IN THE END IS THE BEGINNING IS AN END FOR BAD//DREEMS
- 1 day ago
- 11 min read
IT’S OLD STYLE VALUES at play here. The good ones. Proper ones, of respect, dignity, communal responsibility, bloody good shows, reparations, forgiveness, and ideas you remember no matter how much, or how little, you’ve drunk because they’re worth it and no one either on or in front of the stage needs to pretend. Not about questioning Australia and the myths we tell, masculinity and the bullshit we cover it with, or rock with pop hooks and the embarrassment we’re supposed to feel about it.
Old style set-up too: five-piece with guitars, drums, bass, one bloke singing upfront, two other blokes singing just behind him. All of them with day jobs as well as the night one, some with families, and a back catalogue of what any good South Australian of a certain age might call a multi-function polis - album’s titled Gutful and Hoo Ha! alongside Doomsday Ballet and Dogs At Bay.
Like people who’ve read a book, had a think, and been pissed off on occasion. “To think we’d find the answer, to think we’d find it in a song,” you might say, borrowing from a new song.
That’s why, before even getting to the double backslash and double Es in that name, there’s 15 years, five albums, a metric shit-ton of gigs, and the kind of miles in the legs/tyres/brain that have to be counted in miles and not that newfangled measurement of kilowhatevers in the story of Bad//Dreems.
Which is no bad record. A good place to start you might say. Or, indeed, a good place to stop. For stop they will soon on what the classics, and Bad//Dreems, like to call “an indefinite hiatus”. You see, there’s a fifth album, Ultra Dundee, freshly laundered and released last Friday, a bunch of gigs about to roll out, and a long period ahead of them that might be an event horizon or might be the (re)making of them. Who knows?
While drummer Miles Wilson, guitarist Ali Wells and bassplayer Deon Slaviero are subbed out for this match, Alex Cameron, lead guitarist and principal writer, and Ben Warwe, lead vocalist, contributing writer and dominating presence upfront, are on-ball for a story that goes long but neatly divides into three parts: what they’re doing, why they’ve been saying it, and where might this go.
PRESENT
What is an indefinite hiatus?
“It’s laying down the tools for now,” says Cameron. “In the hope that something will burgeon again in the future, but without any plans for that to happen.”
In the hope that the music industry finds a way for musicians to feed themselves and play music?
“Well that would help, certainly,” he says. “But I don’t think that’s gonna be happening in a hurry. But no, we feel very blessed to have done this for 15 years. That’s way longer, and we’ve done much more, than we ever envisaged. But I think we are finding it increasingly difficult to combine what we need to do with the band with our jobs and families, and probably not feeling like we’re getting the most out of the time we should be doing music and being creative.”
But, lest that seem too negative, Cameron (who is walking somewhere in Adelaide while Marwe talks from home), adds “and yeah, feeling satisfied with what we’ve done and not wanting to grind it into the dust”.
There’s an idea: getting out while the getting is still not too bad and aspects of this life still feel good.
“Yes, that’s exactly right. You can be drawn down so many paths in the music game. It’s a unique form of creative expression that almost as soon as you start you are drawn into this thing called an industry. It’s very easy to conflate success with industry success, and then you end up spending a lot of time thinking about things like selling tickets or selling albums, and getting further and further away from why we started this, which was simply to make music with each other and write and perform songs,” Cameron explains. “And I think really, going on a hiatus is a way to honour that and keep that first and foremost.”
It turns out, that this decision can be put down to Nick Cave. Not from one of his pearls of wisdom on his Red Hand Files correspondence page, not even from anything he has said, but the mere existence of his recent show in Adelaide. That is, the proof of a day-to-day, 9-to-5 commitment made possible by his success, and the fact that for Cameron and Marwe, these two long-time friends, this was the first time they had watched a gig together outside of the band or show context “for as long as we could remember” sighs Marwe.
“And that was sad, because the whole thing started from a relationship of us just hanging out watching music and then writing music,” says Cameron. “That’s why we would actually like to be doing rather than sitting on a Zoom call talking about how to construct a social media post.”
For Marwe, there is something to be acknowledged in the pair being aware enough to recognise this situation. For seeing that “it just felt right to put a pin in it for now” and move on it “before things start potentially slipping and you lose the love for the creativity” after 15 years of doing this together. And going out, for now, with “a pretty reasonable record in my opinion”.
