Something
For Kate

The Cover Story

Words: Al Newstead
Design: Nicholas Jones

Something For Kate celebrate 20 years as a band this year, commemorating their achievement with the reissue of their back catalogue on CD and vinyl and embarking on a unique national tour where the trio will deliver career-spanning setlists at some of the country’s best venues. In anticipation, we take an exhaustive look at Something For Kate’s distinctive legacy, with the input of the band themselves, for a unique celebration of their 20th Anniversary.

Part 1: The Early Years

What’s in a name?

Well when it belongs to treasured Melbourne-based three-piece Something For Kate, it happens to be two decades worth of fertile yarns, starting with the one behind their original moniker, ‘Fish of the Day’.

It turns out that even at a fresh 19 years of age, high school friends Paul Dempsey and Clint Hyndman – who first bonded over a love of Descendents – were not any good at band names.

“Dempsey and the Hyndmans was our school wannabe band, Paul and I made up during an economics class,” Clint reveals. Though they luckily failed to fulfil on that namesake, once they found a bass player – Julian Carroll, enlisted through an advertisement – they did saddle themselves with ‘Fish of the Day’ shortly after. That is, until it became a phrase that a Melbourne venue simply would not advertise.

Pressed for a new band name over the phone by the booker, a young, panicked Dempsey looked to his shopping list and saw the request to get ‘Something’ for his dog, a Jack Russell named Kate.

They were booked, “which also meant we were pretty much stuck with the name,” Dempsey says.

That first ever gig was on Monday 12th September, 1994 at the Punters Club in Fitzroy, opening for The Heard and Bleeding White Noise, as Dempsey perfectly recalls.

“We were as sloppy as anything but we jut went for it and got completely carried away,” he says. “I think we scared a good proportion of the audience.”

“It was the only gig we had booked but the house sound guy came up to us immediately after the show and offered us a gig with his band the following week and suddenly it just seemed like we were playing all the time.”

Jump to 18 months of shows down the line, and Dempsey, Hyndman, and Julian Carroll began recording what would become their 1996 debut EP, The Answer To Both Your Questions, at South Melbourne’s Seed Studios, next door to Studio B, where a Murder Ballads-era Bad Seeds were rehearsing.

…The Answer To Both Your Questions EP

Released: 1996
Key Tracks: ‘Higher Than You Think’, ‘Slow’, ‘Clint’
Did You Know? “Paul, Julian, and myself have a (matching) tattoo of the front cover’s sextant on us.” (CH)

“Nick Cave made me a cup of tea,” Dempsey reveals.

“It was our first time in a proper studio and we had no idea what we were doing, we just bashed everything out like we would at a gig and that’s pretty much how it sounds.”

Intermission EP

Released: 1997
Key Tracks: ‘By Numbers’, ‘Truly’
Did You Know? ‘Truly’ , originally written and performed by Sub Pop-signed alt-rockers Hazel, is SFK’s first recorded cover.

“We wrote, recorded and released three EPs in 12 months and dragged ourselves repeatedly up and down the East Coast playing every shitty gig imaginable and it was fantastic.”


Something For Kate’s 1996 Tour Diary

The first early chapter in the band’s story was about to come to a close, when Carroll decided that the lifestyle of a touring bassist was not for him.

“We were sad when he informed us but there were personal reasons why he couldn’t keep up the touring schedule (which was only getting more demanding) and he had decided to move to the country,” Dempsey recounts.

Hyndman was equally respectful of his bandmate’s decision; “touring and being away from his partner all became too much for Julian. Being in a band isn’t for everyone, it does get quite lonely being away from loved ones,” says the drummer, now a father himself.

With it now clear that their bass player was departing, “we asked him to stay on long enough to finish the first album and travel to New Zealand with us to record,” says Dempsey. “It seemed a fitting way to close a chapter and we had a great time and I’m really glad he got to play on that record and finish a full-length album with us.”

That record was the band’s debut album, Elsewhere For 8 Minutes, recorded across the pond in Auckland with producer Brian Paulson, who’s work with perennial band favourites Wilco and Slint had enamoured him to the band.

Elsewhere For 8 Minutes

Released: 11th July 1997
Key Tracks: ‘Pinstripe’, ‘Captain’, ‘Prick’, ‘Like Bankrobbers’
Did You Know? “We drank a lot of Max Gold recording that record.” (CH)

The song, ‘Captain (Million Miles An Hour)’, preceded Elsewhere…’s July release and eventually landed Something For Kate their first (but certainly not their last) place on the Triple J Hottest 100, placing at #39 in 1997.

