Australian pop punk band Short Stack are best known for their emo fashion, hits like Sway Sway Baby, and being infamously kicked off a national tour at the height of their fame.
So what did frontman Shaun Diviney, bassist Andy Clemmensen and drummer Bradie Webb really do to get booted off The Vamps tour in 2015?
“I always get thrown under the bus for this,” Clemmensen tells 9Honey Celebrity, to which Diviney replies with a laugh, “It was you. That’s why.”
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According to them, the “vibe was weird” from the moment they started the tour with the UK boy band, who didn’t take kindly to their larrikin antics on and off-stage.
“I think they thought we were a bit of a different band from what we were… they’re like, ‘Hey, you guys are idiots. You can’t swear on stage, you can’t do that,'” Diviney says.
They were first warned they’d be kicked off the tour if they didn’t pull their heads in when their opening performance ran just a few minutes overtime at the first show of the tour.
“There are contractual agreements, so you’re meant to have a specific time slot to do your sound check. Ours got cut short, so then we couldn’t be set up to go on time,” Diviney says.
“Then we weren’t allowed to finish our set and play our last song, so we turned around and said ‘stuff that, we’re doing it anyway’. That didn’t go down well.”
He and Clemmensen (Webb wasn’t available for this interview) claim The Vamps’ crew were also “rude” and even accused them of leaking the band’s location, which Diviney denies.
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“The Vamps themselves are great. Their management, not so much,” he adds.
Short Stack’s antics continued to cause tension until the trio were finally kicked off the tour just three days before the final show, and were allegedly told not to announce the change.
Diviney and Clemmensen also claim they weren’t paid in full.
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“They were like, ‘by the way, you can’t let anyone know’ because the last show hadn’t sold out and they wanted to keep selling tickets,” Diviney says.
“I don’t want to get sued… but I allegedly know we did not get paid for the last show.”
Almost a decade on from the infamous booting, the band admit they could have handled the situation better (they later made a music video poking fun at being fired from the tour) but say it wasn’t their worst career move.
That happened a few years earlier, when their former label, Sunday Morning Records, had them record a song for a guest appearance on Australia’s Next Top Model.
“The song was called Bang Bang Sexy, and it’s the worst song ever,” Diviney says. “It’s so bad. I should have listened to [Andy], he was like, ‘this song sucks.'”
Clemmensen chimes in: “The demo was good. The production turned it into garbage…. everything was just taken out the guitar and it was all keyboards, and it was just cheesy.”
There’s a reason they’ve never played the song live, nor do they have any plans to add it to the setlist for their tour along Australia’s east coast next month.
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The band reunited in 2020 after calling it quits in 2015 to announce a comeback tour, which was postponed until 2022 by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic decimated the music industry and Short Stack’s members were lucky to have ‘normal’ jobs to pay the bills while other artists struggled.
Diviney is in real estate, Clemmensen is a photographer, and Webb runs a drum school as well as makig music. They’re also all fathers now and have to support their families.
“I’d be broke.” – Andy Clemmensen
“Some of the biggest bands in Australia, they ain’t making s–t. It’s really hard to make money from music,” Diviney reveals.
“People at Bunnings are making more than, I would say, 90 per cent of the musicians in Australia.”
Even when they were at the height of their fame – and their earnings – the boys were smart with their money, investing in property instead of blowing it on a rockstar lifestyle.
“If I hadn’t invested my money, I’d be broke,” Clemmensen adds.
This is the band’s their second time getting back together – they previously split in 2012, reunited in 2014, and split again in 2015, before reuniting in 2020. It’s a running joke now.
“We think it is kind of funny to break up all the time,” Diviney laughs, and the only grudge Clemmensen holds about the band’s many splits is against a total stranger online.
Every time the band breaks up, the stranger texts him something like “Short Stack sucks. I knew you’d never last”. Every time they reunite, Clemmensen replies and “rubs it in”.
But when the band got back together in 2020 and he hopped into their message thread, Clemmensen realised the stranger had blocked him. He was crushed.
“That was really disappointing, I thought we had something,” he says with a laugh.
Though they’re excited to play some of their most iconic emo anthems like Princess and Sway Sway Baby, the boys won’t be squeezing back into their leather pants for this tour.
Nor will they be cracking out the eyeliner or teasing their hair to recreate their 2010s fashion.
“I look at kids in the street now with mullets and stuff and I’m like, you’ll feel the same about that as I do about my big emo haircut,” says Diviney.
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Meanwhile, Clemmensen still has a box full of his old skinny jeans and studded belts stashed away in the attic of his old home, which he now rents out.
“My biggest fear is one day a tenant will just climb up the ladder and pop into these boxes, and find these weird cowboy boots and this lace jacket,” he admits.
While they can’t be kicked off this tour, which runs through October and November before they hit Good Things festival in December, there are still things that can go wrong.
Prank wars tend to break out between shows and they were even asked for refunds after one Perth show that went pear shaped when Diviney lost his voice as soon as they hit the stage.
Clemmensen had to step in and sing lead vocals and fans weren’t impressed.
“It wasn’t good. We actually had refunds asked, there was a mum who wanted a refund because [she] ‘came out here and the singer didn’t even sing,'” Clemmensen says.
“We ended up giving her her money back… and now we don’t seem to sell as many tickets in Perth anymore. I wonder why.”
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