Proceeds from Rolling Stone Australia and Bonds’ new Father’s Day calendar will go to Support Act. Short Stack appear in the calendar with their greatest support, UNFD’s Luke Logemann.
Shaun Diviney; as told to Augustus Welby
For their Father’s Day charity calendar, Rolling Stone and Bonds recruited several prominent Australian musicians. The musicians all appear wearing Bonds’ new Total Package™ underwear, which ensure neat downstairs organisation courtesy of Bonds’ Total Support Pouch™.
Proceeds from calendar sales will go to music industry charity Support Act, which delivers crisis relief services to musicians and other industry workers. Accordingly, each of the featured musicians has brought attention to one of their greatest supports—i.e., someone who’s helped grow their careers and made them feel welcome in the music industry.
Short Stack announced a reunion tour at the start of 2020. It was set to be the Central Coast pop-punk band’s first run of shows in five years. The tour was ultimately delayed by two years, which gave the band time to sign with indie label UNFD and release their fourth album, Maybe There’s No Heaven.
Short Stack guitarist and vocalist Shaun Diviney credits UNFD general manager, Luke Logemann, as the band’s greatest support. Here, Diviney explains how Short Stack’s new era might never have happened if it weren’t for Logemann’s support.
Shaun Diviney on Short Stack’s greatest support
Luke Logemann is the head honcho at UNFD, which is the label we signed to during the pandemic. It was a very risky time to sign a band.
We didn’t really have any songs and we didn’t really want any managers or anything. We were just going to do the reunion tour and then that was it—we didn’t want to release any music or anything like that..
We were kind of over it, to be completely honest. We thought we were done making music. We just thought we’d do a tour, maybe 200 people would show up. And then all the shows sold out. We put on second and third shows and they sold out. We were just really humbled by the whole experience.
We were signed to a major label beforehand and Luke and UNFD are very much an independent label. So, just to have someone that encouraged us to do whatever we wanted, not to fit into a particular mould, it was just really exciting.
We grew up listening to Blink 182 and NOFX and stuff like that and started in our garage in Budgewoi. When we signed with a major label it was like, “Well, we can’t do a whole bunch of these things you want us to with all these talent show winners—the main reason being, they’re extremely talented and we’re actually pretty shit.”
Luke is only a little bit older than us, so he grew up in the same scene that we grew up in and he just really gets it. He really gets what we’re about and he just believes in what we’re doing. When we made our new album, Luke was pretty much like, “Do whatever you want.” We kept sending him demos and he was like, “Yeah, fucking cool man. Roll with it.”
We really wanted to do an album that was like a Blink album: one guitar, one bass, drums and vocals. Like that Enema of the State, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket pop-punk thing. So, that’s kind of what the demos started as and then we added synths and it evolved into something bigger than that.
Everything that we sent Luke, he was like, “If you guys like it, we’re happy with it. If you feel good about it, we feel good about it.” It was really cool.
Our first album did pretty well and it kind of defined us. When we play the new songs, we’re always like, “Are people going to click with these?” But the songs off this latest album, when we played that live on tour, people seemed to like them just as much as the older stuff.
The weirdest thing that happened was we played UNIFY Gathering. That was our first show in seven years. Obviously, it’s like a heavy music festival, but the weirdest thing about it was so many of our friends’ bands played it. So even though the people in the crowd were like, “What the fuck’s Short Stack doing here?”, we knew everyone that was playing anyway.
But the show was insane. It was one of the best shows we’ve ever done. People came to the tour and were like, “Saw you guys at UNIFY for the first time. Never really heard of you before then.” It’s pretty cool.