The momentum meant that the necessity for a replacement bassist was a high priority, given “we had shows booked on our return,” Dempsey remembers.

His scouting included a call to the bass player of fellow Aussie three-piece Sandpit – who had opened for Something For Kate on a number of shows – a 20-year-old Stephanie Ashworth.

“Steph was the first person I thought of. We didn’t really know each other but we had a phone conversation,” says the frontman.

“Paul called me before they went to New Zealand to record Elsewhere…” recalls Ashworth, but had to decline the initial offer “as I had just signed a contract with [Sandpit] and it wasn’t possible to do both…”


In the studio to record Elsewhere For 8 Minutes

But the seeds were planted, and Ashworth – working at a record store while studying at the time – was already a keen fan of Something For Kate’s first records.

“[They] still intrigue me to this day,” she says of the early recordings, “I loved the intensity of the live show and the faithful delivery of that on record… they capture a band who were in love with noise, melody, and a principle.”

It’s written large in the serrated guitar work of enduring fan favourites like ‘Pinstripe’ and ‘Like Bankrobbers’, songs that cleary blossomed from the well-spring of the post-grunge boom but demonstrated an intelligence in lyric and inventive form that belied other emerging Aussie guitar bands of the time.

Ashworth, like many hearing Something For Kate for the first time, was “spellbound by this album – it was beautiful, angry, very original and very accomplished for a group of 18-year-olds.”

“It remains my favourite of all the albums,” says Ashworth today. “I toured the hell out of it and I feel like I know it inside out … I felt privileged to be able to play these songs in this band. I still do.”

Even though she “wasn’t there for the process” of Elsewhere… whatsoever, Ashworth would still enter into the studio with Dempsey a little over a year later, as a guest on the singer-songwriter’s one-off 1998 album An Empty Flight, released under the alias, Scared of Horses.

“During this time I had a bunch of music that I didn’t know what to do with burning a hole in my head so I made a record in three days with a bunch of guests,” says Dempsey of a roster that included Jamie Hutchings of Bluebottle Kiss and young Augie March frontman Glenn Richards, another “of whom was Steph.”

Something For Kate fans are a pretty devout lot, but we wanted to know what the strangest fan encounter of the last 20 years had been for the band.

CH: “After a show we did at the Zoo in Brisbane a guy came up to me with a vintage Premier snare drum and said. ‘I’d like you to have this, it has a sound that is perfect for you to play ‘Like Bankrobbers’ with.’ He had watched the whole show holding this drum. I still have that drum and it was one epic sounding piece of ply!”

SA: “There’s been some crazy car chases, voyeuristic shopping mall incidents and general weird business over the years but feet kissing episodes are always awkward and confronting.”

PD: “I’m not calling anyone crazy but it’s always a bit surprising when you see some of the band-related stuff that people have had tattooed on themselves.”

Back in Something For Kate, Carroll’s temporary replacement, Toby Ralph, had played with the band for just under a year, “but as often happens in bands it became apparent that we wanted different things and we parted ways,” Dempsey explains.

With the post vacant once more, “we offered her the spot a second time,” he says, nearly one year on from first asking Stephanie to fill it. “And this time she answered in the affirmative.”

Ashworth’s official public debut came (fittingly) at the same Fitzroy venue where Something For Kate’s live show was birthed: The Punters Club.

The 1998 gig was advertised as an acoustic show by Dempsey (a long-running tradition) but following his solo set, “Clint and Steph jumped up at the end and we ran through four tracks from Elsewhere,” Dempsey recounts.

“Steph did great, I think she was really worried about the audience’s reaction to the sudden appearance of a new bass player but everything totally clicked and felt right… She’s fond of joking about all the times she used to see us play and instruments would go flying across the stage in all directions so I imagine she was probably just relieved to get through those first four songs without having to dodge a guitar.”

For her part, Ashworth wittily states it wasn’t flying instruments she was worried about, but the state of her fellow rhythm-keeper.

“I remember that Clint had gastro and I pretty much spent most of the show facing him. It was horrifying.”

Despite her live trial by fire, Ashworth’s permanence was confirmed when it came time for her to creatively contribute to new material.

