Sydney outfit Intentions have just released their ‘Guilt Party‘ 7″ and are currently on the road launching it, you can catch them thisarvo if you are looking for something to do at Red Hill Mansion in Brisbane. Next Friday they play The Pharmacy in Newcastle, The Phoenix in Canberra next Saturday and wrap it up at FBi Social in Sydney on Sunday April 8th. The 7″ is currently available at shows and selected record stores and will be available online shortly. We caught up with Simon from the band mid-tour somewhere between Adelaide and Melbourne to tackle our Hotseat Questions this week. Expand this post to take a read and check out some of their tunes.
THE BASICS
Name : Simon Unwin
Band : Intentions
Job In Band : Bass and singing
Website Address : tohellwithintentions.wordpress.com
HOME
Hometown : Vidan (guitar) & I are from near Tamworth NSW and Jon (drums) is from several places but Intentions is from Sydney.
Hometown is best known for : Being large and prohibitively expensive?
Best venue in your hometown : Black Wire Records, no hesitation. Such a great space, friendly DIY types run it, and now it even has vegan pies!
Favourite show you’ve seen in your hometown : One of the more memorable ones was seeing Melbourne’s late great Truth From Facts in the car park out the back of Jura, an anarchist bookshop on Parramatta Road. An astonishingly irate middle-aged lady appeared and tapped the guitarist on the shoulder to get them to stop, then started yelling at all of us about how what we were doing was illegal and we didn’t have a permit. Band and audience remonstrated with her for 5 minutes or so, then she went off to call the cops and Truth From Facts picked up on the exact note they left off. By the time the police showed up everything had been packed away.
Favourite show you’ve played in your hometown : There have been a few! But last summer we put on a few shows in the basement of my old place in Lewisham and there was one with us, all my housemates’ bands and a doom band from Estonia (I’m serious). That was a pretty great arvo.
THE BAND
How did the band first come to exist? Just gradually really, there’s been a couple of different lineups. I met Jon through a streetpress ad that name-checked Fugazi, and we asked asked Vidan to up and move to Sydney in maybe August 2010, which to our delight he actually did.
How long has the band been going? In one form or another since late ’08. We played our first show in April ’09.
Any particular story behind the name? We were going to name ourselves after the song ‘To Hell With Good Intentions’ by Mclusky, but it was a bit of a mouthful.
What’s your most recent release? Tell us a little about it… We’re touring our new ‘Guilt Party’ 7″ right now – we’re driving from Adelaide to Melbourne at the moment. We recorded the 7″ in a rehearsal room in Marrickville with some friends of ours & we’re putting it out ourselves. It has four songs & some super-nice packaging.
Got a personal stand out achievement of your band to date? Not anything in particular – just travelling across heaps of the country, hanging out with old friends and new, and playing shows in interesting places. Doing a national tour – which is sort of what we’re doing now – feels like a big thing to have pulled together with our friends, so maybe that?
OFF THE STAGE
What was your first introduction to music that made you think seriously about playing it? I come from your garden-variety musical family. My mum put my siblings & I in piano lessons from a young age and my dad played me many a strange record. So I’ve been doomed from the start.
Any particular band / album or song that you personally credit as a major influence? I grew up in a tiny town so weirdly enough I came to post-hardcore and DIY through Something For Kate – following their influences back to Jawbox and Fugazi and discovering all that.
Your first band name, and what style did you play? Insight; and we played grunge and pop-punk covers. Later we wrote our own stuff. It was a pretty standard small-town high school band but we got to play the odd party so that was fun.
Most prized music related item you own? I bought myself a Teenage Engineering OP-1 synth at Christmas and it is the best toy I have ever owned. I know you were probably looking for a cool souvenir or something with that question but I’m obsessed with the thing.
When you’re not doing band related stuff, what are you usually found doing? Working as a trade union organiser, playing basketball and eating dumplings.
The thing you most look forward to just before a tour is… The vegetarian food of other cities. We plan our food tourism very carefully in order to maximize vego/vegan satisfaction. Especially in Melbourne where there’s an embarrassment of riches in that sense. We ate at Zen House in Adelaide yesterday and I had a super-hearty mock-beef rendang. highly recommended.
The thing you least look forward to before a tour is… the driving. And the truck-stop food we’re inevitably reduced to on days where we don’t plan ahead.
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ON THE STAGE
When on offer, what’s your one must have item on the rider? This is getting very hypothetical, I don’t reckon we’re ever likely to have a rider. But probably vegan pies.
Favourite place you’ve toured… and why? Brisbane was pretty lovely last year. It’s hot and they have geckos and houses on stilts and Blackstar iced coffee and excellent emo bands and all-ages DIY spaces.
Got a favourite song to play live? we’re doing a really dramatically slowed-down version of ‘Functionalist Dream’ on this run of shows. We’re indulging our love of bands like Earth and Bluetile Lounge and it’s a really satisfying way of ending the set.
What do you find is the hardest aspect of touring in a band today? Just trying to organise stuff in line with our ideals – making merch out of secondhand t-shirts, trying to play places that are all-ages or at least not soulless bars, and with bands that feature women and/or folks who share our ideas about what punk or DIY should be – inclusive and liberating.
RIGHT NOW
Last song you listened to? right now we’re listening to J Dolla’s ‘Donuts’ album in the car. Genius.
Last album you acquired? the new 7″ by Nebraska from Adelaide who are an excellent screamo band of the old school. looking forward to getting that home.
Which band or album is currently on high rotation? We’re kind of favouring a lot of UK bass music – minimal techno, drum & bass etc – as driving music. Jon’s an increasingly formidable producer of that kind of music (as Mannheim Rocket) so he’s very much a connoisseur. I got really into an EP he played us by a producer called Throwing Snow. Africa Hitech is getting a lot of mileage as well.
Tell us an up and coming band or artist you think we should go and listen to right now? Tangle from Brisbane. Very 90s indie-emo sounding, with amazing lyrics that combine the personal and political better than anyone else in Australia right now.
IF ONLY…
One band you wish you were able to see live but never had the chance? None of us ever got to see Eucalypt or James Dean or any of those bands of the ’04-’05 Australian underground screamo explosion. We were all elsewhere or oblivious at the time!
One venue you have yet to play that you would love to? anywhere in South-East Asia. A bunch of our friends have toured Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, it seems like an amazing thing to do.
The chance comes up to fill in for a member of a band for one tour, which band would it be, and why? I used to really want to sing for To The North and do heaps of harmonies with Cam, but they broke up, which is a shame. That band was sick.
A headline tour overseas comes up, tell us two bands you’d take along to support your band. I’d pick maybe Mere Women and Making (both from Sydney). Both bands are so enjoyable live – I can’t stop dancing! And both are composed of sweet people who would, I think, remain relatively sane even after days of driving.
PLUG TIME
Got any last words? The ‘Guilt Party’ 7″ is available from us at shows (we’ve still got Newcastle, Canberra and Sydney to go), or at select local record stores – so far only Clarity Records in Adelaide, Thornbury Records in Melbourne, and Beatdisc in Parramatta, but probably a few more by the time this is published. You’ll be able to buy it from us online soon too.
