Fiction factory
by Cameron Adams
Herald Sun: HIT, July 10 2003
MELBOURNE trio Something For Kate are frantically trying to learn the songs off their coming album, The Official Fiction, before their Melbourne tour next week.
SFK's show at Palace on July 17 will also feature a string section up on stage with them to celebrate the occasion.
"We don't know them inside out in terms of being able to play them with total abandon," Paul Dempsey told the Daily Telegraph's Dino Scatena of the four or five new tracks they intend to present to fans.
"We still have to think about them. It's not like when you've played songs on tour one million times and you let your hands do what they do and your mind can kind of wander."
This week sees the commercial release of the brilliant first single, Deja Vu. If you think the words on it are pretty, then you should thank Dempsey. And we mean you should really, really thank Dempsey for his efforts.
"I'd say I wrote well over 20,000 words for this record," Dempsey revealed. "I have a stack of maybe 15 or 20 notebooks. I'm talking A4, hard-cover, 180-page things.
"It's just my thing. I write a lot. I guess the best way to describe it is that I'm a very, very prolific writer, but 99.99 per cent I look back on and think it's shite.
"I get there eventually and whittle it down to the lyrics that I think articulate exactly what I'm trying to say, but it takes me an awful long time to get there. I really drive myself nuts. I'll use one sentence out of every 1000 words."
One of the recurring themes on The Official Fiction, as the title suggests, is the notion of how to distinguish between fact and fiction in our multimedia world.
"There are several points in the album where we talk about fiction being passed off as fact or just fiction taking the appearance of fact," Dempsey says.
So was it all inspired by the recent war? Not at all.
"There's a song on the album called Best Weapon that I suspect that everyone is going to straight away go, 'Oh, it's about the war'. But it was written long before the war.
"When I say best weapon, I'm not referring to bombs or missiles. I'm actually referring to rhetoric and propaganda. It's more about using information as your weapon."
The Official Fiction is released on August 18.