“The ‘eureka’ moment came as soon as we started writing new songs together,” Paul notes, coming up with half of a new album “in a relatively short space of time and it felt very different and exciting to me… [it] felt like a new sound and direction for the band.”

With nearly 100 songs to their name, the difficult question must be asked. What are the band’s personal favourite lyrics and musical moments?

Steph loves “playing the early stuff… I can see how happy it makes people. I like it when everyone sings louder than the band on stage to to [songs] like ‘Pinstripe’.”

Hyndman also prefers some of the vintage era, like ‘Telescope’ and his namesake, ‘Clint’. “I love playing the first verse of Captain before the singing comes in,” he adds. “It’s fucking solid.” Along with ‘Impossible’ and ‘A Fools History Pt 1’, his favourite comes in a line from ‘Slow’, “Now I’m stuck here with a bubble beside my head/ so you can write in exactly what you’d like me to have said.”

As for the man who pens the words, Dempsey’s top lyric “right now off the top of my head [is], ‘All I want is a cure for miracles/but all she’s got is a miracle cure.‘”

The seeds of what would become Something For Kate’s second full-length album were sown when Dempsey went on an ancestral trip to Dublin, tracing the roots of his Irish immigrant father, Charlie (who had died in a car accident when his son was but a year old).

“Meeting half of my family for the first time was an intense experience,” recalls the frontman, who’d routinely walk into local bars and be recognised by strangers as ‘Dempsey’s boy’.

The experiences inspired the framework for at least two album cuts (‘Slowdance’ and ‘Beautiful Sharks’) were “written in bars in Dublin” before Dempsey reconvened with his drummer and bassist in Toronto, where “we wrote the remainder of the album in under a week.”

Beautiful Sharks

Released: 1st July 1999
Key Tracks: ‘Beautiful Sharks’, ‘Hallways’, ‘Electricity’, ‘Anchorman’, ‘Back To You’
Did You Know? “Paul played the drums on ‘Photograph’.” (CH)

According to Ashworth, it was a turbulent period of adjustment but also a galvanising process where “really [for] the first time, [Paul] let his guard down to collaborate. It was both exciting and frightening,” she says. “I began to realise what a musical savant Paul was. That was very intimidating.”

“I remember writing the bass part that became the basis of ‘Anchroman’ and think that perhaps it was OK to be a slightly odd bass player,” Ashworth reveals. “I never had a traditional relationship with the drums.”

But her own contributions to the band began to take shape on songs about “humans and the technology we’ve created and where we’re heading” as Dempsey told Richard Kingsmill for an episode of The J Files.

Recorded at Melbourne’s Sing Sing and Hothouse Studios with Elsewhere… producer Brian Paulson, the stimulation of buttressing their new lineup and identity was also nurtured by the band’s label, Sony imprint Murmur, then home to fellow rising Aussie guitar bands like Silverchair and Jebediah.

“It was a great time and [Murmur] were like a lovely family,” says Steph. “They cared so much about the detail of everything and there was nothing they wouldn’t do to make everything right.”

Released in the winter of 1999, Beautiful Sharks proved the positive attitudes of both record company and band by acquiring both critical and commercial acclaim.

Beat’s Justin Murray declared the album proved “Something For Kate are one of the best songwriting bands in the country” and by year’s end, the record had earned a Best Alternative Album ARIA nomination, peaked at #8 on the charts, and saw three singles – ‘Electricity’, ‘Whatever You Want’, ‘Hallways’ – all land in the Triple J Hottest 100 (at #44, #70, #72, respectively).

The band were also racking up miles on the tour pedometer with soon-to-be-good-mates Powderfinger, on the month-long P2k Australian Tour (for their own breakout album, Internationalist), and enlisted one Wally Gunn to bolster the necessary keys and guitar parts.

In a curious twist, ‘Photograph’, the closing track on Beautiful Sharks, wound up being included on the soundtrack for ‘00s teen drama Dawson’s Creek.

“Due to the success of the soundtrack, Paul and I were flown to Sydney to talk about it in a TV special. I was a big fan of the show. Paul, not at all,” recalls Hyndman. The drummer calls the resulting promotional interview the funniest moment of the band’s career. But Paul’s own chuckle-worthy highlight involves one of the band’s sound crew “squashing most of a cheese sandwich into Clint’s ear” after a food fight erupted in the bar of the Columbia Hotel in London.

