Shelvo is definitely the interview king but this time round, you’re stuck with the Quinterviewer. With Splendour in the Grass sinking down into a financial mire rivalling the actual mire I spent three days stuck in back in 2022, the Byron Bay Parklands were conspicuously quiet on July 21st 2024.
The Bangalow Bowls Club down the road was not however. Our good friends Bad Dreems saw fit to give the locals what they deserve, with an incendiary show that had enough stage divers to make an Olympics talent scout salivate at the mouth. Before they tore the roof off the bowls club band room however, Bad Dreems sat down with us in the stands of the neighbouring footy field to answer five of our quickfire questions!
Members
Alex Cameron: Lead guitar
Miles Wilson: Drums
Ali Wells: Guitar (not interviewed)
Ben Marwe: Vocals (not interviewed)
Tom Stevens: Bass (not interviewed)
1. The world is ending and you’ve got time for one last dance, which song would you pick to do a Doomsday Ballet to?
Miles: Does it have to be one of our or can it be any song?
OB: Any song, any song.
Miles: Coney Island Baby by Lou Reed. It’s a bit slower, could get stuck into the step work of perhaps a waltz, and I think that’d befitting as the world goes into oblivion.
OB: What about you Alex?
Alex: (singing) I wanna know what love is! I want you to show me!
Miles: I thought you were gonna say, “Fuck it mask off, mask off”.
Alex: Yeah, that’d also be good.
2. Have you ever come up with something to do with the band that you thought was genius (potentially while off your head) only to realise it was a really Dumb Idea later on?
Miles: I see what you’ve done there! I was thinking about this the other night. When around the time that Gutful came out, there was like talk of playing us playing in front of the Parliament.
Alex: It was Pauline Hanson’s office.
Miles: Yeah, Pauline Hanson’s office. Just like doing a rogue gig until we get arrested. And it almost got across the line but in hindsight it would have been fucking… It was probably for the best we didn’t do that one.
Alex: Yeah, nah there’s probably been a lot of ideas like that. What else? Doing the ballet to Doomsday Ballet was kinda a bit of a weird one but that was mainly just because a friend or relative of the band was a ballet dancer.
Miles: There have been some potential remixes that didn’t get across the line.
3. It’s been a few years since Gutful was released. In the titular track, you guys listed quite a few things that you’d had a gutful of already. I’m interested to find out what’s the top thing you’ve had a gutful of in 2024?
Miles: Wow, yeah that’s a good question. What have I had a gutful of? Yeah so, it’s a little bit convoluted to explain. But I was talking to our bass player Steve-O (Tom Stevens) this weekend about it. It’s that fuckboy influencer haircut that’s like blow dried at the front and the rest is like worked up into sort of like a pie and then they do the lip bite and then they do like the sexy guy thing.
(He imitates the sexy guy walk with his arms)
And it’s like, it’s insufferable, but you can’t look away. You’ve got to watch the trainwreck into like zero battery. I did it for hours yesterday before we went on stage at The Wallaby. It’s just so fascinating and like he’s (Steve-O) across it so he was sending me heaps of them and I was like “I’ve had a fucking gutful of that haircut, okay?”.
(Miles takes a long and pointed sip of his coffee)
Alex: And yeah, extending from that, just all of social media. It’s just- God, it just feels… ill.
Miles: The algo’s all over the shop.
4. Following on from the last question, imagine you’ve found yourself in Kirribilli House. For mysterious reasons unknown, you are the next PM of Australia. What are the first three things you’d change in Australia? Take time to answer, but at midnight, you’re evicted!
Miles: It’s about time! I’d probably reverse the No vote to start with.
Alex: Yeah, and a relatively serious answer, I’d mandate that anyone who goes into politics has to have a career of at least twenty years in another field that isn’t politics. It doesn’t have to be a profession. Change the way that fucking politics is done so you get rid of these career… blobs you know? These uninspiring, automatons, climbing-
Miles: Christopher Pyne!
Alex: Climbing, scheming, machinating, like nobodies who have-
Shelvo: Bruce Lehrmann!
Miles: Yes, less Brucies would be good yeah.
OB: That’s two things, you’ve got one more!
Miles: Probably on a less serious note, you know when you take in your Asahi’s and you get like ten cents for a unit in South Australia? Make that like fifty cents. And you make a little bit of a crust out of it and then everyone starts recycling and then we slowly reduce that issue a little more. I used to collect cans when I was younger, just scrape together a little bit of pocket money.
Alex: And another thing while we’re at this, I would take an absolute chainsaw to the music industry. Live Nation, gone!
(Everyone laughs)
Most of the people at the upper echelons of the industry probably imprisoned. Some sort of Stalin-esque purge. Gareth Liddiard will be introduced as like Minister for Arts.
OB: I’ve got a lot to say about a certain 2022 edition of a music festival not too far from here.
Miles: (nodding as he remembers all the mud) Yeah, I remember that one.
OB: Yeah, I remember seeing you fellas play that one ha-ha-ha.
Alex: I think a statue of jack from Pisties in Canberra? Yeah, that kinda of thing. Change the national anthem to perhaps a Mini Skirt song.
5. Bad Dreems and Mini Skirt are both known for their socially conscious lyrics about the state of modern Australia. With this in mind, is there a track that out there that you’d like to team up with your contemporaries to cover together?
Miles: Yeah, good question.
Alex: Yeah, we should have already done that actually.
Miles: I mean I’m such a massive fan of theirs that I’d happily team-up with them on any of the stuff that they’ve released. I think you could Mini Skirt up a version of Jack.
OB: It doesn’t have to be like one of your tracks or their tracks, it can be like any track out there.
Alex: Well, actually the other week we played a version of I Was Only Nineteen by Red Gum which is a classic Australian song that’s sometimes forgotten about.
OB: We’ll lock in I Was Only Nineteen by Red Gum then.
But that wasn’t it! Shelvo had a bonus question for question for Alex:
6. Paging Dr. Alex, there is this crazy rumour going around that you are moving to WA and forming a woodwind punk band trio with Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki and the Fremantle Doctor, and you’re calling the band School of Doc and the Winds of Change. Is there any truth to this rumour?
(Note: In addition to being a superb guitarist, Alex is also plastic and reconstructive surgeon, hence the question.)
Alex: I think that sounds like a horrible- I have known of some bands of doctors and they sound very cringeworthy. So, no.
Shelvo: So, we can deny that one?
Alex: Yeah. However, I will say that if it was Deniz Tek from Radio Birdman, I would say yes. We could get Deniz Tek, the drummer from Hunters and Collectors (Doug Faulconer), and Gordi. Dr. Karl’s not a medical doctor, he’s too clever.
Shelvo: You didn’t say no to the Fremantle Doctor.
Alex: Yeah, the Fremantle Doctor can come in.
(Note: The Freemantle Doctor is just a nickname for a nice, refreshing, summer sea breeze that comes in from the WA coast and should not be consulted for medical advice.)
The show that ensued that evening was one for the history books. The people of Bangalow sure know how to party! Even the band were concerned for our wellbeing but at least to my knowledge, everyone managed to make it out with only a few bruises, scrapes, and in Ben’s case, a ripped pair of pants.
Big shoutout to Dakota (@strictly.sentimental) as always for capturing all the action from the footy stands!
Bad Dreems aren’t up to much over the next few months but hopefully that will change. Maybe we might even have a role in that, watch this space…
