Features Weird Dreams: ‘I’ve Always Had Vivid Dreams…’

“I’ve always had very vivid dreams ever since I was a young child, the ones where you would wake up and everything would still appear so clear to you,” says Weird Dreams’ singer Doran Edwards as he recovers from an impressive support slot performance backing The War On Drugs at Camden’s Electric Ballroom the night prior. “It’s always been an important part of my life. They become almost like another reality in a way.”

Mainstream media has always been keen to blame strange behavioural affectations on video games, music or films but in this case it seems to fit somewhat. Sometimes you wonder that if you were sat in a pub, nursing a pint with one of your heroes, how much you would actually have in common beyond your love of their work. For example, I wouldn’t have thought that Morrissey and I would have too much to agree on sitting in a dark and dingy Wetherspoons. But I don’t think this would be a problem with Weird Dreams and their self-proclaimed hero David Lynch, whose name litters their press releases and crops up somewhere on their official blog on a nearly daily basis.

Lynch’s back catalogue of films, and Twin Peaks especially, is centrally concerned with “weird dreams” and often these visions have some meaning or reflection on a certain character’s real life consciousness. “I just love the way that in Lynch dreams and reality aren’t wholly different worlds, there’s not such a strict distinction in his work. This is something I’ve always felt too.”

“I used to get insomnia quite badly,” Doran tells us. “I definitely feel like sometimes the line is blurred between dreaming and being awake, as your sub-conscious sifts through your library of thoughts and your mind goes off on tangents. Sometimes these dream-like states tell you more about you than you can tell yourself.”

Unconscious unravellings are not the only thing that links the band to Lynch. As in a Lynchian suburban world, not all is as it seems in the band’s songs. Such a chorus as “Love it when you hurt me bad,” for example, exhibit a bittersweetness. “I’m a big fan of 1950’s era doo-wop and ‘60s girl groups which share this feeling of such idealism, but it’s because a stereotype was to sing these sweet love songs to the point where they became a bit meaningless,” the singer explains. “I really love that contrast.”

But ultimately the band has actually been quite a cathartic experience for Edwards. “My insomnia’s gotten a lot better recently. You’d think that being on the road would make you even more nocturnal but we’ve spent the whole tour getting drunk. After getting drunk you don’t really remember your dreams.”

Weird Dreams’ debut album ‘Choreography’ is out now via Tough Love.

Taken from the April 2012 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.