SOMETHING FOR KATE:
SOMETHING 'SHOCKING'
Something For Kate will be back in force in the coming months with the release of their new single 'Electricity' off the forthcoming 12 track album 'Beautiful Sharks'.
We were lounging in the boardroom of Sony Melbourne with ultra tall Kate frontman Paul Dempsey, talking about the new release and the forthcoming tour.
Finished a month ago. 'Something For Sharks' was in production from November 98 through to early February. 'It was really two months of solid every day in the studio and there were a few days between the end of December and the end of February going back into the studio and redoing a few things.'
With the music all done within the two months of the recording period, a few remixes i.e. 'turning the keyboard up' meant that the album represents Something For Kate over a tight timespan of several months, unlike some bands whose music was 'like that was what we sounded like last year when we spend six months recording.'
'Something For Sharks' is current and a slight departure from the last album 'Somewhere Else For 8 Minutres.' Fans will not have heard the tracks on the new release. They have not been demoed or shopped around. 'Something For Sharks' will be new and the tour will feature the music current to the progression of the band.
'The basic reason is the fact that many of the songs were written close to the recording of the album and we weren't doing live shows at the time being overseas. We looked ourselves in a room and basically wrote a good deal of their songs.'
With many of the lyrics written during a visit to his hometown of Dublin, Paul Dempsey drew on his Irish ancestry (he is in fact the only member of his Irish immigrant family born in Australia). 'It was a homecoming,' he says, 'Dublin is an area where my roots are more than Australia,' he admits. 'All my life the word "Australians" was used around my household, I have never felt particularly like I was an Australian, I mean I am an Australian, but it is funny to grow up to have your mother and sister talking about Australians. You get the sense that you're not in that group. I've always felt my roots, my family and my belonging is in Dublin.'
Meeting members of his family and finding cousins and relatives not available to him in Australian, Paul found an immediate multiplicity in relatives.
The current single Electricity plumbs the depth of an intellectual guy. 'You're limited to what you can do with the human body. You have limbs and muscles and blood. Sometimes there is not enough hours in the day. It's good to dream about being a pure, clean, fast force moving at the speed of light being everywhere at once.' Not a sci-fi fan or Star Treck, Star wars fan a such, Paul is keenly interested in physics and cosmology. 'It's not a metaphysical statement,' he says, 'Can a photon be in two places at once? Being human is being confined to a lumbering mass of bone and tissue. In physics you read about forces acting over billions of miles of space and about elementary particles that can be in two places at once. i just got to think about being in two places at once.'
The compexity to Electricity is interesting. Aside from the thought provoking concepts of the lyrics, there are some great guitar riffs that change the tempo of the song midstream. The loose gangly style that is traditional in the music of Something For Kate. 'It's a chaotic, sonicly it does what the lyrics are doing, when the music hits that part it becomes a chaotic force. It has an electic sound to it.'
Together now for some five years, have the Something For Kate guys Paul and Clint found it increasingly easy to craft their music?
'It's never easy. Communicating your idea to another person is not an easy thing. We work great together, we're like brothers,' says Paul, 'we cant offend each other. We can say anything to each other. We don't have to tip toe around each other, we can say exactly what is on our minds. We know exactly how to take each other. But at the same time it is never easy to communicate a new idea. It takes a bit of understanding and patience.'
With newcomer Stephanie, how does she fit into such an easy going team?
'As much as mine or Clint. We're more of a collaborative effort than we have ever been, since Stephanie joined the band. She is an equally strong personality. She's here for good. With past bass players it hasn't always beenright or comfortable, this is really it. She is very clear about he ideas. When she thinks a song should go in a certain direction, she know exactly how to say it. She knows how to make it happen.'
Crowd favourite Pinstripe will appear on the new single in an acoustic form. A favourite in their live show Pinstripe features because of it's popularity. With Paul performing a lot of solo shows last year, he found the acoustic version very popular, it is very much a 'request track.'
So how much do we know of Paul from his lyrics? 'I really write my songs from a place or a part of myself. There are elements of me in my songs, but they are coming from a part of me. I always keep most of myself private when I write.'
So on St Patrick's Day, dressed in patchy green corduroys, we found an Aussie musician rediscovering his Irish roots and rediscovering himself. Paul Dempsey is still on that journey of self discovery.
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