"It was a bit of a spin out," bassist Steve Leonard says of the Triple J exposure. "I didn't know what to do. Any normal person out there records a couple of songs and sends out a couple of CDs. But the next thing we knew, we're getting played on national radio. We've got no inroads in the industry to capitalise on that, as far as selling CD's goes - we just didn't know how to do it. That's why you've got to get experienced people involved, because it's all to do with who you know - it's a really close-knit, cliquey industry."
"Fickle!" pipes up guitarist Gus Lunig.
"There's been an awakening," adds second guitarist Paul O'Hallaran, "everyone's woken up to how the industry operates. We had no idea back then."
For a while, Leonard took on the sole responsibility for the band before enlisting the help of manager (Gavin Purdy, who also manages Magic Dirt) when the walls started closing in.
"When 'Afterglow' came out, there was just so much shit going on," he says with an air of helplessness. "It just changed. Bent really didn't give it any push at all, that was all my doing. I did all of the promo mailouts and lined up interviews and organised basically what a record company would do for a band. That took up so much time, because I'd never done it before, so I was learning by my mistakes as I went along. I wanted to learn how to do it by myself, by trial and error, and I wanted to learn by meeting people and getting a gut feeling on different people in the industry, because that's what it's all about. And then I got to a point where I just though 'Fuck it!' All I wanted to do is play."
"I think we've become more disorganised," Lunig says. "Steve used to be really, really organised, and he's gone the other way."
"I had a mental breakdown!" admits Leonard, who laughs about it now, but at the time it was terrible.
With the release of Incusion's second EP, "In The Black Sandshow", the band has relinquished ties to the Bent label due to a series of communication breakdowns and a build up of bad feelings that soured relations irrevocably.
"It's come out and it hasn't meant as much to us really as the first one did because of the difficulties we had bringing it out," O'Hallaran says. "It comes out and you're ready to move on. The songs that we're writing at the moment are a definite change to what is on those EPs."
At this point, Incursion plan on pursuing an entirely independent course for the immediate future, putting on hold offers and interest from major labels. Having toured regularly up and down the east coast, which brought them together as nver before, Incursion want to concentrate on songwriting, regaining control and focusing on the music (the band were anxious to leave the interview to get to rehearsal). Experimenting with recordings is their major priority, as both EPs were recorded in Bent label head Jamie Durrant's garage studio. But the emphasis is on taking the time to let their music develop at an organic pace.
"You need to tour and stuff, but I don't reckon it's worth running yourself into the ground over," says Lunig. "You've got a job to do playing music and if you're not psychologically there, you can't be creatively there. You've got to stand your ground and work with the way the band's feeling. If the band's not up to something, then you probably shouldn't do it because it could be detrimental to what's really important. You've got to be a bit wary."
"The wise element that has come out of it is that you've got to be really careful," Leonard says seriously. "If I was to give any sort of advice to young bands, because there are plenty of bands out there that are good, just be careful of the independent labels."
"It just seems to be this element in people that once money starts to come into the picture, the whole idea of it begins to change, it becomes a lot more serious. Now we're just working on new stuff and we're just going to get over it."
(By Lauren Zoric - Rolling Stone, June 1996. Page no.34)