Rockers Bad Dreems keep rolling up to their day jobs as they release third album Doomsday Ballet
Bad Dreems may be one of the bands ushering in a rock revival in Australia but they have kept their day jobs. This is why.
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When garage rock band Bad Dreems formed in Adelaide seven years ago, the musicians made a conscious decision to keep their day jobs.
Founder, guitarist and songwriter Alex Cameron continued his reconstructive plastic surgery studies and practice, frontman Ben Marwe is a landscape designer, the other members including Ali Wells have music-related occupations.
The Australia Council’s 2017 report Making Art Work found that “in the financial year 2014-15, practising professional artists earned average gross incomes of $48,400”.
As the band, which also includes James Bartold and Miles Wilson, release their third album Doomsday Ballet, Cameron says both the financial realities of a music career and previous experience with the industry had convinced them to juggle performing and recording with day jobs.
“It was planned we would all keep our jobs pretty much forever because most of us have been in bands before which have, at some level, had industry involvement and knew how difficult it was to make money, especially now,” Cameron said.
“It can be a difficult juggle; Miles and I were sitting in the Virgin lounge when a flight was delayed and wouldn’t get in until midnight and both of us were dreading going back to work the next day.
“But I don’t think we would change it even though I did struggle with people maybe thinking I was a dilettante hedging my bets.
“Am I being piss-weak not having the courage of my convictions and putting everything into my true passion which at the end of the day is music?
“I know opportunities have been passed up because of my job and I know at times I feel I am not able to put enough into songwriting and music. These two worlds are poles apart.”
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They aren’t the only established rockers who have salaried employment.
Radio Birdman’s Deniz Tek has worked for decades as a trauma surgeon in NSW hospitals, his Birdman bandmate and now member of the Soul Movers Pip Hoyle is an executive at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney and Redgum’s John Schumann works as an advocate for the treatment of police and armed services personnel suffering PTSD.
Cameron tries to keep his night job on the down low from those he works with in medicine and his patients; he specialises in hand and skin cancers.
But in the era of Dr Google, his dual occupations can evoke surprising reactions from those he may be treating.
And “cheeky nurses” occasionally prank him by playing a Bad Dreems song in the operating theatre — or an Ed Sheeran playlist to tease him about his garage rock proclivities.
“We’re not like a chart-topping act where the person on the street knows who we are, especially not surgeons,” he said, wryly.
“A whole group of people I work with came to our last Melbourne show which was really nice of them and kind of embarrassing. But that’s all my insecurities.
“I’m always a bit worried about patients googling me and finding a beer-swilling pub rocker is about to operate on them. Most actually love it but in the past some (patients) have questioned why I was doing (music), whether it was a fitting thing to do as a surgeon.”
When Bad Dreems emerged with their debut album Dogs At Bay in 2015, produced by Mark Opitz whose long list of credits include almost every notable Australian rock band including the Angels, AC/DC, Cold Chisel and INXS, some critics slapped them with the “pub rock” descriptor like it was a “dirty word”.
While some of their lyrics were focused on politically and socially conscious themes and their sonic influences stemmed from the post-punk era of Television and Devo, they were treated as an anachronism in the mainstream music scene dominated by R & B-flecked pop and hip hop.
Doomsday Ballet pairs them with producers Burke Reid and Jack Ladder whose canon is “underground garage music” and you can hear the difference in the ramped-up melodic sensibilities of their new songs including Cannonball and Sally’s Place.
“When we first started, pub rock was foisted on us as an insult; a few reviewers from the eastern states used that to slander us and at that time, I would have thought of pub rock as a dirty word too,” Cameron said.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t like the music but more its overtones of something a little chauvinist, misogynistic or crude. For 50 years, people and music have been inundated by white men with guitars and that has brought a prejudgement of any kind of rock music.
“And then I thought ‘F … you, we will do pub rock in honour of some of the best music made in this culture.
“Now there are a lot of bands who are riding that wave who weren’t around when we were getting slagged off.”
The songs of Doomsday Ballet explore various tangents of a world in chaos as it adjusts to the paradigm-shifting influence of President Donald Trump, Brexit, climate change and gender identity.
They are difficult and delicate subjects as conversations in everyday life or in the toxic echo chambers of social media, let alone in a three minute rock song, so he and the band took more of an absurdist than narrative approach.
He credits the influence of hip hop for their songs being less linear and more character-driven.
“I think some of the best lyrics today are by hip hop artists,” he said.
“One conversation will be dealing with something existential and then the next will be talking about racial politics and a third conversation is making pop culture references.
“It’s a lot different to the traditional pop songwriting where you stick with a theme. I wanted to explore a lyrical approach that was more in time with what the world is now.”
Doomsday Ballet is out now. For all tour dates, baddreems.com
Originally published as Rockers Bad Dreems keep rolling up to their day jobs as they release third album Doomsday Ballet