Something for Kate

Finding the Spark

With this in mind, the first single from the upcoming new album Beautiful Sharks is a transitional one; Electricity leaps out of the speakers and whomps the listener between the eyes with a fierce intensicy that belies its melodic grace, but, says Paul, it’s not exactly an indication of the album’s mood.

“We’re hoping to rope people in with the single, and I think they’re going to find that the album is going to take a bit of concentration,” he says carefully. “The single is a song that you could probably apprectiate on one or two listens; the album, I think, has to be met half-way, it takes a few listens. It’s not as pop-rock as the last album was, its quite atmospheric and quite meandering. People aren’t going to get catch little hooks...”

“I don’t think we’ve ever done anything that’s catchy like that, though,” adds drummer Clint Hyndman. “it always takes a long time to get into the songs we do.”
“I’m sure,” says Paul, “that if we wrote verse-chorus-verse songs with more straightforward timing, then sure, alot more people might get into it. But that’s just not what we do.”

Some of the new songs have already been given audience exposure at the various summer festivals that the band tackled this season; ovbiously it’s going to be a little harder to get the new material across to the fans on a first hearing.

“A lot of the new songs are very quiet, and with the gigs we’ve been doing at festivals and so on, you’re playing to such a big audience,” Clint observes. “A lot of these songs should be heard in a small, more intimate venue, and I think that’s where some of them have been falling down a little bit. We do pull out a few rock songs, we play the hits so everyone’s happy, but the new songs will be more appreciated when we play them in the right venues. We haven’t been playing the right sort of venues for these songs.”

“Obviously it’s going to be easier,” adds Paul, “when we’re doing our own headlining shows, because people come to see us specifically. You feel like you’ve got a bit more leverage to try some different things. But a lot of these songs never even got played live before they were recorded. If you write a song and then go and play it live for six months, it sort of finds its home and you leave it like that when it’s recorded. Whereas if you write the song on the spot in the studio you’re more inclined to throw keybourds all over it, instruments that you can’t do live.”

Beautiful Sharks was once again produced by US-based Brian Paulson, whose impressive work on Elsewhere took the band to another level; he’s also helmed the upcoming Pollyanna album. Sharks was recorded in Melbourne, a suprising decision considering Dempsey’s insistence on doing Elsewhere as far away from everyone outside of the band as possible - in that case, New Zealand. Greatly preferring an isolated environment during recording, Paul soon remembered the benefits of not recording in your home town.

“I think this time we should have gone back to New Zealand to record,” he says without hesitation. “I think we were exactly right going to New Zealand the first time, and all the reasons why came up this time. At any given moment there were people sitting on the couch that basically didn’t need to be there, and it does affect the vibe - people calling up every five minutes, dropping by ... and when it’s family and friends you don’t have the heart to say ‘leave us alone’. But it does change things. In the future we’ll go elsewhere to do records.”

A somewhat rumultuous history with bass player saw Toby Ralph depart the band without having played on an album (he can be heard on one of the Electricity B-sides); new bass recruit Stephanie Ashworth has stepped into the band after years as the bass anchor of the greatly-missed Sandpit, and her forceful, flowing style is very much in evidence on the new single.

“She’s another very strong personality,” says Paul. “She actually didn’t much like Electricity at first, and it basically took recording it and finishing it off before she did. It was one of my songs that I’d basically written the whole guitar part for, and when she came along to put her bassline on it, she was a bit begrudging about it - she thought it sounded like Blur, a Britpop sort of vibe. But she’s been playing it a lot around the house lately, and thinks it’s great.” But it’s not typical of the album as a whole? “not at all. Electricity is one of the three rocky songs on the record, one of the most immediate, catchy songs.”

Not that releasing obcious singles is always a band priority. For the final single from Elsewhere , the band chose one of the more abrasive tracks from an album loaded with potential singles; it was a point, says Paul, that needed to be made.

“Putting Prick out as a single was just a knee-jerk rection to what happened with Captain. Because Captain came out, and all of a sudden we couldn’t play a show without it being the centrepiece of the entire evening. I mean, the single did really well, and we like it, obviously, we’re proud of it as a song, but we’re proud of a lot of our other songs too, and we didn’t want to just be That Band With That Song, So we got a bit knee-jerkish about it and insisted on putting out an unlistenable single. It was funny, too, because Sony’s marketing line for it was ‘It’s a prick of a single’. And they weren’t kidding. They took out all these ads in Music Network saying that, and it was just as much how they felt about it as how they intended other people to feel about it! It still ended up selling well, thanks to the B-sides, but got no radio play at all.”

The new album - still, at the time of writing, under wraps - promises to be an exciting development in the life of one of Melbourne’s most compelling bands. And while, as mentioned earlier, Dempsey is somewhat pensive about how it will be received, it’s obvious from the assurance in his voice that this is a record that he’s very, very proud of - and for a man who goes about making music with nothing less that intense passion, that’s the best result possible.

“I’ve been having these on-and-off periods of panic about the new record, where I think that nobody’s going to get this album, nobody’s going to understand it at all, because it’s too fucking involved. But then I think that, ideally, people will hear this and think that it’s a bold move, and they’ll appreciate it for that. I think it’s the best album that we’ve made, and the best album that we could have made in 1999. I think it’s a great album. But I still occasionally panic about whether people will find it too difficult.”

- By Anthong Horan

Something For Kate play tonight (Wednesday 7th) at Lamby’s in Geelong, this Thursday 8th at the Prince of Wales, Saturday 10th at Karma Hall in Morwell (all ages) and Sunday 11th April at the Pelly Bar in Frankston.