.png)
With a new name and new single All Regards are not strangers to the Melbourne music scene. The Pop-Punk trio released ‘Trainwreck’ yesterday full of heartfelt lyrics with a bouncy tune. Jeremy, Mark and Ali chatted to Jess from Moody Music all about the band’s new name, new sound and new single.
FFO: Blink182, Stand Atlantic, Slowly Slowly, Trophy Eyes, Ocean Grove
All Regards (Melb Pop-Punk) are:
Jeremy Allen (vocals/guitars)
Mark Fuhrmann (bass/backing vocals)
Ali O’Sullivan (drums)
Moody Music: HOW DID YOU ALL MEET AND BECOME A BAND?
Mark: It was at school, and just a way to get out of homework really haha. It was just a thing with my friends and then I think in the first year of uni I met Jez (Jeremy) and it kind of kicked off with The Lancias, and we did just a bit of song writing and then met Ali through Facebook.
Jeremy: We didn’t have a drummer for a long time. There was a guy that both Mark and I went to uni with in first year, who Mark went to highschool with him, he was going to be the drummer for the band. The three of us jammed a lot of covers together when I first joined the band, but he decided that it wasn’t really what he wanted to do anymore. So, we were without a drummer for 12 months maybe longer. Mark got the ball rolling and put ads out on Facebook and Ali took the plunge and met us, she joined us in March last year and the rest is history.
Moody Music: WHAT WAS THAT AUDITION PROCESS LIKE ALI?
Ali: There wasn’t really a process, I think I was the only one that even tried out haha correct me if I’m wrong haha
Mark: No haha we got another message, but yeah definitely went with Ali haha
Jeremy: We landed a gig at the Workers Club at the end of 2018…
Mark: I think that’s what solidified it, like aw man we need a drummer
Jeremy: Mark had someone lined up to come play drums for us for that one gig, but then he pulled out last minute for whatever reason. So, we basically took the drum tracks from the album we recorded and yeah it was just the two of us up on stage playing to these drums, so we were like yeah we better get into gear and find someone to play with.
Ali: I was talking to Mark and was like okay I have to go meet these two dudes who are a couple of years older than then, 3 or 4 so it’s not that far apart. I said to Mum like okay I have to go and audition, she was like how do you know these guys?, I was like I just met them off Facebook, and I hadn’t been in a band for a really long time, I was just out of highschool.
So, I went over, there was Mark and Jeremy in a garage…
Mark: In a dingey garage haha
Ali: haha yeah a dingey garage. I come in on Mark’s sh*tty little kit, I had forgotten 2 of my symbols and was like oh sorry, so, I didn’t have a crash or ride, so I was just there. Then we played a few covers that they had sent through to learn, and after about 40 minutes it was like cool, ace, was good meeting you guys haha I was like that went so bad.
Moody Music: Did you think you would get a call back?
Ali: I didn’t really know, I was just kind of hoping, I was just really bored of not playing in a band and only playing in my little music room at home. Eventually we got good enough to play at a show and kept playing shows.
Mark: I feel like before Ali, we were more of a writing project rather than an actual band.
Moody Music: NOW YOU GUYS USED TO BE CALLED THE LANCIAS AND NOW YOU’VE DONE A NAME CHANGE TO ALL REGARDS, WHY THE CHANGE?
Ali: We changed it because apparently it was so hard to say, people often couldn’t find us on Facebook or Instagram, they had difficulty spelling it. We wanted something that people could just see it and remember. So like, when we go out, people see it like oh All Regards, they know us as All Regards, it’s easy to spell and easy to find. We had been trying for months to find a new name, since the start of lockdown in March, we were just constantly messaging each other with things we had seen or little phrases that could be a name.
Anyways, we eventually got down to a few and All Regards is something that we liked and just fit the vibe a bit better. We had like a vibe chart, it was very heavy on one end, and then very pop/soft/indie whatever on the other end, we wanted to find something more towards the harder end.
All Regards was that perfect balance, that we felt represented us more and was better in the way we are going.
Moody Music: WHAT DOES ALL REGARDS MEAN? IS THERE A SPECIAL MEANING BEHIND THE NAME?
Mark: I came up with All Regards, and I was like we can’t just have All Regards, it has to be All Regards to… or All Regards something. But we couldn’t really think of anything and was like All Regards sounded alright on its own.
Jeremy: It was the first name that all three of us liked, they were a few contenders, like there were names that Mark and I liked and Ali didn’t or vice versa, when two of us like it but one didn’t. It was the first one all three of us agreed upon. It was a long process trying to come up with a name.
Mark: And it should be the easiest thing, and it is probably something that matters the least. More work went into that than anything else haha
Moody Music: A lot of people say that it’s really hard though, cause it’s like naming a child, if you give it a bad name, the kid’s going to have a bad name haha
Ali: Yeah it is, it’s gonna have that name forever! Potentially
Jeremy: It was so difficult. When we decided in March, by like April or May we were going to have something nailed and sorted and then we plan from there. But it took us until like August-September to find something that we really liked.
Mark: We had a lot of horrible names in their too, we won’t go into names but ah man there was some bad ones haha
Moody Music: Those are the band names you don’t talk about, right? Haha
Jeremy: Yup just sweep it under the rug, they never existed! Haha
Moody Music: OKAY LET’S TALK ABOUT THE NEW SINGLE ‘TRAINWRECK’. I NOTICED THAT IN THE LYRICS THERE ARE SOME DARK THEMES AND DARK SORTS OF PHRASES IN THERE LIKE “I’M SORRY”, “BASKETCASE” AND “I NEED HELP”, CAN YOU TELL US WHAT ‘TRAINWRECK’ IS ABOUT?
