Fact & fiction
Herald Sun, August 20 2003

Something For Kate set the record straight -- they do have fun, they do laugh too and, writes WILLIAM BOWE, here's the evidence...

FRONTED by the brooding, intense figure of Paul Dempsey, and with songs covering themes from sadness and alienation to longing and regret, Something For Kate make odd companions for Atomic Kitten and Pink on Video Hits. But such is the company now kept by the band, who grew steadily from a modest start on the Melbourne pub circuit in the mid-'90s to enjoy platinum sales for their Echolalia album two years ago. Perhaps struck by such contrasts, many have formed a perception of the band as world-weary, serious and perhaps a little lacking in humour. It's an image they want quickly rectified, starting with the release this week of their fourth album, The Official Fiction. 

"We all had a lot of fun making this record, and I'd just like people to know how much we laughed in the studio," Dempsey announces.

"Everybody thinks we're these po-faced bastards. I think it's because people think that a band that writes songs about reasonably serious subjects must be really serious people all the time, 24 hours a day."

That said, there is undeniably a certain gravity about Dempsey, and what he reveals of himself through the band's music suggests he's more serious than most. But if Something For Kate's mood is not getting noticeably lighter on The Official Fiction, the album does find them continuing to expand their emotional and musical range. A case in point is Moving Right Along, on which they manage to maintain a jaunty country shuffle without losing their trademark air of detached resignation.

"I believe it's in 4/4, and 4/4 is the most normal beat of all rock and pop music and we never go near it," Dempsey says.

"That's probably why it's different for us. It's probably the most fun song we've written, just because for once we've kind of gone, 'Let's just shuffle. Country rock. What the hell'," he announces.

As Dempsey acknowledges, the emergence of this spirit has been a crucial development for the band since their promising but self-consciously convoluted early EPs.

"In the past, we would have been afraid and gone, 'This is too straight country, we need to screw it up".

"But these days we're much more willing to go, 'Yeah, but it feels good, so let's just do it'. In the past we might have been, 'Is that not cool?' But it's like, we're going to do what feels good and never mind whether it's cool or not cool."

Bassist Stephanie Ashworth, who joined for their second album, Beautiful Sharks (the band is completed by drummer Clint Hyndman), says growing confidence with the technicalities of recording has been the band's other major development in her time.

"The evolution of the sound from the first record to now is the evidence of three people learning about the process of recording and becoming empowered by that knowledge, and taking advantage of that," she says.

"There's no suspicious attempt for us to have sweet sounding records.

"We've learned that sometimes it's actually really nice to have your music represented in a high fidelity way rather than a lo-fi way, where you're missing a lot of the frequency range. That's something we've taken a lot of interest in."

Dempsey concurs, noting that the band have long abandoned any aversion they may have harboured to sophisticated recording techniques.

"The early EPs and the first album in particular are just extremely dense, and it's because we didn't know anything about recording," he says.

"We thought the most obvious way to make something really big was to put 20 guitar tracks on it.

"All that does is make it sound like mud.

"These days we understand that the way you make something sound big is to often do as little as possible to it and leave as much space."

As well as musical and technical developments, The Official Fiction covers new territory for the band lyrically, in that it appears to be their most overtly political album to date.

"Propaganda, rhetoric and spin" are among the main themes identified by Dempsey, and many observers of recent world events who hear Best Weapon and Letter to the Editor will reach obvious conclusions about what motivated them.

Dempsey, however, warns against interpreting his words too narrowly.

"To me, most of my lyrics mean something very definite. Best Weapon is the most explicit example on the album of language being used -- being misused really, is what I should say -- as a weapon, on the news and in debates and dialogues.

"But I also like to leave them open to interpretation because I don't want to just write boring literal things where people go, 'Oh right, that's about that, ding-ding'.

"I'd like to think that they could be interpreted differently at different times depending on the listener's frame of mind. I certainly feel differently about them each time I hear them."

While Dempsey does not shy away from expressing strong opinions about the Iraq conflict, he doesn't confine the theme of a song to his thoughts on a specific political issue.

"I like to convey things in a way that can be seen from all angles. People can definitely look at certain things on the album from that angle and interpret it that way: 'Oh yeah, that song's about recent events'.

"Or depending on how well acquainted they are with their history books, they can just as easily go: 'Oh, that's about something that happened 60 years ago'.

"Because what's happened recently shouldn't be a surprise to anybody because it's just another in a seemingly endless pattern of bulls..t wars that could have and should have been avoided."

There's no questioning the relevance of such topics in the current environment, or the conviction with which Dempsey expresses them. But how far will an album dealing with such themes go towards resolving those image issues? Dempsey concedes it's something the band may have to learn to live with.

"I've come to think journalists must like portraying us as depressed. But you can be the first journalist in Australia to tell everyone how wacky and zany we really are."

The Official Fiction (Sony) out now. Something For Kate, Inferno, Traralgon, Oct 1, ph: 5176 0464; Forum, Oct 3-4, Ticketek; Peninsula Lounge, Moorooduc, Oct 5, ph: 5978 8717.