“When you are working a full-time job whilst you are trying to run your own business, which is what the band effectively is, and you are expected to keep all balls in the air at all times, plus tour and travel and keep up with the industry norms and go to Europe, because all the other bands of your level are doing it, then follow it up with a UK trip, it comes to a point where, to be quite honest, you are just completely fucking exhausted,” he says. “Being creative is pretty much my only outlet in life now. Coming to the back shed and picking up my guitar is a creative bias and it’s something that allows me to feel some sort of freedom in life. It’s almost a form of meditation.”
By the way, calling Ultra Dundee a pretty reasonable record is a pretty reasonable understatement for what is an excellent set of songs. Indeed, the quality of the record would make it easy for fans to think, ‘just keep going, just give us a at least one more, we’ll keep buying’. But the smarter fan would admire an artist who can get off the train instead of grinding it – their love and your love – into dust.
Marwe leans in. “Just to touch on that, and back to your question about pulling the pin, it’s important to not overstate or grandstand or drive something too heavily into the ground because it can start to become a bit of an ugly pastiche in itself,” he says. “If I’m totally frank, I’ve started to feel like that when I perform, being a 35-year-old father of two. The physicality that props up the show, and a lot of it is around how I’m acting, you’ve got to be really careful that you don’t let that get too stale or otherwise everything might lose its meaning.”
Cameron agrees. “The musical style that a group has adopted when they start, after 15 years it can be, in a group such as ours which functions as somewhat of a democracy, it’s very hard to necessarily evolve that. I share Ben’s sentiments there that you can start to feel like you’re almost writing to a formula, because you know what the band can do and what the band is expected to do. For solo artists that can be different. Your Dylans, your Bowies, they’ve been able to take these abrupt turns that are often very jarring for fans, but when you look at the trajectory of their career, they were really effective at being able to reinvent themselves.
“As a band that’s very hard because you can’t really pull four or five people abruptly to a different direction. It is both a strength and weakness of a band where all the members are valued but you are to a certain extent by what you’ve created.”
PAST
Masculinity and Australia are two topics destined for trouble in public discourse, always fraught because someone somewhere wants you to praise this and only this, or criticise that and nothing more, to make a definitive statement or provide the simple answer, and nuance is frowned on. Smarter people than us avoid it, dumber people than us create parties like One Nation to distort it, but Bad//Dreems go straight in with new songs like January 26 and Shadowland, Ultra Dundee and Firestorm, and have for pretty much their whole careers. Why?
“They’re just topics that are close to home for us. We started to make music that was very Australian in character and quite blatantly influenced by a lineage of Australian acts who were also very Australian in character. And we were a group of men,” says Cameron. “Both of those things were pinned upon us as soon as we started. Sometimes in confrontational ways. I’ve mentioned it many times how our first reviews in the Melbourne street press were using the disdainful term of pub rock, which is a very Australian art form, to put us down. I mean you’re constantly reminded in the music industry of being an all-male band, for good reasons really, but every few months we’ll be told the reason you can’t do this or do that is because you don’t fit the quotas. Which is fine, but it does make you aware of those things.”
So buying in was never in doubt.
“The Australian one for me is a really interesting topic that I read a lot about, and that is really important to me because I think the Australian national identity is a real failing. A failing of imagination for our country. Whether that is the great Australian silence, in reference to Aboriginal history, or whether it is a failure to see ourselves as a nation of immigrants that we are, or whether it’s a failure to value the arts as much as sporting prowess,” Cameron continues.
“I don’t think we have done a good job of creating an identity for ourselves. I think a big problem for our country was that during the ‘90s the nascent Howard government struck upon a plan to whitewash and homogenise our culture, bigging up things like Anzac Day and Australia Day, which really masked the beautiful complexities and subtleties of what Australia is really about. Not the least of which was the colonisation history.”
As it’s a topic close to them all, injecting that into their storytelling was obvious, and not without precedent for these fans of Midnight Oil, Paul Kelly and Archie Roach, to name but three “exemplars” of people who told good history with layers and subtleties. The malformed business of being blokes? For Cameron that’s even closer to home.
