Noughties hit rockers Short Stack back on the road for 15th anniversary of debut album
When he's not staging the latest comeback of noughties pop punk band Short Stack, frontman Shaun Diviney is one of the NSW Central Coast's top real estate agents.
'I'm a real estate agent, which is super punk rock, hey?' he said.
'I feel we always stop and start the band because music is so different now and life changes; we've all got kids and families and it's hard to be a touring musician with kids.
'But it's the coolest thing to bring the kids to shows with us now.'
Diviney swaps the business shirt for his rock uniform as he and bandmates Andy Clemmensen and Bradie Webb return to their night job this weekend, in celebration of the 15th anniversary tour of their 2009 debut album Stack Is The New Black.
The shows sold out quickly with some venues upgraded to meet demand to see the poster boys for the noughties' scene of black skinny jeans, eyeliner and voluminous side fringes.
While their look has shifted, late 2000s hits including 'Shimmy A Go Go', 'Sway, Sway Baby!' and 'Sweet December' influenced by their love of Blink 182, Green Day and Fall Out Boy, remain in vogue with rusted-on fans.
'I think our fans connected with us starting in high school and the fun element to what we did and people liked being a part of that,' he said.
'And there were a lot of bands that were sort of put together or manufactured at the same time that we came along where we were a little bit more authentic.
'I suppose we were probably too ugly to be a boy band. So we kind have that going for us.'
In the wake of Short Stack releasing their fourth album Maybe There's No Heaven in 2022 on independent powerhouse UNFD, the band's team was negotiating to buy back the masters of their early recordings, a la Taylor Swift.
The masters became government assets after their previous label dissolved.
'We own them now, which is f...ing wild. Our managers did a great job of getting them back because we'd thought, whatever, it's never going to happen,' Diviney said.
Regaining the rights to their music matters as Short Stack head back out on a tour to play their debut album in full to an audience that not only includes their OG fans, but whose ranks have swelled by newcomers who have discovered them on social media.
Diviney was shocked recently when his seven-year-old son asked his dad why his teacher knew all the Short Stack songs and was intrigued teens in the front row at their sets at Good Things festival in 2023 and again during their regional tour.
The frontman also points to the band's determination to keep tickets affordable as cost of living pressures decimate young people's entertainment budgets as one of the reasons behind the tour's success.
'We noticed a lot of kids, 18 and 19, during the regional tour; I guess they have older siblings who grew up with us, who know our gigs are this fun night out where no one is taking themselves too seriously,' he said.
'Cost of living is insane now and out tickets are under $80 but that's a lot of money to people, you know so we want to make sure they have a good time for their money.'
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Brooks eventually gave up journalism to write fiction, publishing the bestselling plague novel, Year of Wonders, in 2001 and winning a Pulitzer in 2006 for her US Civil War novel, March. She and Horwitz remained in the US, raising their two sons, Nathaniel and Bizu, in an 18th-century mill house on Martha's Vineyard, an island off the New England coast. "Their relationship is probably one of the all-time love stories," Bizu says. "More than anything, [he] revered and respected and loved how smart, intelligent and passionate she was about everything." Brooks first visited Flinders Island with Horwitz in 2000 to research a novel. Together they'd toured the island, marvelling at its natural beauty. They were confronted by its dark history too. At Wybalenna, they viewed the unmarked graves of Aboriginal people who died on the island after being forcibly removed from Tasmania in the 1800s. 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There, alone and without distraction, Brooks returned to the worst day of her life to work through her grief. "I would get up in the morning and … do the work, write my thoughts, and then when I realised that I had a cramp and hadn't moved in hours, I'd go for a walk." She found solace in the rocky, windswept landscape. "I fell in love with granite," she says. "The rocks on Flinders Island are in these sculptural shapes. They're great works of art, monumental sculptures that completely moved me in the way art moves you." She also found another kind of comfort in her solitude. "I realised I wasn't alone. I was with Tony. I was able to be with him night and day. And it was wonderful." Brooks fell into a routine on the island, ending each day with a swim in the ocean. "At first it was just a swim. But as I got deeper and deeper into the work, I realised that there was something almost ceremonial about it," she says. "It became this gift to myself to be fully immersed and completely alone in my skin, in the water, like some kind of aquatic creature. And it felt cleansing and healing." Brooks felt a connection between her daily swim and the mikvah, a purifying bathing ritual that had formed part of her conversion to Judaism when she married Horwitz three decades earlier. Horwitz's Judaism was cultural rather than religious or spiritual. "If he had died and I was an Orthodox Jew, there would've been a very set road map to travel, a pathway into and out of grief," Brooks says. "There are strict rules. The first one, I think, is incredibly insightful: in the first hours after somebody experiences a loss like this, you don't even offer them condolences. They're in a state of 'stupefying grief' is how it's put. All you do is help them. "It's only after the burial that the grieving and condolences start." Known as Shiva, this formal mourning period lasts for seven days. 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Grief, A Love Story on Compass on Sunday night at 6:30pm on ABC TV, or stream now on iview.
