OPITZ MAKES BAD DREEMS COME TRUE
The first thing I explain to the band is that I want them to be a band. That means you play as a band. Laying down parts separately to a click track is not being a band!
When Bad Dreems were putting together a list of producers they’d like to work with ‘dead or alive’, they started by dreaming big, writing down names like Martin Hannett — the Factory Records partner who well and truly passed away in 1991. Then Mark Opitz came up. They weren’t sure which side of the mortal coil he resided on, but put him down anyway.
“Around that time I was reading the book he had out,” said guitarist Alex Cameron, talking about Opitz’s ‘bi-epic’ Sophisto-Punk. “We were like, ‘We think he’s still alive but haven’t really heard anything he’s done lately.’”
Opitz is, in fact, well and truly alive, and still actively producing and engineering — mostly out of Colin Wynne’s Thirty Mill Studios in Melbourne. He also recently signed on for a visiting fellowship with the Australian National University. The band excavated his details from the internet and sent him an email. “He liked the music and that was it, basically,” said Cameron.
The band has recorded two albums now with Opitz, the first was Dogs at Bay, which followed on the heels of their succession of singles getting Triple J airplay. The second is Gutful, another powerhouse Aussie release in the pub rock/garage tradition with boatloads of killer melodies.
WALKING IN WALKER’S SHOES
Despite being a pillar of the Australian music scene, the pub rock playing field is surrounded by stigma, something the band was aware of when they worked with a guy famous for recording bands like AC/DC, Cold Chisel and The Angels.
“I didn’t realise how much of a role he’d played in the lineage of Australian rock,” said Cameron, who dug up Opitz’s diverse range of credits in his research, which includes pop bands like The Reels. “I read how The Triffid’s was his favourite Australian song. What came out of all that for us is how he was really into song craft. We’re a band based
