up killing a lot of the fun, and the other guys eventually went back to Australia.

He met his wife Shirley during this period, an American music industry veteran in her own right. She acted as Davies pseudo-manager, and the two of them moved to her hometown of Boston. While back in the states, Davies met Bob Fay of Sebodoh and they started playing music together.

“We really hit it off,” says Davies. “It felt like hanging out with the original moles lineup. Just joking, making music and having fun in this dirt-floor basement in Somerville, where Sebadoh and Folk Implosion rehearsed.”

Fay brought in Eric Matthews who would team up with Davies to become Cardinal. Where the moles were more of a lo-fi, art-rock garage band, Cardinal was a pristine, highly focused, chamber-pop recording project. They recorded in three weeks in Portland, Oregon, and released their self-titled LP in ‘94.

“We got real serious and the fun stopped,” says Davies. “It started to feel like a chore to me, but we ended up making a very good record.”

The combination of Davies’ ‘60s rock aesthetic and Matthews’ string and horn arrangements struck a chord with critics. Nirvana was at their peak. Cardinal’s single “If You Believe in Christmas Trees” was the antithesis of “Smells like Teen Spirit.” Cardinal was on track to be the next big thing. They were on the cover of Billboard Magazine. CD List called it, “one of the most perfect half-hours of music ever committed to tape.” The New York Times wrote that it was “the most brilliantly understated album of last year.” The record was a critical and industry success, considered by some as one of the most important records of the ‘90s. Davies and Matthews were on track for a massive music career.

“Cardinal was smoke and mirrors,” says Davies. “Our relationship as a band was this gossamer thing that we didn’t know how to jigsaw into place. By that point, I was in Boston, he was back in Portland, Oregon, where he came from. We knew that people were loving this Cardinal record, but it was an art project rather than a band.”

As an emetic, Davies went to New York to record the moles album that would be Instinct (1994). It was a shoot-from-the-hip affair. He relied almost entirely on gut impulse, writing and recording everything in a week.

“I went to make a howl-at-the-moon record on the spot,” says Davies. “It was an antidote to the Cardinal record, a rebellion. It was pretty much just me and Hamish Kilgour of The Clean on the drums. I’m a punk by nature, so I just wanted to tap into something primal. Something that amuses me. Bat-shit crazy stuff. People who like my music tend to be peculiar and strange, like me.”

In ‘96 he put out the acoustic art-pop record There’s Never Been a Crowd Like This. This was Davies’ anti-rock-star concept record about the culture shock of being an expat. It was a spartan, stoic effort that focused on memories of Australia and his family. 

Around this time, The Flaming Lips were big fans. Coyne would comb record stores to find all of Davies’ previous works. They eventually connected and went on tour together, playing massive shows in Oklahoma and New York, with The Flaming Lips as Davies’ backing band.

“I would ride in the van with Wayne,” says Davies, “and it was apparent he was very career oriented. It had the feel of a log-rolling exercise. Music had never been about the spin or the politics for me.”

Davies had gained the attention of Kevin O’Leary and Adam Silverman at Sub Pop Records with the early moles records. This led them to start their own label, Flydaddy, to release Instinct and Cardinal. Flydaddy Records quickly proved influential, inspiring and attracting young bands from the Elephant Six Collective: Apples in Stereo, Elf Power, Neutral Milk Hotel, of Montreal, and the Olivia Tremor Control.

Flydaddy became an imprint of the then-new major label V2 Records to put out Telegraph (1998), released as a Richard Davies solo record. The major label meant many lunchtime showcases and meetings in Midtown Manhattan corporate offices. The album was recorded at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, NY, where Todd Rundgren, Muddy Waters, and The Band had made famous records, and R.E.M. had recorded Automatic for the People a few years earlier.

“I was satisfying the bureaucracy and the people with money,” says Davies. “So it’s a very, very well-produced record. Unlike something like Instinct, which quite deliberately sounds like it was made in a garbage can. I wanted to make it work for Kevin and Adam, but with every meeting with a different department head, it was apparent it went down like a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain. By the end of the Telegraph cycle, I felt like I’d done the best I could with that, but I had to let the fucker go. The price to be paid was not worth it.”

By then, Davies had a wife, a dog, and a house. He didn’t want to spend his life on the road. He decided to parlay his penchant for performance into becoming a trial lawyer. He’s been navigating the music and law sides of his life ever since.

“Generally speaking, music and law couldn’t be more distinct,” says Davies. “There’s no rules in songwriting. The headspace is about letting go of rules, preconceptions and embracing your impulses. Then you edit later. There are very specific rules of evidence as a trial attorney that you need to be cozy with. The similarity between my musical and legal experiences is in the performance. When I’m in front of a jury, I have to be shameless, to a degree. For both, I’m telling a story, or conveying a feeling or experience.”

While entering the law, Davies put out Barbarians (2000) which was a reflection on his time as an itinerant in America, much as Never Been a Crowd had been a reflection of growing up in Australia.

It was during this time that Davies had struck up a friendship with Guided By Voices frontman Robert Pollard. Their relationship consisted primarily of old-school mail correspondence (that’s continued for 15 years), and birthed their project Cosmos, and album Jar of Jam Ton of Bricks (2009).

“I found out that Bob [Pollard] liked my music, so I reached out,” says Davies. “It’s a very natural, organic friendship. We traded tapes until we had an album. After the record was ready, his manager called me while they were all at a party in Dayton, Ohio. They were playing our record loud, and everyone was cheering. It was the best phone call, reception to the record, that I could’ve wanted. It was that experience that got me back into making moles records.”

Fire Records was putting out reissues of the Cardinal album and out-of-print moles records. They were interested in new music from the Cardinal duo, so Davies reconnected with Matthews to craft the bi-coastal Cardinal record Hymns (2012). The first Moles album in 20 years, Tonight’s Music (2016) was comprised of songs Davies wrote during his allegedly ‘quiet’ law years.

The moles played a series of shows with Guided By Voices in 2018, including a New Years Eve show at the Williamsburg Hall of Music in Brooklyn. There he met Richard Lynn of from Austin’s Super Secret Records. Davies went to Austin, to record a single for Super Secret Records, but ended up with the 16-song, double gatefold album, the moles’ Code Word (2018).

The moles live band members at this point are an undercover syndicate of operatives in many U.S. cities, as well as London and Mexico City. Davies is currently working on the next moles project with assorted moles scattered around the world. Tracking is nearly complete, and a new moles album is on the horizon.

“I turn 60 this year,” says Davies. “You learn stuff as you get older. I have a 19 and 20 year old son and daughter. A lightbulb went off when my son was born. We were in a snowstorm right before the bar exam. He appeared at 3:30 in the morning. He looked at me. I know it’s cliche, but my life changed in an instant. Before that, I was selfish. I looked into his eyes and knew I was going to pass that exam, and take care of him. Same with my daughter. I saw the image of a black panther prowling about, saying ‘bring it on.’ This is definitely reflected in my lyrics.”

Davies subscribes to the philosophy of the way Winston Churchill would sign off his letters to Roosevelt during the height of World War II: “K.B.O.” – “Keep buggering on.”