DREAMS: Luke Steele & Daniel Johns' Two-Man Gang From The Future

"I was trying to get in touch with Dan [Johns] and then I found out, 'Oh, he's gone down to Hollywood for the night,' and I was like, 'Oh, no, here we go!' And then he comes back the next morning for this photo shoot with this massive DREAMS tattoo - he goes all in!" Luke Steele marvels of his DREAMS co-conspirator's maximum-coverage neck tattoo that permanently advertises their band name. "It was like, 'Yeah, we better make sure that we get the domain name now'," he laughs. "I actually made the [band] logo from Dan's tattoos... that scorpion's actually on his chest and then the DREAMS logo is taken from his neck." 

So has Steele had the pair's new musical project inked anywhere on his body? "Nah, not yet," he admits, before cheekily adding, "I gotta man up, right?"

To say that the DREAMS aesthetic (as demonstrated via their music video for debut single - No One Defeats Us) is strong would be a gross understatement, particularly Johns' baseball bat-wielding alter ego, Dr Dreams, who appears shirtless underneath a long, animal print fur coat decorated with tongues and eyeballs. To complete the look, Dr Dreams' eyes have different coloured irises, the left eye a glowing, menacing, luminescent blue. "I mean, to be honest, the alter egos were basically just how we would like to dress if it didn't attract so much attention," Johns chuckles. "It wasn't that much of a stretch." 

Steele's DREAMS character goes by the name of Miracle and Johns stresses, "It's not like we've escaped ourselves and invented a whole kind of persona, there's a lot of stuff that comes from our hearts... There's a lot of quite personal stuff, especially lyrically, on the record.

"We wanted it to be like a two-man gang from the future, 'cause I think, you know, in the future hopefully people are still gonna have hearts."

DREAMS followed up the release of this debut album's title track with another single, Silence, the day of their live premiere at the first weekend of Coachella. During an onsite interview that KROQ-FM conducted with the pair, Steele confirmed this song was written as a reaction to the Charlottesville riots. 

The first band to ever be booked to play Coachella before releasing any music, DREAMS performed on the Mojave stage. Was this the very same stage another of Steele's outfits, Empire Of The Sun, graced last year? "It was different, one across," Steele details. "We played the Sahara [stage] with Empire [Of The Sun] and the Mojave with [DREAMS]."

When asked where the DREAMS Coachella rehearsals took place, Steele offers, "I have a pretty big front lounge room and we set up a PA, and Dan and I just sort of sang with different pedals and tracks and, you know, kind of put it together like that. It was a really cool way to do it, to start with, and then we went into a big room with the rest of the guys and the whole production team and, yeah! But, you know, a lot of [the rehearsals] were quite chilled, with us just eating sushi and drinking coffee and, yeah! Getting dizzy by having too much nag champa around."

Given that Johns suffers from stage fright, we wonder what level his anxiety was at before that first-ever DREAMS show. "It was pretty high, I'm not gonna lie," Johns allows. "We didn't have a lot of rehearsal time and we'd never performed, ever, and the DREAMS show was quite technical. If you miss your tech cue - like, pedals and stuff - it still sounds alright, but it sounds so much better when everyone's just completely on. It's almost a bit like Kraftwerk: it's just gotta be perfect or it doesn't sound right. So I think that combined with stage fright was, like, not only am I scared to be in front of people, I'm also scared that I'm gonna ruin it," he laughs.

Steele elaborates, "We had vocal processors that we've never really used and we were just using a whole different technique of having mirrored set-ups. 'Cause there are so many harmonies and half-time vocal recording cut-ups and stuff that we have to go into a whole other world that, yeah! It was cool, you know?"

We're tipping that if a member of DREAMS missed a cue, punters wouldn't even notice but the performer who stuffed up would probably fixate on their mistake. "Exactly," Johns agrees, "and it can totally throw you as a performer. But, you know, having said that, little things did go wrong and the show was great... I mean, for the most part, with stage fright, the bad bit is the three months leading up to the performance and knowing that at some point you've gotta go on stage. And anxiety kind of feeds itself; you start worrying and then you start projecting and thinking that you're gonna stuff something up. But once we were about two songs in, we were havin' a blast! We were having such a great time. And then the second Coachella show [the following weekend] was kind of a godsend, 'cause the second one's, 'Oh, alright, there's no more freaking out, we know we can do it,' and, of course, as soon as you're a bit more confident, the show is better, which is kind of what happened at the Vivid shows as well: the first show was great, but the next night we had the second show and the second show was just, like, on fire, 'cause you just need that one [show] to confirm you can still do it."

