Paul Dempsey On 'The Fucking Bullshit' That Inspired 'The Official Fiction'

After 20 years on the scene, Something For Kate have reissued their catalogue in conjunction with a national anniversary tour which reached their hometown of Melbourne over the weekend. In the fourth of a six-part series, we ask Paul Dempsey to reflect on The Official Fiction.

The writing of The Official Fiction was actually even more difficult than Echolalia; it took a lot longer. Because Echolalia kept us so much busier for so much longer, we toured overseas for much longer, so by the time that all died down it was like I hadn’t written a song in a year; I just hadn’t had time.

We started getting together in our rehearsal space again, and the filter had become even more narrow so we were even harder on ourselves. I remember the whole writing of that album — Clint [Hyndman] and Steph [Ashworth] spent a lot of time in our rehearsal space playing Uno because I would just be like, ‘I can’t even play anything, just wait, give me a minute, I’m not happy with this bit, I’m not happy with this bit,’ and they’d just go, ‘Eh, fuck him,’ and put their instruments down and go and play cards. We got there in the end. We just kept at it until we felt we had a better bunch of songs and when we did we called Trina [Shoemaker] again.

After Echolalia I did a solo acoustic tour with Grant Lee Phillips and he had a guy, Eric Gorfain, playing violin with him and we became good buddies; Eric is part of a string quartet in LA called Section. So we had stayed in touch and he wrote some string arrangements so we really wanted to get them, and we were mastering in LA anyway, so we tapped LA onto the end so we could get the string quartet down and then also some guest vocalists.

Basically, it was just people we had gotten to know. Phillips happened to be in Australia touring again while we were up at Mangrove recording so he came up to hang out. He was there and it was like, ‘OK, cool, you want to sing some backing vocals?’

It was a similar thing in LA basically; we got over there and Lisa Germano is based in LA and she’s an old friend of Trina’s, and we’re all big fans of hers as well, so Trina invited her down and that happened, which was really great. And Caitlin Cary as well, same deal; Trina made some records with Whiskeytown so she was friends with Caitlin and basically it all kind of just happened.

All these people were just around. Grant happened to be in Sydney while we were recording, Caitlin and Lisa were both in LA while we were there and they came by to say hello to Trina and next thing you know they’re singing on the record.

Throughout the writing of the album — it was written basically in 2002, in the aftermath of September 11 — basically the whole entire year of 2002 was the Bush administration trying to manufacture an excuse to invade Iraq. All that stuff was happening where there were the whole ‘Weapons Of Mass Destruction’ and they were trying to get the UN to sort of sanction the Iraq invasion and then when that didn’t work they were building their ‘Coalition Of The Willing’ and it was just so much bullshit, y’know? It was just so much fucking bullshit and everybody knows that now. In ten years of hindsight, everybody looks back now and everybody completely acknowledges that there were no Weapons Of Mass Destruction, Iraq had fuck all to do with September 11, the whole thing was just completely about an ulterior motive and a whole separate agenda. Most intelligent people knew that at the time as well, but it was just incredible how much the media just completely fucking lay down and bought into this whole tale of Weapons Of Mass Destruction and, ‘Oh well, we better go invade Iraq…’

All of that was going on while I was writing these songs and we were actually in the studio in March 2002 recording up at Mangrove when the invasion happened, when the first US troops went in, we watched the first air raid on Baghdad while we were in the studio recording that album and I was still writing lyrics at that time. Songs like Letter To The Editor and Best Weapon and No Man’s Land, there’s a whole lot of that album that is very directly related to watching the whole Iraq War unfold before our eyes. Like everybody else, I was just kind of outraged and disgusted. Obviously we had John Howard as our Prime Minister at the time and don’t even get me started…

I think the songs stand up but I think maybe at that point in time maybe we had become studio animals. Everything we’ve done since has basically been a reaction almost to that album because its our most polished, studio recording and as much as I love the songs on that album, and I still think the songs themselves stand up, I just think that we were too comfortable in the studio and that we potentially lost some of the energy of our live shows.

It’s so layered and such a studio album that the intensity of our live shows and all that sort of stuff got lost, and it’s a real studio production because we were so into the studio by that point. We were so into the gadgets and the toys and the recording process and once again I had engineered and recorded all our own demos so I was getting more into it.

We had the luxury of time because Echolalia had been so successful, so with The Official Fiction it was just like, ‘[clicks] Bring me the string quartet’ and stuff like that. We were doing stuff because we could and because it was a good idea, the strings on Déjà Vu I wouldn’t change for anything, they’re so beautiful.

I love the songs but I wish it had a bit more of our live energy.