Bad//Dreems
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Bad//Dreems

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Bad//Dreems formed in 2012 after Cameron returned to his hometown of Adelaide after spending a few years living and working in Melbourne. Pulling on the boots at his local football club, Cameron met the other members of the band – guitarist Ben Marwe, bass player James Bartold and drummer Miles Wilson – and the seeds of Bad//Dreems were sown. “I met Ben first and got to talking to him about music, and we started writing some songs, and then we started jamming with James and Miles, who were playing in a band with Ben’s older brother, and there was an instant chemistry,” Cameron says.

The band took its name from the bad dreams Cameron says he’s prone to experience; in a backhanded nod to the power of Google, the misspelling mitigates the risk of the band being lost in an almost infinite digital heap. “If you Google ‘bad dreams’ on the internet, it just comes up with this myriad of self-help sites and weird peoples’ blogs,” Cameron says.

Bad//Dreems’ lyrics, and the film clips that accompany some of the band’s songs, suggest a bittersweet relationship between the band and the city in which it continues to reside. “I’ve got a pretty negative view of Adelaide most of the time, which I feel guilty about a lot of the time because the city cops a lot of criticism,” Cameron says. “I moved back here on a whim because the band I was in while I was in Melbourne finished, and there was a job back here that I could start straight away, and I had no money, so I could come back and live with my parents and sponge off them for a bit. It was a one year plan, but I’m still here five years later,” Cameron laughs.

Almost paradoxically, Cameron says the strengths of the Adelaide scene possibly lie in those attributes commonly used to criticise the city: the limited number of venues, the isolation and the relative dearth of opportunities compared to Melbourne and Sydney. “It’s a very cheap and easy lifestyle, with a nice climate,” Cameron says. “Because there’s such a paucity of cultural stuff going compared to places like Melbourne, you can look at all music with fresh eyes without being coloured by what everyone is talking about. So that isolation and insularity is a bad and a good thing. So as much as I’m always jealous about not being in Melbourne, for music and songwriting it’s been good to be able to take a step back and see what’s going on in other cities, where there’s more vibrant scenes. That said, I do find Adelaide very frustrating, it can be stifling conservative.”

Cameron recounts a theory he developed and proffered to his father about the relationship between Adelaide’s conservative cultural idiosyncrasies, and the city’s weird criminal history. “I had this theory that tied together the Family murders and the cultural decline of Adelaide,” Cameron says.  “Coming out of the 1970s when it was this vibrant time, but then there were the Family murders with all the conspiracy theories involving judges and doctors and that stifled everyone and made them all stuffy and conservative. And I put this theory to my dad and asked him what he thought.  And he paused for a bit, and then said, ‘That’s the biggest load of bullshit you’ve ever come up with,’ ” Cameron laughs.

Outside of the confines of Adelaide, Bad//Dreems trekked across to Sydney at the end of 2013 to record some songs with Mark Optiz, famed Australian producer of The Angels, The Models, INXS, Cold Chisel and The Divinyls. “It was awesome working with him,” Cameron says. “I’d been reading the Opitz autobiography. I’d always known his name from his involvement with ‘80s bands, even though a lot of those bands weren’t on our list of influences. But you had to respect what he’d done. And after reading about him he seemed like a really good fit for our band because his whole approach to production is based around songwriting. So we got in touch with him, and got along really well with him.”

Bad//Dreems’ association with Opitz will extend to the recording of the band’s first album in December. “We’re aiming to have the album out mid next year – that’s what we’ve got penciled in.” But while Bad//Dreems is now signed to Ivy League and has the notional support of an established label, Cameron says the band will continue to take things at its own pace. “The timing for the album isn’t hard and fast, we don’t want to be put under any specific industry pressure or time frames, we just want to do something that we’re happy with.”

As for the future, Cameron says the band will remain in Adelaide for the immediate future. “So much of the band’s identity is tied to being in Adelaide,” Cameron says. “It’d weird if we decamped to some thriving scene, it could totally screw us up!”

BY PATRICK EMERY