“And as for the masculinity thing, we literally met at a football club. Ben and I both grew up, in our teenage years, very serious about football. It was probably our main passion, and for me personally, getting into music and music scenes as an adult was really important to undo a lot of the harm that that environment had caused,” he says. “I think we understand what it can be like to be led astray and to succumb to some of the things men, and especially groups of men, are prone to. For me, music and being exposed to a creative community was a way out of that and an education. So it’s inherently connected to making songs and creating safe spaces and communities.”
As both men point out, being who they are, where they’re from, how they looks, they’ve been lumbered with assumptions from all sides for as long as they’ve been around. Now, 15 years in, a hiatus approaching, do they think they’ve made a dent in those assumptions – about them individually, about the band, about being an Australian man?
“On a personal level I don’t really feel completely understood,” Marwe says. “I guess to comment on the complexity and subtlety that Alex was talking about, I don’t have the bandwidth or intelligence to cite literary texts from two decades ago or remember what Don Watson had written in an essay 15 years ago that had some sort of great impact on my life. A lot of my life was literally playing four games of football a weekend and training every other night.
To touch on what Alex said again, to be in a football club from a young age right up to the age of 22 when you find a friend that understands that you have creative endeavours, it’s confusing but it’s also a big door that was opened to me. And entering a world where it became ok to feel like I could sing and play guitar but I could also go play football at 2 o’clock on a Saturday. It was a discovery of myself as you’re still developing as a young person.”
Rituals and coming of age, connections and finding a place that was shared – more talked about than lived through for many of us. Certainly more talked about than understood.
“In terms of being understood, for a lot of my life I didn’t even understand that, so it doesn’t surprise me that other people can’t still,” says Marwe. “Within Australia you look at what’s being said on football fields by professional athletes, even as late as finals last year, homophobic slurs. All you have to do is have a stroll on a post from the AFLW and see some of the malice, the barbs that are being thrown at women who are just trying to play sport at a professional level and succeed and do their best. So whilst I think we’ve come a long way, I think we still have a very long way to go.”
Is that work worth continuing?
“In Jungian therapy, it is called The Work,” says Cameron. “And the work never ends. Your life is a process of growth, and when the only important thing is to do the work. In relation to your question, personally I tick almost every box of privilege that you can have, so for me to experience what it’s like to be typecast or stereotyped is [he laughs] actually good for me to experience. In almost every other facet of my life I am given significant advantages just because of the way I look or other aspects that I’ve not really done anything to deserve. There’s a part of us being stereotyped and viewed almost with a negative connotation that was welcomed.”
As for the rest of us in the audience? There’s more to that stereotype too.
“We do know some people can see the complexities of what we’re doing. And by and large, even though our audiences look like a bunch of yobbos, it’s really affirming to talk to them and see that they are listening to the lyrics,” says Cameron. “I often talk about when we put out the song Jack, because that was the first time we spoke maybe most directly about a socio-political issue.
[Jack sample lyric: “We're the violence, we're the godsend, we're the virus/We're the wokest, we're the leftest, we're the silence/Look at the ground, what do I see?/60,000 years staring back at me”]
“And 100 per cent across the board, every fan that we spoke to just loved the sentiment. And it gave them licence to feel like they could speak out on a cause like that.”
FUTURE
For anyone who’s paid attention to music history, one of the good things about a band taking a hiatus rather than breaking up is that how often have we heard years after a breakup, a splintering of a creative musical force, one or more members saying if only we’d taken a break, done side projects, had a rest, just stopped “the job” for a bit, we probably would have come back, gone on afterwards as this band.
“I think that’s exactly our thinking, really,” says Marwe. “I’ve said this in an interview before and I think it’s valid to your point: we take songwriting and music and lyrics pretty seriously so it takes a certain level of energy within yourself to get up every week to play. I’m not going to speak for Camo, writing a lot of the lyrics, but in terms of having the energy and feeling like you have something more to add to the contemporary culture in Australia, we need the time to sit with what’s actually happening around us and use it as a time to consume.”
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SEE MORE
Bad//Dreems play:
Gather Sounds, Adelaide, April 10.
Thornbury Theatre, Melbourne, April 18.
Marrickville Bowlo, Sydney, May 1.
Brightside Outdoors, Brisbane, May 2.
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BANDCAMP: Listen to Bad//Dreems – Ultra Dundee
SPOTIFY: Listen to Bad//Dreems – Ultra Dundee
APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Bad//Dreems – Ultra Dundee
The Baddies actually play two shows in Sydney, and have sold out both!