Short Stack Biography
Shaun Diviney, guitar and lead vocals
Andy Clemmensen, bass and vocals
Bradie Webb, drums
* Channel [V] OZ Artist Of The Year Award in 2008
* Over four million plays on MySpace with over one million plays for there second single Princess alone
* More than twenty five gigs around Australia, playing to a total audience in excess of fifty thousand fans
* Australia's biggest band on YouTube with over 1.4 million views of the Short Stack TV series and video clips
Question: How does a teenaged three-piece from New South Wales' Central Coast rack up stats like these and become Australia's hottest new band before they've even released their debut album?
Answer: By doing what no other music act has successfully achieved. Using the combined powers of SMS, YouTube and MySpace, Short Stack has amassed a massive following that's growing by the second. This isn't some cynical marketing ploy, either. The band themselves have driven their online explosion with constant updates, ongoing interaction with their fans and a raw look at life in Short Stack in their own reality series, Short Stack TV.
"The main idea with Short Stack TV is that we saw all these terrible reality TV shows and thought, 'Hey, we can do that'" Andy explains. "So we got a camera and filmed ourselves dicking around and put it on YouTube and people started to enjoy it. It makes us more real to our fans."
But what about the music? After all, you can't have a band -- and fans -- without tunes. On their first two singles, Shimmy A Go Go and Princess, Short Stack established themselves as Australia's most energetic new rock band with a sound that mashes elements from punk, glam and electro, delivered with a cheeky, don't give a fuck attitude.
It's that attitude that brought the band together when they were just three high school students with a passion for causing mayhem on the train trip from their home town of Budgewoi to their high school in Broadmeadow, Newcastle. It's that same attitude that, in 2005, prompted them to enter the Youthrock band comp in Sydney, despite not being that great.
"We thought we could do it," Shaun recalls. "We thought we were the best band in the world... and we weren't."
It didn't matter. The experience was enough to kick the guys up the ass and the following year they made the finals.
"We'd only ever mucked around with our instruments but after we got into this competition, which was a pretty big deal for us and our first live show, we thought, 'Let's try again next year'," Andy says. "Ever since then we played non-stop shows every week and the year after we entered again and came third."
A more accomplished, tighter band in 2006 than the year before, Short Stack weren't perfect but their passion and energy were enough to impress Trevor Steel, and Chris Johns of indie label Sunday Morning Records who would go on to sign the band, with Trevor co-producing their debut album.
"They were looking around at interesting new bands because they were just starting up their label and they saw us at the final," Andy says. "Shaun broke a string, I fell over my lead, Bradie dropped the drum stick - we pretty much played a terrible show but they thought we had potential and started working with us."
In between HSC exams and gigs supporting the likes of Simple Plan and Good Charlotte, work began on Stack Is The New Black with all the songs written by Shaun. "We never thought we had any good songs until we got signed and people were like, 'These are actually quite good'," Shaun says. "For us, more than anything the album is a timeline because we have songs on there that were written when we first started out then songs we wrote a week before the album was recorded. It's really cool to see how we've progressed as a band, and how we've grown up."
Stack Is The New Black covers a range of styles -- from epic ballads to fast and furious electro-tinged rock anthems. "It's got a song on there for everyone depending on what genre you like," Andy says. "When you listen to some albums, you can only listen halfway through before you get over hearing their voice or hearing the same sounds but I think ours you can listen to the whole way through because it changes up so much."
Album - 'Stack Is The New Black' out now!
