Adelaide-based band Bad//Dreems have had a stellar year following the release of singles like “Chills” and “Caroline.” They are set to release their debut EP Badlands. Sosefina Fuamoli had a chat with guitarist Alex Cameron about working in the studio and living in Adelaide.
Things seem to be going well with the band. What’s your experience been like?
Yeah, we’re having a good time. We’re releasing our first physical release. It’s exciting and we’re enjoying ourselves, that’s for sure.
With the EP itself, how are you all feeling about finally having this one all together?
Yeah, good. I mean, it sort of comprises of songs that have been written over the history of the band. Like you’ve got “Chills” on there, which was the first song we ever wrote, and then right through to “Hoping For,” which is the most recent song on the album. They’re not all recorded in the same recording sessions as well, which is spaced out over a year. So, it’s not an album where you really plan the vision and you sit down and map out ten songs and record them in one sitting – it’s more of a collection of the singles that we put online, plus a few new songs. So, I guess, we took our time to put that together as well to make sure we were happy with the songs and we recorded them properly. We recorded a lot of songs across that year that never reached the public domain because we weren’t happy with either the song or the recording.
What was it like recording with Paul ‘Woody’ Annison, Jack Farley and Johnny from Children Collide?
Yeah, I’ve known Johnny Mackay for a fair while just from being in other bands in Melbourne, and that was the first time he’d actually produced another band. So, it was exciting for both parties. And he worked with Jack Farley who’s obviously made lots of great records and he does the more engineering sort of stuff. Wheareas Johnny, obviously being a great song writer, has lots of good input with the pre-production and the arrangement of the songs. So, they were really the team – those two guys. It was sad we couldn’t do more, but they were both busy. And now Jonny’s gone overseas. And then Woody Annison – he produced my old band’s album and was our manager.
We’re pretty close mates. It’s really interesting to see the contrast between the different styles. Woody has been making records in high-end studios for thirty years, and the stuff he can do with all the equipment in there – pulling out sounds and the mixing process, is pretty amazing. Whereas, with Jack and Johnny, it was recorded in a loft on Brunswick Street in Melbourne. They both produced the result and I guess it just goes to show that there’s many ways to skin a cat when it comes to recording. We’re definitely not a band that has to go in to an awesome studio, but also on the other hand we’re not a band, which has been in vogue these days, that is against doing that either. We’re not like ‘oh we have to record with two mics and do it ourselves.’ We just want to do whatever suits our vision, I guess.
What would you want to tell future listeners of this EP? What is the main message that you wanted to convey with your music?
I guess there where quite important themes in there for us. For me, it was about moving back to Adelaide and having left behind my musical ambitions in another city. But then rediscovering my joy for music with my new friends – my band mates. And then it was about embracing the situation that you find yourself in at that time. I didn’t really know anyone in Adelaide, especially, in music. But I just started making music again and found more people who were into music and since then I’ve met heaps of other great bands in the city. There’s a lot of optimism in there, but on the other hand, a lot of the songs are also about Adelaide and the fact that it can be a quite oppressive and conservative place. And also the weird dark underbelly that goes on. I’ve always been interested in true crime and I’m interested in the family murders. There are no songs that are explicitly about any of that but we tried to capture that kind of setting that you can find. There’s a mixture of boredom and darkness sometimes.
I think there are a lot of parts of Adelaide that are really interesting and untouched. We filmed that video clip for “Caroline” in the northern fringe of the city. The actual suburbs are kind of like petering out halfway between Palmlands and the city. The video for “Chills” which we did down at Port Adelaide, which I reckon is an awesome place, with all these empty warehouses and weird shit from all over the world. It’s kind of a dead and deserted place with all these amazing buildings. I think that people get hung up in Adelaide and negative about how conservative and plain it is, but I think that just means that there’s lots of places you can discover yourself. In Melbourne or Sydney, all the hipsters have already gone to all those places, so they’ve become commercialized. It’s kind of exciting here because you can kind of make your own adventures.
You guys have been riding many waves of success since 2012. You’re the second most played act on Unearthed. You’re supporting Oh Mercy and Wavves. For an Adelaide-based band, would you say you’re going well?
Oh yeah. We don’t really have any career plan. I think that we’re all realists in the fact that we don’t that we’ll ever make money off music or at least from making the music that we want to make. But having said that, we can still be ambitious about keeping working. We do everything ourselves; we don’t have a manager or a label. Well, we’ve got small labels putting us out. We don’t have a booking agent. We kind of work pretty hard at getting out what we want to get out from music. In this day and age, for a start there are so many great Australian bands putting out music. We aspire to play alongside those bands and further down the track to put out a really good album. And we would love to have the chance to go to otherseas and the good thing about music now is that you’re only a blog post away or an e-mail away from getting the chance to do that.
But in terms of ever having any commercial aspirations, our plan is to make it so that we don’t ever have to really worry about that. We us money from our jobs to pay for flights to go to and do gigs interstate in order to get exposure quickly. Some people outside of music say ‘Oh what do you do this for? When are you going to make any money?’ And I say ‘Well, it’s not really about that’. One guy said this at a golf course, and I said ‘Well you pay for your golf membership or your golf clubs, I look at it as being the same with music. As a hobby’. I get a lot of pleasure from it.
You’re doing it for the love of it.
Yeah, exactly. I guess I’m lucky that I’ve had that experience. With the band I used to be in, we had that naïve ambition that this was going to be our career. So, I’ve got a bit of hindsight starting again, knowing what I wanted to get out of it.
Bad//Dreems EP Badlands is out now.