Many performers, including Johns, struggle with this frustratingly repetitive cycle of freaking out, going on stage, finishing the performance and then almost wanting "to go straight back on and do another show". "It's just classic anxiety," Johns observes. "If you face it, it almost inevitably gets more tolerable. If you keep hiding from it, it will create something that maybe, potentially, doesn't exist, in your head."

Footage from their live shows was spliced together with some backstage antics to create the music video for DREAMS' third single, Love To Live, which contains a string of proverbs such as, "Do unto others as you would have them do to you", and, "The heavy givers are the light complainers" - there's definitely a sense that DREAMS aim to inspire and empower. 

"We've always seen DREAMS as more than just a band and an album," Johns enlightens. "It was supposed to be - well it IS - these two kind of alter egos that came together, and a lot of it was about the art and the aesthetic. And a lot of the time when we were in the studio, we were painting and, you know, throwing paint at walls and a lot of it was about expression in more than just the musical sense."

The duo's paths first crossed when another of Steele's projects, The Sleepy Jackson, were enlisted on support duty for Silverchair's Across The Night tour in 2003 and Johns shares, "From that tour onwards, and actually including that tour, we were pretty much inseparable; when there was a guitar or a piano or a keyboard or anything, we were always backstage before and after shows writing songs." 

And Steele remembers the first-ever DREAMS recording session at Scott Horscroft's Big Jesus Burger Studios. "That was a big hub for everyone from The Presets to Dan to me to, you know, every band in Australia pretty much," he points out of the now-defunct Sydney studio. On this initial recording session, Steele recounts, "It was basically me and Scott Horscroft, and I spoke to Dan on the phone - he was still in Newcastle and he said he was up for a session - and I said, 'Yeah, I'm down here in the studio,' so he got in his Jaguar and fanged it down the highway and then two hours later we were recording this classic Beach Boys-sounding, Brian Wilson number... For years we were quite into the whole Brian Wilson world, and Dan had worked with Van Dyke Parks, and it was quite deep in that '60s harmony, acoustic sort of sound. And then, as the years went on, we realised at parties we were just sort of listening to dance music - you know, [The] Presets and all that kinda stuff - and so we wanted to make a record that was, like, a wild art record that we could play at our parties. So, yeah! In the last five years, I guess, we started working on that record." 

"We just pretty much globe trot and would go to wherever we could meet up in a studio," Johns expands, "whether it was LA or London or Newcastle or Santa Monica or the Central Coast."

It was at The Grove Studios on the Central Coast that DREAMS recorded their latest single, Young Minds, about which Johns recalls, "We laid it all down really quickly and then we'd always have this list that went from, like, 200 songs to then ten songs to then another hundred songs, and then we just kept changing the list until we got a shape of the record. And Young Minds is one of the songs that just never deviated from its spot on the list; it was always right there at number five or something [laughs].

"So I think we kind of knew there was something special about that song, because we do tend to change our minds about things - and change directions - and things that we loved would fall off the list and, you know, Young Minds was just one of those songs that always stayed. I think we loved the message and, I mean, I think it feels quite anthemic and uplifting; it's got aggression and it has that thing that DREAMS is all about, like, this two-man gang - it does feel like we're fighting something."

Another standout album track, the Daft Punk-funky California, survived from the duo's "French phase", which was "probably five years ago", Steele tells. "We were actually in this great studio, which is taken over now by a production team called The Stereotypes that do Bruno Mars, and 24K [Magic], and all that so, yeah! We were in that studio and it was through our love of French and Ratatat guitars that that song was born."

As well as this DREAMS project, Steele reveals he's tracked a lot of The Sleepy Jackson's "pretty amazing new record" - with drummer Malcolm Clarke and Ben Witt [The Chemist] - over the last couple of years. Obviously Steele never suffers from songwriter's block, then. "Nah, I never have songwriter's block," he admits. "I just have times when I'm maybe not in my purple patch; like, you're surfin' good, but there's no swirl, you know? So it's like you just can't perform to your full potential kinda thing."

When asked what he admires most about his musical partner in crime, Johns extols, "I always have admired not only his talent and commitment to his craft, but his perseverance is pretty much like nothing I've ever seen. He'll just keep going until it's the way he wants it to be, whereas [with] a lot of other people, if it's not going well or not going according to plan - a lot of the time I don't think [they] will just keep going 'til it's right... but, I mean, there's a myriad of things about him that are pretty spectacular artistically and personally, actually."

The sonic creations on DREAMS' debut record are equal parts demented, sexy and empowering. Electronic elements are paired with raw instrumental flourishes to ensure it never comes off as overly polished. "I think it could be rawer," Steel reflects, "but, yeah! We're definitely loving it, but it seems we could go even further now, with the world, you know? Just super-raw on maybe the next record."