D:Ream

It was the unexpected hit of Glastonbury 2024: the reunion of one of the great dance bands of the 1990s. A duo responsible for a defining song of the time, an anthem that managed to be both feelgood and political. And remarkably, 30 years on, D:ream’s Things Can Only Get Better felt as alive and vital as ever – especially when founding members Peter Cunnah and Al Mackenzie were joined onstage at Worthy Farm last summer by original keyboard player Professor Brian Cox.

“It was such a lovely moment,” reflects frontman Cunnah of the performance of three decades deep classic, a Number One smash back in the day and with almost 50 million streams on Spotify alone. “We were going to keep quiet the fact that Brian was coming onstage, because it'd just be more fun. And then we let the cat out of the bag the day before, because we'd gone up to Bristol to put in a couple of days rehearsal. It was a big thing for us, and we wanted to pull it together. Not that Brian was rusty! He remembered, of course, what key it was in. But we just had to nail it down.

“And, oh man, it was just great! 'Ladies and gentlemen, he needs no introduction, he's more famous than all of us...’ The roar from the crowd was like being at a football match when someone scores. The energy just hit me in the chest. Just a moment of pure, unadulterated joy.”

It’s testament to Cunnah’s songwriting that, all these years later, Things Can Only Get Better sounds as fresh as ever. Although, to be fair, its recent topicality was accidental. When, last spring, Rishi Sunak announced his ill-fated re-election campaign in pouring rain outside 10 Downing Street, D:ream’s classic could be heard in the background, blasted out by a protestor. A song that ushered in New Labour in 1997 was now, as it transpired, showing the Tories the door.

“Our song’s gone then from being a big dance anthem, to being a Labour anthem, and then to being used during the Clap for Carers time in the pandemic – and then it goes to the end of the Tories. It's like a Swiss Army Knife of culture with multiple uses!”

Not that D:ream have been resting on their Swiss Army laurels. Ever since Cunnah and Mackenzie got the band back together in 2008, they’ve been coming together every few years, defining and refining their sound, most recently on 2021 album Open Hearts Open Minds. It’s a relationship based on the push-pull of the pair’s creative urges.

“It's a great bone of contention how many song ideas Al throws away because he's not comfortable with them,” says Cunnah cheerfully. “But I do like that insofar as he pushes me. He's not a yes man. He doesn't bring any smoke to blow! He just says it how it is, and that really fires me up. So, we end up really concentrating on the ones that really appeal to us both.”

Case in point: Do It Anyway, the first single and title track of what is only the fifth D:ream album in this choosy duo’s career, and the first fruits of their new label deal with Chrysalis. It’s a buoyant electro-pop bop that artfully draws from the Eighties, Nineties and Twenties. (To be clear, that’s the 2020s, not the Jazz Age. Although maybe that’s one for the next album.)

“I’ve had the backing track for, I’m not kidding, 20, 30 years, from when I was working on commercial stuff!” marvels Cunnah. Back then, after the release of D:ream’s second album World (1995), “I found myself being a hired gun. I was doing a lot of commercial stuff. It was a busman's holiday – I had the pop star lifestyle without the hassle! I was working on things like Steps, Honeyz and A1.

“And I wrote that backing track for a song which I pitched for Kylie, and it never worked. So, it was one of those things, almost like we had when we were writing Things Can Only Get better, insofar as we had the backing track but we didn't have the song to fit. Then when we were working on this album, we were going through stuff we both had, and I played Al that. He loved it because it had this ’80s retro vibe about it. It even has a similar synth to the one the The Human League used!”

“Then I came up with the lyrical idea of ‘smoke-filled rooms and warehouse parties’ and ‘four-to-the-floor and you know what the score is,’” says Mackenzie. “And Peter got off on that, and it put us right in the moment. Yes, it's reflective. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I mean, isn't nostalgia big business?” he adds with a laugh.

That sense of up-for-it optimism and “Je ne regrette rien”, adds Cunnah, is exactly the point. “It’s got that connotation of getting involved in partying. In the ’90s we didn't know what these drugs were, we didn't know how safe they were or not. But we were anarchic in that regard, and we were just up for that feeling, for that moment, for that party. And that's reflecting back on that.

“I couldn't be further away from that today,” the Irishman clarifies with a grin. “The strongest thing I have these days is double espresso and a yoga session. But back then dance music was quite punk in its own way. It brought us together. It was so strong, so powerful, that I thought: if we could drop this product, this MDMA, into the water supply, maybe we would get rid of war! Maybe the Irish would stop fighting each other. It was that much of a revolution to me.”

“It's a great lead single because that whole '90s club thing is where Pete and I met, got our act together and formed D:ream,” says Mackenzie. “We never want to wallow in the past but it was nice to bring that feeling back saying: would you have changed it? No. We're very stubborn!”

Equally, D:ream have their feet firmly planted in 2025. Working over the last couple of years in Cunnah’s studio on the northwest coast in Donegal, this politically astute, socially aware pair might have had one foot on the dancefloor but they also had both eyes on the news. So, The Geek Who Rules The World is smooth electro-funk that started as a barbed jarb at the broligarch who was, until recently, the DOGE axewielder- in-chief in Trump’s White House.