Beautiful Sharks also took Something For Kate to Japan and the United States (where Ashworth famously rebuffed a personal invitation from Courtney Love to join Hole) while the album ended up achieving Platinum sales.

In 2000, another single was issued, ‘Astronaut’, along with Q&A With Dean Martin, a Murmur compilation of the band’s earliest out-of-print releases, and a 12-strong music video collection, Big Screen Television.

But there was a darker spectre lurking beneath Something For Kate’s swelling momentum; their chief songwriter hadn’t written any new material in nearly a year. Dempsey was plagued with writer’s block and suffering from bouts of severe depression as a result.

After a particularly frustrating and fruitless rehearsal session one afternoon, the three booked an impromptu getaway to Thailand. As the myth is told to Sain magazine’s Christie Elizer at the time, after a week of unwinding, one afternoon Dempsey wandered out of the sea, into his hotel room, picked up the guitar and out poured what would arguably become the band’s most well-known tune: ‘Monsters’. Fitting given that it dealt with a very personal subject: Dempsey’s own demons and “those objects and symbols which stop us from achieving something.”

Following ‘Monsters’, a valve turned, with a drip-feed flowing to a torrent of 25 more songs that meant the threesome were ready for album #3.

Echolalia

Released: 22nd June 2001
Key Tracks: ‘Monsters’, ‘Twenty Years’, ‘Old Pictures’, ‘Say Something’
Did You Know? “It was almost called Imagine My Surprise When I Woke Up And Found That My Boat Was Missing, and this is actually printed as an alternate title somewhere on the artwork.” (PD)

“We were holding ourselves to a whole new standard and my own internal editor had grown into an intractable bastard,” Dempsey reveals. “We got there eventually and the recording sessions with Trina Shoemaker were the most fun we had ever had in a studio.”

Shoemaker, the American producer who won the band’s admiration thanks to her work with Sheryl Crow, Wilco, Whiskeytown, and R.E.M., was “the perfect person to capture [our] best songs yet on tape.”

Ashworth, who also has “great memories” of recording Echolalia, at INXS bassist Gary Garry Beers’ Mangrove Studios on the Central Coast, calls the sessions “a lot of fun, but also rigorous. [Trina] was very perfectionist compared with Brian Paulson… we worked so hard that we turned down dinner with Springsteen!”

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Something
For Kate

The Cover Story

Part 2: Mid-Career

While knocking back The Boss may still be a regret, Echolalia (named after the condition of meanlessly repeating words) surpassed the high watermark set by its predecessor. Commercially, it eventually hit double-platinum, peaked at #2 on the charts, earned four ARIA Award nominations, graced end-of-year album polls, and found multiple singles winding up on high rotation across the airwaves.

Or as Dempsey describes it: “By some favourable turn of the fickle radio programming landscape, ‘Monsters’ and ‘Three Dimensions’ got played far and wide and we did our enthusiastic best to back it all up with plenty of touring.” That included a further expansion to the touring lineup, recruiting ex-Sidewinder member Pip Branson and Simon Bourke to aid in the more expansive arrangements of the album.

There’s an awful lot of gigs to choose from in a career spanning 20 years, but what are Something For Kate’s most memorable gigs?

CH: “Playing in Pittsburgh at some festival that had a capacity of 10,000. When we went on stage there was one person watching us. Truly, a very fun show.”

SA: “Paul & Clint will probably think I’d say it was in the snow at Mt Hotham not long after I’d joined the band when… mid-song, I noticed there were suddenly no drums to find Clint was standing in front of me attacking my strings with his sticks as I eventually found myself playing a bass solo. People were diving off the fireplace into the crowd. Paul was on the drums and didn’t want to get off. They had been enjoying the local hospitality. But I think one of my most memorable gigs was actually when Clint forgot how to play ‘Captain’ live on national radio. I really felt for him. I know what that’s like. It’s usually me.”

PD: “Side of stage at the Livid festival, Robert Smith in Lycra Bike shorts watching Devo with his parents.”

Echolalia was also named by Triple J listeners as the best album of 2001 while ‘Monsters’ hit #2 on the Hottest 100, gifting SFK with what is still their highest ever ranking position on the poll; nine years later it was also named by a panel of Australian industry figures among the 100 Best Australian Albums.

But as is the cautiously modest nature of the Melbourne trio, the band unanimously agrees in hindsight that their third album is “nowhere near our best work.”

