Melanie Sheridan gets thoughtful with Paul Dempsey
by Melanie Sheridan
Beat Magazine, May 15 2002

The softly spoken, acutely intelligent frontman of Something For Kate, Paul Dempsey, is about to embark of a national solo tour. He offers Melanie Sheridan his thoughts on touring, writing, work and grabbing hold of life.

"I think the only reason people know who I am is because of the band, and I hope that there's not a real distinction between me and the band," he muses, when prodded about the possibly narcissistic existence of his occasional solo tours.

"The reason I do these shows, first and foremost, is because I enjoy it; I enjoy that being the only person on stage I can play whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want. I can go off on my own tangents without having to check that everyone's okay with it. I can do a really different version of something or I can pull out a song that we haven't played in years that the other two may not remember. Or I can try a couple of new songs that maybe the other two haven't even worked on yet. They are all SFK songs, and I enjoy the process of absolutely cutting them down to their real raw essence and delivering them that way. It makes people find something about a song that maybe they hadn't noticed before. And I think it definitely makes people hear the lyrics a lot more clearly. I'm not sure how much people focus on the lyrics but I think this way they're sort of forced to."

Does he want to force people to listen to the lyrics?

"I think it's one of the stronger points of the band. I hope," he laughs quietly. "Music for me is really about expression and communication and observation. All of that stuff helps me to be a balanced person. By writing songs and taking my observations and frustrations and neuroses and whatever; music is a wonderful way for me to take that and put it outside myself so that it's no longer swirling around my mind. I can capture it and articulate it in an exterior way that I can then look at and think about; like it's not a part of me any more. And that's really important. It's an outlet."

Asked about his busy work ethic, Paul explains that he tries "to take time off but it never seems to work. It's not that I'm a workaholic. Workaholic is a very strong term and it conjures up negative images. I like doing what I do; it's not a chore. It's a great help and a stabiliser. And I do it as often as I can, although it's not a question of doing it whenever I can. It just kind of takes over. I do everything else when I'm not writing. Writing is really the foremost thing in my life."

Speaking of his writing the talk moves to the common perception that Paul is depressed, and that his writing is depressing.

"I don't feel the need to reassure people, or to impress anybody," is his answer. "People are perfectly welcome to think 'no I don't really like Something For Kate. They put me in a bad mood or they depress me.' That's alright," he laughs. "It'd be a little simplistic to assume from that, that I live in a cave and drink only red wine. I know who I am and I know that if anything I'm grabbing hold of everything as hard as I can. I think that's the only way to live a life. When I'm in a fantastic mood and on top of the world I'm not gonna lock myself in a room with a notebook. I'm not gonna write a song about running through fields of daisies because I'd be too busy running through fields of daisies. I tend to do my writing when I need to address something. So obviously the large Something For Kate body of work is me addressing stuff. It's just that I happen to be doing it through music so other people get to hear it."

After a moment's thought, Paul is keen to clarify what he's saying.

"Whenever I'm talking about the fact that we do what we to satisfy ourselves and people can take it or leave it I always feel a twinge of hoping people don't take it the wrong way. We have to satisfy ourselves first otherwise it's a hollow venture, but obviously we're extremely grateful that people have taken an interest in what we do. And I'm just really happy to be doing shows and I'm really happy when people turn up and enjoy what I do. I just feel I need to ad that after saying that people have to take it or leave it. I think people understand that if we spent our lives trying to cater for their taste they'd see right through it, and so would we."

As to the band, Paul mentions that they tried to take some time off after the BDO but that they were itching to get back into rehearsals. "We do that five days a week. But it's not like we go and try and push shit up a hill. If there's nothing flowing and there's no ideas kicking around, we won't make ourselves stay there and create music because I think that's a bad idea. But we've been in there for about two months working on some new stuff. I think there's a new record slowly taking shape, but we're not gonna rush that."

I can't imagine Paul would ever rush anything. He's too smart for that.

Paul Dempsey plays at the Prince of Wales on Thursday and Friday (sold out).