For Bad//Dreems, a good music scene is like a local football club
After fifteen years and four albums, Adelaide’s ‘literate pub rockers’ Bad//Dreems are preparing to hit the showers with a ‘hyper-intense’ farewell LP and a Gather Round-adjacent music festival that might bankrupt them first.
When Alex Cameron first moved back home to Adelaide, he didn’t have a band or much of a plan. Back in Melbourne, his old group Dardanelles had glimpsed success with an Australian Music Prize-nominated debut, festival slots, airplay and high-profile supports before hitting the scrap heap.
“I thought my time in the music industry was over,” he tells InReview.
That changed one day in 2010, when he befriended a younger player at his local football club named Ben Marwe. The pair started making songs and going to shows together, and when another band dropped out of a Rocket Bar lineup organised by Marwe’s older brother, they stepped up to the plate with a rhythm section – drummer Myles Wilson and bassist James Bartold – drafted from the older Marwe’s band.
“There was no plan or foresight, we just enjoyed playing together,” Cameron says of the group that became Bad//Dreems. “It worked well, and then it just sort of went from there.”
Cameron’s old music industry connections scored them a slot opening for Children Collide on a long national tour – a galvanising experience as the four-piece slept on floors and rarely broke even.
“You realise how impassioned you were about music and being in a band,” he recalls. “It was just fun, and it was a good time for music. There were a lot of good Australian bands around – you know, going to the Metro, watching bands like Twerps, Slug Guts, Dick Diver, Eddie Current Suppression Ring, and some of the Adelaide bands doing similar things too.”
When the band’s early releases saw them disparagingly tagged with the ‘pub rock’ label by the East Coast music press, they decided to lean in to it.
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“Because really, we were not, you know, sophisticated musicians. And also at that time I was re-examining that music, which I’d probably dismissed earlier because it’s sort of the music of your parents’ generation. I’m talking about bands like Cold Chisel, The Angels, Midnight Oil. Re-examining that and finding that, actually, there was a lot there that I related to.”
For the band’s first album Cameron cold-called Mark Oppitz, the man behind the desk for Cold Chisel’s East, Barnes’ Working Class Man, and INXS’ Shabooh Shoobah (“If you listen to Triple M, he’s basically produced every third band,” Cameron says).
The album, Dogs At Bay, made Bad//Dreems bigger than any of Cameron’s past projects, from the GOD-invoking bruiser ‘Cuffed & Collared’ becoming a Triple J staple to Go-Betweens founder Robert Forster dubbing ‘My Only Friend’ a “masterpiece of Australian rock.”
“When the band started, if someone had said that one day you would play to 100 people that you didn’t know, that’s all I could ever wish for. So going on to do stuff like supporting Midnight Oil, Pavement, At the Drive-In, The Avalanches like, that’s just beyond my wildest dreams in music to play with bands that we all grew up idolising.”
Another formative moment came when Oils frontman Peter Garrett joined the group for Triple J’s Like A Version, covering the Warumpi Band classic ‘Blackfella / Whitefella’ alongside Emily Wurramara and Brad Bara and Don Murrungun from Mambali.
“The really special part about it was getting these guys from Groote Eylandt, Mambali. We briefly met them at Bigsound where they were performing. I asked them afterwards, ‘What was that melody that you sang, was it just improvised?’ And Brad [Bara], the guy who sang it, said, ‘Oh, no, it’s a songline.”
Bara told Cameron it was first written by his ancestors when they saw Macassan sailing boats on the horizon hundreds of years earlier.
The band would eventually tour to Arnhem Land, as their subsequent three albums wrestled with the contradictions and unresolved tensions of modern Australia in songs like ‘Jack’, from 2024’s Hoo Ha! (“At my school they taught the Russian revolution, the stump jump plough and the Roman constitution / No Bennelong, Namatjira, no William Barak,” Marwe sings in ‘Jack’) and recent single ‘January 26’.
This month, the band released their fifth album, Ultra Dundee, with a title dreamt up by Marwe that crystallises the band’s outlook. “My idea of Ultra Dundee was this hypercolour, hyper-intense version of Australia,” Cameron explains.
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The band largely recorded it themselves in a small Thebarton studio dubbed ‘The Showers’. While Ultra Dundee retains the needling guitars and fist-pumping choruses of their earlier work (see ‘Shadowland’ and ‘St Francis of Andamooka’), the time and space let Cameron and guitarist Alistair Wells refine and expand the band’s palette.
“We’ve tried to capture the subconscious of Australia – trying to push into the uncomfortable, the dark, the weird, because that’s always been what I found interesting.”
On the day of its release, Cameron and his bandmates also announced it would be their last for the foreseeable future.
“It was just getting very difficult to keep it going over 15 years,” he says of the ‘indefinite hiatus’. “Certainly the industry side of things, it’s so hard to get your music heard. That ends up being a lot of work, which is not really the work I got into music to be doing – stuff like accounting and marketing and social media.”
Cameron and the band have been open about the challenges about Australia’s music industry, and while sleeping on floors and spending weeks on the road once excited him, at 43 years old he now concedes it’s “my idea of hell”.
“In the time I have, I kind of want to actually focus more on actually writing and making music.”
In a somewhat counter-intuitive move, they’re bowing out with the most logistically complex farewell: a two-day festival dubbed ‘Gather Sounds’ that Cameron says, half-jokingly, might bankrupt them.
Timed to coincide with the AFL’s Gather Round, it’s a “full circle” moment for a band that grew out of a footy club friendship – and a noisy rebuke to the notion sport and arts sit on opposing teams.
“When football clubs are done well, and when you can lay aside some of the misogyny, or poor behaviour, or boorishness, it provides a space for all sorts of people. I’m talking more at a local level; in a good football club the worst player in the C-grade is valued as much as the best player in the A-grade. As much as the old guy who comes in and goal umpires, as much as the old grandmother who’s at the canteen, as much as the weird outcast who gets paid five bucks to do the scoreboard.
“You can look at a music scene in the same way. They’re places where people can feel welcome and valued, and I think that’s what we’re striving for with this festival.”
Bad//Dreems will launch Ultra Dundee at Gather Sounds on Friday April 10 with West Thebarton, The Empty Threats and Jon Ann, performing again on Saturday April 11 alongside Beddy Rays, Phil Jamieson, Caitlin Harnett and the Pony Boys, Kurralta Park and more
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