Further highlighting their humility in triumph, Ashworth terms their increasing recognition as “being in different territory and it was exhilarating,” but with the disclaimer, “I needed to be a better player. I steel feel that way.”


Recording ‘Echolalia’ in 2001

Dempsey’s similarly remembers it as “quite a surreal time – walking down the street the week [Echolalia] came out and it seemed to be playing out of every bar and shop… it was strange.”

“I remember feeling a mixture of excitement about all the great stuff that was happening but also some apprehension…”

That sense of double-edged anxiety would eventually creep its way into The Official Fiction, a record that compounded the success of Echolalia with a similar sonic world – achieved by once again returning to Mangrove with Trina Shoemaker – but also heightened some of the band’s darker impulses.

The Official Fiction

Released: 15th August 2003
Key Tracks: ‘Déjà Vu’, ‘Best Weapon’, ‘Max Planck’, ‘Song For A Sleepwalker’
Did You Know? “‘Déjà Vu’ was quite last minute to the record – it almost didn’t make it.” (SA)

“I think it’s fair to say that there was a fair bit of pressure on us as this stage and writing this record did our heads in,” says Ashworth of their 2003 record. “We spent nearly every day for at least a year in the studio writing it.”

There was another dimension at work, and the trio’s resulting 13-song set may not specifically detail the post-9/11 world in which it was crafted (enigma has always been a powerful tool in Dempsey’s lyrical arsenal) but these alternatingly withering and antagonistic tunes were still very much affected by it.

“Even though it wasn’t intentional, I can’t help thinking of this as our ‘political album’,” Dempsey confers. “It came together in the aftermath of 9/11 while Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Blair, Howard et al were putting together their ‘coalition of the willing’ and lobbying to create a pretext to invade Iraq based on what everybody now generally accepts was a load of outrageous horseshit.”

Thus, the album’s title, telegraphing the “official language of fucked up and static” lyric found on the biting ‘Best Weapon’ and ‘Letter To The Editor’ or the duplicity of the Hitchcock-nodding ‘Kaplan/Thornhill’

Something For Kate have performed secrets shows under a number of pseudonyms over the years, such as George Kaplan and the Editors and Jerry & The Manmade Sharks. But what’s the band’s favourite? Steph and Paul have the same answer: “Three Eggs, One Omelette.”

“Like many people, I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing, reading [and] hearing at the time and the degree to which it was being indulged, propagated and supported by a large proportion of the media,” Dempsey rattles. “It just came out in the lyrics. Even the more personal songs on the record feel like a reaction or an attempt to escape from the glare and noise of the 24 hour news cycle.”

There is juxtaposing shade too however, ‘Song For A Sleepwalker’ remains one of the most unabashedly graceful in the Something For Kate catalogue while Ashworth loves “the darkness and beauty” in the slow-motion sway of ‘Reverse Soundtrack’ and drum-less strum and strings of ‘Light At The End Of The Tunnel’.

“I remember being really excited by watching Paul do the string arrangements,” says the bassist of their LA recording sessions, which also led to a clutch of appreciated musicians – Grant-Lee Phillips, and Whiskeytown’s Lisa Germano and Caitlin Cary – providing vocals on the record; “we had some good times with drink,” Ashworth nattily remarks.

Released on 15th August, 2003, The Official Fiction debuted at #1 on the ARIA Album Charts, a feat Something For Kate would repeat again with its successor, Desert Lights, in 2006.

What’s something about the band that even the most diehard of fans might not know?

Steph answers: “I have face blindness, Clint has no sense of direction, and Paul refuses to read second hand books.”

The three years between new music didn’t leave the band’s fans starved however, broken up by Phantom Limbs – a double disc set handily compiling the band’s rarities, B-sides (many as strong as any of their album material), and live recordings.

It also collated a selection of the cover versions that had by now become a bit of a band trademark (and continue to be), ranging from the faithful (Midnight Oil, Jebediah) to the transformative, like Duran Duran’s ‘Ordinary World’ and ‘Ashes To Ashes’ by David Bowie, who the band had the privilege of supporting on the Australian leg of his 2004 Reality world tour.

Sharing the stage with the great icon on his first Down Under tour in nearly a decade (and he’s been absent for as long since) is a glaring career highlight. For Ashworth, it meant enjoying “hanging out in David Bowie’s costume room while [everyone] made me try things on for their amusement.”