Jeremy: Of Course! First of all what did you think of the song?
Moody Music: I liked it! And I listened to a bit of The Lancias before, I gotta compare haha. I thought that ‘Trainwreck’ was a lot more faster and pop-punkier, The Lancias were a bit more slower and Indie Rock, and I like bounce music so I liked it.
Jeremy: That’s been like everyone we’ve shown the song to, they’ve just had their heads bouncing to it when they hear it.
So, ‘Trainwreck’ lyrically for me was a night out in the city a couple years ago, I had just basically had a mental breakdown, been out all night with my friends drinking, and just had a mental breakdown in the middle of the night, and just went of walking in the middle of the city.
Mark and I had finished uni, we had done our 2 years or whatever, and I had this overwhelming feeling in my head of what am I going to do, and just like failure and that kind of thing, and my grandmother had just passed away a couple months prior, so that didn’t help things. I just basically had a mental breakdown and went walking through the city, trying to clear my mind or think of what to do. A mate of mine, I live about an hour away from the city, he drove up with his girlfriend and a couple of my mates decided they didn’t want to hang around the city anymore and drove them back an hour away, and then drove back to pick the rest of us up. He came and found me, and basically talked me out of whatever I was thinking.
This song is basically that feeling of failure that you get and I feel that it will resonate with a lot of people, especially with people in Victoria at the moment with what’s been going on with lockdown and coronavirus and everything. As I say, when you hear in the bridge things do get better, like when you see it there’s dark, but there’s always light. Things do get better in the end, that’s basically what the song is about.
Mark: I think that overall it is a really positive song, there are some dark themes in it, but it is about getting over that.
Jeremy: The writing process started, when it was just Mark and I, he came up with the bass riff at the start of the song, so we just jammed on that from there.
Mark: We fleshed it out into a demo like really quickly, there was a lot of back and forth between Jeremy and I, and probably in 30 minutes we had the original demo. It has undergone many changes since haha
Jeremy: And then when Ali joined it went under a few more changes, and when we went into the studio to record it a lot changed, but a lot of the same kind of stuff was there in the track.
We recorded in between the first and second lockdown, so end of June/start of July. We recorded it with Darcy Handley, who plays drums for Terra, he’s worked with some mates of ours in Doonie Way and we really liked how their recording sounded. The thing with the album is that we produced it ourselves, we wanted to have someone as an outside ear to listen to the songs and help us to make the songs better, and we liked what he had done with the Doonie Way boys and he was pretty interested from the get-go when we videoed him to chat about the song.
We recorded it over 3 days and he produced it and mixed it, and then his housemate Christopher Vernon who sings for Better Half, and sings and plays guitar in Belle Haven, he’s produced countless Melbourne bands and he mastered our song.
Moody Music: SHOULD BE EXPECTING A MUSIC VIDEO?
Ali: Well we did have big plans, we wanted to do something and we had people lined up to do a really great music video. But just with all the conditions going on, we didn’t want to wait forever to release a song and a music video.
At the moment we are sort of piecing together something made by us with just the entire process, like what Jeremy was talking about with the recording, even like getting the artwork done and just like what we have been up to over lockdown in relation to music, so like us recording demos and sending them back and forth. It is a bit of footage about all of that into a video, we wanted something to share with everyone, I know a few people have been interested with what’s been going on. Hopefully, it will be out not to long after the song released and just like as a little something to accompany it, so people can see a bit of behind the scenes of what was going down.
Moody Music: WHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM ALL REGARDS GOING FORWARD IN THE FUTURE?
Ali: We’ve done A LOT of writing over lockdown, sending each other demos and recording stuff, like what do you think? And adding onto each other’s stuff. I think that we do have a lot of things that when we can play together, we will flesh that out. We do have another single that we want to record shortly, hopefully sooner rather than later that we did play at a few live shows at the start of the year that we really love and it is a bit of a crowd pleaser. So hopefully getting that pieced into an EP as well.
Mark: There are a few cool songs there that we are keen to record, as soon as we can haha, as soon as we can all get back together and play together.
Jeremy: Absolutely, that has probably been the one blessing about this lockdown, it has given us time to think about where we want to go from here as a band and what kind of music we want to write, and we demo with that kind of stuff in mind.
Mark: It definitely has been great with setting in stone a theme.
Moody Music: DO YOU HAVE ANY FINAL WORDS YOU WANT TO GET OUT TO OLD FANS AND NEW FANS?
Jeremy: We hope everyone really enjoys the new single, all three of us love the song so much. From where it started to where it is now, from when we recorded it with Darcy and Chris mastered it. We are just so excited to get it out there for everyone to listen to it and we just can’t wait to get out there and play shows again with our friends and with other bands.
Mark: I hope people take something from it as well, like what we were saying before it is really powerful lyrically.
Jeremy: It definitely has something for everyone in there, lyrically, musically, however you want to take it and make it a part of your own.
That was our Moody Music interview by Jess with Jeremy, Mark and Ali from All Regards. ‘Trainwreck’ is OUT RIGHT NOW check and don’t forget to follow the band’s socials:
All Regards' Social Media