“I was playing the demo to Al, and it was going towards a satirical Elon Musk fanboy thing,” remembers Cunnah. “But Al threw it wider on the lyrics. We're looking at Zuckerberg being the king of information. We're looking at Bezos having his eyes on the prize in the planetary race. Elon's in there, and then Gates. All these unelected oligarchs that seem to be running the world. They're just laughing everyone off because no one can touch them because they've got fuck-off money. They've got fuck-you money. That's a power that we've not encountered before as democracies.”

“It's quite playful, but it has got a message,” says Mackenzie. “I think songs should have a message. In fact, Funk U Up is one of the few that there's no message in that at all.”

“That’s just sexy, baby!” laughs Cunnah of a song that’s a proper George Michael groove.

“That was a last-minute tune,” continues Mackenzie. “I remember at the end of session, I said: 'Look, I really want to do something that's just a bit of fun that we can play live so people dance.’”

There’s more politics with a small “p” in Anthem for Change, which stars with an Edge of Seventeen vibe before sliding into a trip hop-meets-glitchy beats gospel singalong.

The lyrics, meanwhile, are punchy with a capital “P”: “This cabal of crooks and thieves line their pockets easily / They walk away from justice / As long as we are silent / Our complicity caused by our complacency / We're never rid of tyrants / A state of wilful blindness”. Was there an inciting incident or individual for those?

“There's lots, and they're on both sides,” replies Cunnah. “Al's firmly on the left, but I've been non-partisan for many years. I think that the whole thing is corrupt. I feel like I'm being run by a criminal cabal. It doesn't matter what you vote for, you get the same old, same old. I'm no fan of Reform either, because they'll do the same thing. I can't see social justice in a lot of these so-called parties.

“But specifically, it was the Tories partying during Covid while I couldn't go and see my aunt when she was in the home. That broke my belief in the whole system. Then, the fact that having gone to war in Iraq, Blair's still walking around free. And, in fact, he's failed upwards – he's been given a knighthood! Everything's a slap in the face to the people.”

The backing vocals are courtesy of Ella B, Lisa Moorish and long-term band collaborator TJ Davis. “She’s a major star in her own right,” says Cunnah. “We just found out she was the voice of Sonic the Hedgehog! She goes and plays 10,000 seaters in the States! But just like the gospel sound on Things Can Only Get Better was all by accident, so was this. We layered and layered and layered until we got something big enough. We didn't know what it was going to be until we heard it in front of us.”

Also contributing is harpist Gemma Doherty, most recently seen on stage with Bono on his Songs of Surrender one-man tour. She appears on three tracks: Pain Never Hurt Me Like Love Did, Something In The Water and Famous For Nothing.

“I bumped into Gemma in an old trad pub in Greencastle one summer about four years ago," begins Cunnah. "Someone introduced us and even through my drunken haze, because I was drinking then, I managed to get her number from her mother because she seemed quite young. Then we rang her up and the number still worked. She's lovely and very talented brought a lot of ideas to the table. We'd never worked with harp before because it's quite a difficult instrument to set in the right key, but she had a mastery of her Irish harp and it just seemed to suit."

There’s more inspired lyrical flow on that last track. The six-minute Famous For Nothing is a suitably epic cap to Do It Anyway. It's a symphonic electronic sweep, propelled by Cunnah’s voice at its richest and most resonant, as he takes a swipe at... well, take your pick. Altogether now: “Fluffy, lovey-dovey, air kiss, dainty things / Schmoozy, boozy / Floozies gossip in the wings / When the party is over / All the pompous and bombast / And who is the last one standing? / Who knew it wouldn’t last?”

When Cunnah first presented those to Mackenzie, his response was unequivocal: “They're nuts.” Unabashed, Cunnah said: “Yeah, I know! But it's like Tutti Frutti. What's pop about? It's all disposable. It's all fluff!”

That, he says now, “perfectly worked for the vignette in the song, of this guy following around this creature who'd made it with no particular talent other than the fact they might have looked good.”

It is, again, a D:ream song of three decades deep resonance. “Popular culture got to a stage, I suppose after the Spice Girls, where it was throwing up people who just wanted fame. This is talking about success in and of itself, and commenting on that being like: well, what are you famous for? What have you done other than just hung around with the right people? Some people just make it because they're in the right time, in the right place. And that's OK.

“I wouldn't say that’s necessarily us, because we got lucky. And we did play our dues between art college and the club scene. But at the same time, also it reflects on us,” acknowledges Cunnah. “Because we've had our ups and downs. We've been famous, and then not famous. So, so it's drawing on that parallel as well.”

Through it all, though, D:ream have kept the faith, and kept the, well, d:ream alive. It’s what makes Do It Anyway such a triumph, Peter Cunnah and Al Mackenzie’s hunger and defiance and passion baked into its title and into its grooves.

As Cunnah says: “You should keep some childlike wonder, and that's what keeps the creative juices flowing. If you lose that, you're in a dark place. Al and I prefer the light. That's what keeps the whole thing worthwhile for us.”