For Dempsey, it afforded the opportunity to tell Bowie just how much the ‘Ashes To Ashes’ video “scare[d] the crap out of me as a little kid,” as he told The Vine in 2012. “He offered his apologies so we’re all good.”


Soundcheck on the David Bowie tour

Comprehensive tours of Europe and the UK followed, taking up much of 2004 until returning to Australia late in the year to begin working on their next record, but the lurking spectres of depression and writer’s block once again settled over Dempsey, resulting in a long year of protracted writing and aborted ideas where “the three of us really went through some sort of hell,” as Ashworth puts it “– particularly Paul of course.”

“I think we looked at each other blankly every day for around about two years and then the light bulbs started to go out one by one in the studio and we didn’t bother to replace them – until the last one went out on Clint and I one day, we looked at each other and knew it was time to go – the room was pushing us out.”

Dempsey gives a much more punctuated account of the difficult process, “2005” is his reply when asked of the scariest moment of the band’s 20 year career.

Desert Lights

Released: 1st July 2006
Key Tracks: ‘A Fool’s History Pt 1’, ‘California’, ‘Impossible’, ‘Down The Garden Path’
Did You Know? That’s famed Bowie associate Mike Garson tinkling the ivories on closing track, ‘Washed Out To Sea’.

To exorcise their ordeal, the trio escaped to Los Angeles to record in the garage of producer Brad Wood. His experience at the visceral end of the sonic spectrum (with album credits like Sunny Day Real Estate’s seminal Diary and LP2 and Liz Phair’s raw Exile In Guyville) facilitated the band’s necessity to “let loose and make a racket” in Dempsey’s words, and not merely on record alone.

“We stayed there for nearly six months making Desert Lights. After the anguish of writing it, we had the time of our lives making it with Brad Wood,” says Ashworth.

“We went out drinking a lot, we availed ourselves of everything the city had to offer… spent time with friends and just really enjoyed ourselves.”

It also saw Dempsey and Ashworth cementing their – up to that point – private relationship, getting married in a Las Vegas hotel room under the license laws of Nevada. The tying of the knot marked not only a romantic symbiosis but a symbolic strengthening for the band.

The transforming of another period of personal turmoil into triumph is eloquently signalled in the album’s title “suggesting lights leading a way out of a desert,” Paul explains. “It’s a really cathartic record for me, it’s associated with a difficult personal time in my life but it’s also the thing that represents the end of that chapter.”

From the first cutting guitar notes that open Desert Lights, on the propulsive ‘California’, it’s clear that in sound and scope that “the record is a bit of a reaction to the layered polish of The Official Fiction,” as Ashworth punctuates; “we fell in love with guitars again.”

Did you know that Something For Kate have an annual ‘Xmas Staff Party’?

“It’s just the three of us. We get wild. Smoke heaps of ciggies and drink lotsa booze,” says Hyndman. “Members only. It’s the joke that keeps on giving,” says Ashworth.

At a brisk clip of 10 tracks over 40 minutes, Desert Lights is the shortest and arguably most focussed album in the Something For Kate discography. Though gilded with agitated guitars and wiry energy (on ‘Transparanoia’ and ‘Oh Kamikaze) and honing closer to the core trio’s playing once more, it didn’t sacrifice their gift for melody or skill in letting the music showcase Dempsey’s highly emotive delivery and intelligent wordplay.

“My favourite moment is when Paul screams ‘your heart’s lonely whispering’ at the end of ‘A Fool’s History Pt 1’,” Hyndman glows.

Desert Lights debuted at #1 and was certified Gold within the first few weeks of its release in June 2006. The next two years were stoked with extensive national touring as well as releasing a career retrospective, The Murmur Years – The Best Of Something For Kate 1996-2007, featuring a new single ‘The Futurist’. There was also a live album, a limited edition “artist controlled bootleg” of the band’s hometown performance at the Corner Hotel on Saturday 23rd February, 2008, available for purchase minutes after concluding their sold out performance.

What came next was a well-earned rest for a band that had a near 12-year cycle of writing, recording, and touring. Well, nearly all of the band.


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Something
For Kate

The Cover Story

Part 3: Hiatus To Today

“After Desert Lights and The Murmur Years Tour, Clint and Steph basically told me that it was time for me to do a solo record and the band shouldn’t rush straight into a sixth album,” Dempsey notes.

