Adelaide band Bad Dreems targets ‘racist, ignorant’ Australians in fiery single Jack
In its provocative single Jack, Adelaide rock quintet Bad Dreems ‘takes the fight up’ about the confronting reality of our shared history with First Nations people.
In an incendiary three-minute single that connects this country’s ancient past with the present day, Adelaide rock band Bad Dreems urges Australians to educate themselves about the confronting reality of our shared history with First Nations people.
“I’ve got an itch that I cannot scratch, right down in the middle of this ageing back,” sings Ben Marwe in the opening verse. “Three things that we cannot say: ‘Invasion, genocide, Australia Day.’”
Backed by distorted guitars and a thundering rhythm section, the track skewers gaps in the national curriculum when its members – all in their 30s – went to school: “No Truganini, Jandamarra, no Billy Barlow / No referendum, stolen children, no Eddie Mabo”.
Marwe’s vocal then climbs to a chanted chorus that’s not so much sung as spat: “What you think about that, Jack? / 31 years and I’m talking back / What you think about that, Jack? / 60,000 years, why don’t we give it back?”
The result is a landmark song for the South Australian quintet, which formed in 2011 and has released three albums while the musicians work day jobs to afford the time and space to feed their creative outlet.
“The premise of the band is that most of our songwriting is about Australia,” said guitarist and songwriter Alex Cameron, 39, who works as a surgeon in regional Victoria.
“I don’t think there’s anything more Australian than the issues that face us with the history of how First Nations people have been treated, and also the future of how that has to be repaired,” he said.
According to Cameron, the path to writing Jack began three years ago, when Bad Dreems opted to record an urgent, evocative take on the classic Warumpi Band track Blackfella/Whitefella for Triple J’s Like a Version cover series.
For the Warumpi cover in 2019, the group was backed by collaborators including Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett, Groote Eylandt singer Emily Wurramara and two members of Arnhem Land rock band Mambali.
“That started the journey of education and learning for us,” he said. “It’s continued through our trip up to Arnhem Land recently, and this song is the product of some of that.”
In August, the Adelaide quintet ventured north for an eye-opening 11-date tour with Jabiru act Black Rock Band, where they were warmly welcomed into remote communities.
It was a trip that contained echoes of the rock ’n’ roll past: in 1986, Midnight Oil ventured into the desert and the Top End with the Warumpi Band for what the musicians viewed as a life-changing tour, as documented in a 1988 book by the late NT-based journalist Andrew McMillan titled Strict Rules.
Released on Friday, Jack fits neatly into a lineage of sharply worded Australian protest songs that includes a 2016 track by hip-hop duo A.B. Original titled January 26, which criticised the national malaise on the subject of learning about Indigenous Australian history (Sample lyric: “You watching telly for The Bachelor / But wouldn’t read a book about a f..kload of massacres?”).
Like January 26, Jack is unmistakably provocative, and according to the songwriter, that’s the point.
“Australia, in large part, is still racist and ignorant,” Cameron said. “Maybe we’re a Trojan horse, in a way, because we are a band of five white men who come from a position of real privilege.
“I don’t have any qualms about standing up for what’s written in this song.
“We’re happy for anyone to come at us with those views, to expose how the problem’s still there, and take the fight up to them.”
In support of its new single, Bad Dreems begins a six-date tour in Launceston on October 21, followed by concerts in Hobart, Sydney, Melbourne, its hometown of Adelaide, and Brisbane on November 25.