Bad//Dreems was conceived at Cameron and Marwe’s football club in the inner suburbs of Adelaide, back in 2012. “I reckon the toughest team we played against was Salisbury North,” Cameron says, when asked about his favourite footy memories from those days. “There was a fair bikie connection with that club. I remember one time we had a guy playing for us who was a member of the bikie task force and I asked him if he recognised anyone on the field, and he said ‘Sure: number 5, 12, 23, 17,’ [laughs].
“I don’t really like the AFL that much,” he continues. “What I like about football is the amateur leagues when you get situations like a privileged university or college team playing against a team like Salisbury North. It’s a real tribal thing. Most of the time it’s in a really good spirit, but sometimes it can get a bit carried away.”
The dystopian aspect of suburban culture is woven through Bad//Dreems’ debut album, Dogs at Bay. On the track Bogan Pride, Bad//Dreems delve into the murky nocturnal world of steroid-laden bogans on the tear, a song that Cameron clarifies is “about the confused male youth of Australia.” The idea for the song came when Cameron was at a dance festival “stone cold sober”, observing the attendant male culture in its drugged up, shirtless glory.
“There’s this hyper-masculinity which is also a bit homoerotic, but they’re also really aggressive ‘cause of the drugs they’re on,” he says. “It’s really gross, and it’s also really confusing. And heaps of them have also got Southern Cross tattoos – and it was about the time of the Cronulla riots, so it was really dystopian and also really disturbing.”
Marwe compares the dance festival scenes to a “modern day Hindley Street”; the seedy entertainment strip on the western fringe of the Adelaide city centre. “I suppose I can relate to that because I’ve been a 21 year old out at night, with plenty of testosterone,” Cameron says. “I wanted to make a short clip to accompany it, which was going to be a combination of The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up and Head On with Alex Dimitriades with these two guys leading up to a fight, but they actually have sex. But I suppose it might not have had a good run on television [laughs].”
The conversation turns to the pub rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s – bands like Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and The Angels, whose tunes have become associated with so-called bogan culture. “You listen to those bands now, and you realise they were making really great art,” Cameron says. “Even a band like Hunters & Collectors with a song like Throw Your Arms Around Me, or even better, ‘You don’t make me feel like I’m a woman anymore’ [Say Goodbye]. He’s a hyper-macho guy, but he’s singing from a woman’s perspective.”
An ongoing issue of debate concerns whether the concept ‘bogan’ is about a specific attitude, a socio-economic profile or, like the mod and rocker subcultures of the 1960s, a visible style. “I actually have more problems with the middle-class bogans,” Cameron says. “You look at the AFL – you’ve got people like Sam Newman, who’s a massive misogynist. I find that much worse than anything to do with economics. I actually don’t know what the word bogan really means.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