That meant 2008 was spent writing and recording his first solo album, Everything Is True, and after its release in 2009, Dempsey “toured constantly around Australia, followed by Europe and the US.”

In 2010, Dempsey and his bandmate wife relocated to New York, where the couple stayed for two more years. A period in which Ashworth “took around 18,000 photographs and had a baby,” she says, while the infant Miller Dempsey’s father used the Big Apple as a base of operations while touring America at large.


Something For Kate in New York City in 2011

“I reckon I played more shows in two years in the States than I had in all the years preceding,” Paul calculates.

Meanwhile, back in their native country, Hyndman didn’t put down the drumsticks due to his bandmates’ absence. “I played drums with Joel Silbersher [of cult Melbourne band GOD], in a band called Souls on Boardand put out a great record called Mirror Wood. Played a few shows with Kellie Lloyd from Screamfeeder,” he lists.

He also became a proprietor of two bars (Yellow Bird and later, The Woods Of Windsor) and the proud parent of two sons (Milo and Sonny).

Their lives enriched by family and other priorities and their musical legacy already well ensured, it would seem that putting Something For Kate into first gear for a few years was not only a smart and productive move, which made bringing the band back into full momentum was not a matter of necessity or habit, but choice.

The new sense of freedom did wonders for the band’s internal dynamics, and the result was the writing, recording and release of a new album within the space of a year, closing a gap of six with a new album release in 2012.

Leave Your Soul To Science

Released: September 28th 2012
Key Tracks: ‘Survival Expert’, ‘Miracle Cure’, ‘The Fireball At The End Of Everything’, ‘This Economy’
Did You Know? The Yolanda of ‘Deep Sea Divers’ is a real “transsexual homeless person” who frequented Dempsey’s local subway stop in New York; “even in real life, (s/he) was too good a character to not use.” (PD)

“In many ways this feels like the debut album from SFK version 2,” asserts Dempsey, who credits their new-found sense of vigour to producer John Congleton, who “really opened up a new way of working for us… he effectively destroyed our tendency to procrastinate.”

Ashworth adds: “we were a bit looser in how we approached the whole thing and Congleton was the right man for the job,” especially given his hands-on approach bringing albums by St. Vincent and Okkervil River to swift completion. “No time for contemplation, just committing then and there.”

Compared to the band’s previous, long-gestating recordings, their newest album was completed in record time, using only three-ish weeks of the six they’d booked in Dallas, Texas studio.


In their Texan studio recording Leave Your Soul To Science

“We would bash out the basic tracks live and not even listen back to it, if it felt good and there were no obvious mistakes then we just moved on to the next track without even walking into the control room to hear it back,” says Dempsey.

“We didn’t fuck around overthinking or analysing or second-guessing anything, we just made decisions and committed to them and it felt great and I’ve never been as happy with an SFK record thus far.”

A view emphatically shared by his co-horts: “It’s my favourite record,” declares Hyndman. Ashworth concurs, “not because it’s the newest, but because the songs move me the most and lyrically, Paul’s sense of humour is more prevalent and there’s just some really sharp darkness there.”

Not least on ‘This Economy’, where the downcast protagonist once “doomed to succeed” is bemoaning to a fellow banker about the burst financial bubble like a teenage lover scorned (“my money ain’t what she used to be”). Then there’s the fact the band’s first new single in five years was called ‘Survival Expert’.

But far from being a comical nod to their musical mainstay status, the song heralded an album that laced instantly familiar Something For Kate hallmarks with a fresh sonic perspective and inventive new approaches.

The menacing 5/4 shuffle of ‘The Kids Will Get The Money’, poignant two-act structure of ‘Private Rain’, the undressed acoustic of semi-autobiographical New York narrative, ‘Deep Sea Divers’ – each cut proving that the strength of the band’s writing (as always), was in merging the thematically and musically complex with boldly direct, memorable songs.

Taking up such a primary part of their lives (for Dempsey, the band has been more than half of his 38 years of age), there must be something specific that never would have happened if not for Something For Kate?

CH: “I’d still have my hearing and my forearms and neck wouldn’t be so big.”

SA: “I probably wouldn’t have had so much glass embedded in my feet or lost so much of the top range of my hearing. The latter is almost exclusively Clint’s fault. I’m still learning this… but wearing earplugs is advisable.”

