With love and Kate
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Something For Kate celebrate their 20th anniversary with tour and reissues. Picture: Supplied
Source: Supplied
YOU know a band has made its mark on the cultural consciousness when their name lends itself to headlines.
Kate Middleton, Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Kate Moss and the other famous ladies sharing that name will all have a Something For Kate headline somewhere in their clippings.
“Is it a sign we have somehow entered the consciousness, or is it just dumb coincidence that there is a subeditor who has heard of the band?” says frontman Paul Dempsey. “Whichever reason, I will take it.”
The Australian trio Something for Kate celebrate 20 years of playing their idiosyncratic brand of melody-drenched alternative rock music with a raft of numerous reissues and a national tour. Dempsey and Clint Hyndman formed the band straight out of high school, with Stephanie Ashworth joining in 1998 to replace original bassist Julian Carroll.
The strength of their friendships and singularity of their sound have kept the band going through six studio records and thousands of concerts.
“The band and the friendships are so inextricably linked for us; you couldn’t have one without the other,” Dempsey says. “There’s only three of us and one of them is my wife and the other is my best friend since high school. So it’s pretty hard to f— it up.”
To mark this milestone, we go for a waltz down memory lane with Dempsey.
First gig
“It was Monday September 12, 1994, at the Punter’s Club. It was $ 3 and we were playing underneath a band called The Heard and another band called Bleeding White Noise. There were 88 payers, and for your first gig, on a Monday night, we were pretty happy with that. We didn’t book a gig until we had enough songs to play for 45 minutes, which means we probably played every song that ended up on our first EP.
“At that time, a band could play just one gig and if they looked and sounded right, the A&R guys would be all of them like a rash. I like the fact it took nine months for those guys to come and see us because it was clear we didn’t look and sound right. We didn’t fit and we
didn’t care.”
Monsters,
the 2001 “hit”
“When we started off, we may have been a bit too intense and raw for some people and scared them off but at the same time, we were so much more melodic than any of heavy bands we loved that we would play with. Monsters was the first song that got played on commercial radio and it was a top 20 single so it made it into the popular music landscape. Anybody who thinks they can predict what the popular landscape is going to be next week or next month is kidding themselves.
“Our very first single Captain
and I told the record label had to be a song called Prick, which was possibly the most abrasive thing we ever recorded. Captain was so melodic I decided we had to go back to scaring people with the next single.”
Something For Kate hang out with David Bowie in 2004
Source: Supplied
David Bowie
Reality tour 2004
“The promoter called and said they sent him a bunch of music and he picked us. I don’t know if there is any truth to that but that’s what they said.
“I’ve got friends who have toured with U2 for several weeks and were granted a five-minute audience with Bono at some point.”
“We didn’t know if it was going to be like that and it wasn’t like that at all. He
was unreal, hanging out, sticking his head into our dressing room to have a chat,
he would watch us soundcheck and would shoot the s— for
half an hour.
“The funny thing about it was it was so easy to forget you were talking to David Bowie because you were talking to a guy in jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap. I had never seen David Bowie look like that, he looked more like crew.”He told us stories about how strung out they were the last time that had been in Australia, how on the Glass Spider tour whoever was playing drums for him at that stage could barely sit on his drum stool.
Paul Dempsey gets up close and personal with the front row fans. Picture: Supplied.
Source: Supplied
“I was young and didn’t understand how anything worked, PAs or microphones or why you got feedback. I also didn’t understand why Clint couldn’t play the songs at the exact tempo I wanted and why the bass player would forget parts of songs.
“I had this unreal expectation of everything. “A lot of our early gigs would descend into chaos and fights on stage. I am very happy to say now we just don’t have bad gigs anymore.
“We are in the happy place.” where we can embrace the mistakes and the quirks and make them part of the show.
Covers
“I think the first one we ever did was a song called Truly by a Portland band called Hazel, and it was on our third EP. I still play that song today.
“We didn’t really do covers in our set until Official Fiction. I think it was because of things like Like a Version and we would learn Rock the Casbah or something and had so much fun doing it we would play it that night at the show.
“I have been wanting to cover Stop by Sam Brown for 10 years but I could only recently start hitting those notes.” I don’t have a favourite. It’s fun to do all of them.
Fashionable drummer Clint Hyndman with his perennial band mates Paul Dempsey and Stephanie Ashworth. Picture: Supplied.
Source: Supplied
Clint’s hairdo
“Which one is my favourite? It’s a tough question. Obviously, right now in 2014,
he looks good with the beard and slicked-back hair. But who knows if I will still feel the same in 2017. In 1999, with his spiky blond hair and ball-bearing necklace, I thought he looked current. I have looked the same for 20 years, I don’t do fashion. I am just that boring.
“To his credit, Clint has always been a snappy dresser and looked ‘now’.”
HEAR All six albums (Elsewhere For Eight Minutes, Beautiful Sharks, Echolalia, Official Fiction, Desert Lights, Leave Your Soul To Science) now reissued on limited edition vinyl and deluxe CD
see Something for Kate, 20th Anniversary Tour, Tivoli, Brisbane tomorrow, Enmore Theatre, Sydney, July 12,Forum Melbourne, July 18-20.
