Kate expectations - Something to sing about - Fact or fiction - Deja vu all over again as Something For Kate take you to another dimension
The Daily Telegraph, August 13 2003

Something For Kate are at their record company's Sydney office, examining for the firts time finished copies of their latest album.

Bassist Stephanie Ashworth's scrutinising her own handiwork. She's a keen photographer and several of her photographs make up the sleeve artwork for the album, The Official Fiction.

"I always say to people that there's no one better to do the artwork to accompany the music than people in the band itself, lyrically and emotionally and politically," says Stephanie. Frontman and songwriter Paul Dempsey agrees. 

"With our early EPs and our first album, before Steph was in the band, we still did most of it ourselves - I would draw pictures. We always had the ideas of how we wanted to do it," he says.

A similar attitude exists when it comes to SFK's music. Paul and Stephanie, along with drummer Clint Hyndman, have a policy of pleasing themselves when it comes to making new music. And this policy involves never looking back. With each record (this one's their fourth) the band make a conscious effort not to emulate the last. Even if their previous album, Echolalia, enjoyed close to double platinum sales, received six ARIA nominations, was Triple J Listeners' Album of the Year and garnered them best artist, album and single awards in Rolling Stone's Readers Poll?

"It would have bored us," says Stephanie. "We had a fairly strict self-editing process where if anything did sound similar to us we would trash it. We don't want to go over the same ground."

Clint says, regarding their anti-rehash rule, "We're our biggest critics. one of us will pipe up and go, 'Nup, it sounds like us' ".

The change to their latest album involves a healthy dose of strings injected into the Melbourne trio's trademark rock sound. This is seen in the sumptuous and complex arrangements on current single, D j Vu. Those who attended Something For Kate's two shows to launch the single at the Metro last month, at which the band were accompanied by a violinist and cellist, can attest to the band's new sound.

"It was great [but] weird to look over and see string players, having company at the back," says Clint.

Stephanie says they were trying, on The Official Fiction, to make a connection between their live and recorded sound.

"I think that there was a definite conscious desire to have that side of things represented live, particularly with D j Vu being the single," she says.

"Wherever possible we like to replicate things in a live sense, we're not a band who likes to use samples or anything like that. We want to have the energy of all the musicians on stage that you can enjoy."

The band have built a solid following since their 1997 debut, Elsewhere For 8 Minutes, which featured the hit single, Captain (Million Miles An Hour), on the back of some earnest but fiercely beautiful rock music. 1999's Beautiful Sharks saw Paul's sometimes sombre, but often breathtaking, songwriting skills come into their own on tracks like Electricity and The Astronaut. By the time Echolalia - with its hit singles Monsters and the almost anthemic Three Dimensions - was released in 2001, the band's popularity had grown so much the album's sales went gold within its first week of release. Despite this popularity, you get the distinct sense the band are still a little uncomfortable with their public profile. At 6'6", Paul cuts an imposing figure wherever he ventures, yet during live sets he's often content to stand at the side of the stage rather than hugging the centre where he surely belongs. The band, say Paul and Stephanie, prefer to let their music speak for themselves rather than spend a great deal of time talking it up.

"I do worry that if you talk too much, if you talk about the music and try and describe every last thing about it, then when people listen to it they're not listening to it with open ears," says Paul.

"It's not that I dislike doing interviews and talking to people, not at all. But there has to be some line where you can just put the record on and not have preconceptions about it."

By avoiding the dissection of their sounds, Stephanie argues, they can avoid being pigeon-holed by the media or their listeners.

"There's always that worry about being mediated, that there often is a tendency to reduce people in the arts to being one particular thing, and that's something that everybody has experienced - whether you're a musician or a writer or an artist, you will always get put in a neat box and sometimes that's really frustrating," she says.

At the end of the day, it is the music itself - the instrumentals, the vocals, the sound - that should steal the show.

"What would really be great is if people just put the record on and listened to it, that's what it's there for," says Paul.

"We don't write all these songs and put all our energy into this music so that we can then go and describe it to people in abstract terms. You'd rather just hand them a copy."

The flow of communication between them and their fans is also a central concern for the band.

"Sometimes it's really nice to have unmediated communication with people who buy your records, like doing web-chats and things like that, where you can just directly answer a question and then know the interpretation. Sometimes that's quite liberating," Stephanie says.

The new album encompasses some of those views on a thematic level.

"There's definitely things on there about how information is passed on - the fact that we talk to you, you pass it on and however you choose to do it, that affects the way the information is received," Paul says.

"Those themes are in there. Everything from personal conversations with people in sort of everyday life, like Chinese whispers ... right down to the way news is reported, the way albums are reviewed, you know, everything. You're always having to rely on someone else's interpretation."

There are both advantages and disadvantages to this complex process of interpretation.

"[It] can be good and bad. It's necessary, it has to happen, we wouldn't find out about what's going on in the world if there wasn't someone on the spot passing information on," says Paul.

"But sometimes you've just gotta look at the agendas of the possible reasons things are being presented in a certain light."

Paul's lyrical ideas fill "stacks" of notebooks, he says. "I definitely write a lot, I write thousands and thousands of words to get a couple of songs out of it.

"[But] I don't know if you can say that's prolific because out of a thousand words, 10 words might be worth using, the rest of it's crap."

Which brings us back to the trio's policy of never looking back. After each album is completed, Paul makes a habit of destroying his notebooks. "I don't want anyone finding my stacks and stacks of notebooks and reading them because they're like diaries. They're on their way to the incinerator. I try to dispose of the things as quickly as possible." There's never any material that he might consider saving for the future?

"No, I kind of have the attitude that if something is worth using a year after the fact or two years after the fact, it'll stay in your head," he says confidently.

"If an idea, musically or lyrically, is any good, it'll stay in my head, and if I forget about it it's because it was meant to be forgotten, it wasn't worth remembering.

"I also like to think that by getting rid of everything once an album's done, by getting rid of all the notebooks and everything that was involved in that album, you wipe the slate clean so everything's new and fresh and you're not living in the past of that record any more."

The Official Fiction is out Monday. Something For Kate play the Enmore Theatre on September 20.

So something for kate has nothing to do with Kate. Here are some more obscure band names.

Killing Heidi

The name doesn't concern the death of a girl: the band thought Heidi the perfect name for an innocent girl - the name is referring to a loss of innocence while growing up.

The Dandy Warhols

A play on the famous artist's name. Fortunately they've had the talent to last a fair sight longer than their allotted 15 minutes.

Jimmy Eat World

A band member supposedly has two younger brothers, one of them with the name Jim. One of them apparently told Jim he was fat, and drew a picture of him being so large that he could eat the world, writing 'Jimmy Eat World' at the bottom.

Stone Temple Pilots

Originally named STP after the popular motor oil, but fearing a lawsuit, the band came up with a number of acronyms for the letter, one of which was apparently Shirley Temple's Pussy. Thankfully they stuck with their current moniker.

Dexy's Midnight Runners

Rather than a reference to being too busy to go for a jog during daylight hours, the name comes from Dexadrin, a drug that can allow you to dance (or run) all night.

Echo and the Bunnymen

The band originally began their career with three live members and a drum machine, which they called Echo. Echo himself didn't last very long, but the name lived on.