PD: “I sometimes wonder whether Cate Blanchett is sick to death of seeing the same headline every time an Australian publication does a story on her…”

Notching another #1 debut album into their CV with Leave Your Soul To Science, it was clear Something For Kate’s talent had only sharpened over two decades rather than diminished, made all the more potent by the fact the band’s motives were no longer driven by obligation but an assured sense of relevance and dedication.

As Dempsey told Tone Deaf in late 2012, “At this point we’re just doing this because we can and we want to, We each are lucky enough to have other livelihoods, Something For Kate now is this thing we can choose to do.”

They chose to remain in Australia to tour the album, resulting in two sold out national tours and a ream of festival appearances returning them to the biggest stages the country had to offer, including a return to Splendour In The Grass last year, a favourite festival moment for Something For Kate’s rhythm section.


Performing at Splendour In The Grass 2013

“It had been around 5 years since we’d done that festival and the crowd were just so overwhelmingly welcoming,” Ashworth says. “It was hard not to get a bit emotional.”

Hyndman remarks: “We hadn’t played a big festival together in such a long time. There was just a special energy between the crowd and us that night. I’m sure most people there were seeing us for the first time…”

New listeners may have also been accountable for the success of Something For Kate’s return to the Hottest 100, when their Like A Version rendition of Calvin Harris and Florence Welch’s ‘Such Sweet Nothing’ hit #68 in 2013.

“Triple J and their listeners have always been supportive,” says Ashworth. Indeed, the band had made several appearances on the station’s covers segment before, but there “was just something else about this particular track and the way we interpreted it that struck people,” Dempsey speculates.

“It’s good when new generations of listeners respond,” Ashworth says.

“I’d never heard that song until we covered it,” Hyndman admits. “At the time it didn’t mean much, but seeing the reaction to it has changed that. I think it was a big moment, as a lot of people never knew how amazing and large Paul’s vocal chords are.”

Cover versions and Dempsey’s ability to interpret them would become the centre of a new practice at Something For Kate’s Star Crossed Citizens Tour, where each show, the frontman (and whoever was available) would randomly select a song to cover and post the results on YouTube as ‘Shotgun Karaoke’.

It became the title of an 11-track Paul Dempsey release and the impetus of another solo tour, with setlists stocked with tributes to his own songwriting heroes (Bowie, Bad Religion, Talking Heads), contemporaries (You Am I, Courtney Barnett) and curios (Queen, INXS).

We asked each member of the band to write a letter to themselves from 20 years ago? Here’s what they wrote:

CH: “Dear Clint, Wear ear plugs!! Eyebrow rings, bleach blond hair and ball necklaces are not cool. When someone says you should be the star of a film clip (‘Working Against Me’)… Say no! All the Best.

SA: “Don’t worry so much. Get a law degree. Don’t tell Clint any secrets!”

PD: “Dear Paul. Invent Facebook. Cheers.”

Now set to celebrate their 20 year career by embarking on a historic headline tour this July, where do the band see themselves in the next 20 years?

Stephanie is optimistically pragmatic: “I see Paul doing [another] solo album pretty soon and SFK doing a new album after that … keep writing and releasing albums and touring until we age disgracefully.”

Clint’s vision of the future is also practical: “To continue to write more songs and exist. I’ve really loved seeing younger people get into the band and look forward the next generation of music lovers to discover our music.”

As well as his childhood friend’s more neglected skills. “People will finally acknowledge what an amazingly talented guitarist Paul is. If there’s one thing this band does not get enough credit for, it’s that.”

As for the Something For Kate frontman himself, aside from a hopeful prediction to “play at the re-opening of the Punters Club,” his true ambitions for the next two decades are far more humble: “Write a better song. Make a better record. Play a better show.”

“It’s all subjective of course, but we’ll know it when we see it.”

Something For Kate 20th Anniversary Tour 2014 Dates

Friday 4th July – The Astor, Perth WA – SOLD OUT
Friday 11th July – The Tivoli, Brisbane QLD – SOLD OUT
Saturday 12th July – Enmore Theatre, Sydney NSW
Friday 18th July – The Forum Theatre, Melbourne VIC – SOLD OUT
Saturday 19th July – The Forum Theatre, Melbourne VIC – SOLD OUT
Sunday 20th July – The Forum Theatre, Melbourne VIC
Friday 15th August – HQ, Adelaide SA

Tickets for all shows on sale at www.somethingforkate.com

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