The Fights And Ping Pong That Carved Something For Kate’s Second Record

We recorded Beautiful Sharks in Melbourne. I guess we just sort of thought we were less scared. The label basically said, "Ok, you can make another record." And the first one did alright so we felt a bit more comfortable, so we thought "Ok, we could do this at home and manage our lives," but it was a mistake, and we’ve never made another album in Melbourne. We got the thing made, but all the stuff that we were afraid of with the first record happened with Beautiful Sharks; there was always heaps of people in the studio, and people leaving the studio to go and do something and not coming back for four hours.

I remember a few moments of upset in the studio because of family members or friends dropping by and then drinks being had and people having fights or whatever in the studio.

It’s also funny as well just watching the stuff you can’t do [in the studio] anymore. This is at Sing Sing in Melbourne; there’s half a dozen people sitting in this tiny little control room, dragging away on cigarettes. The whole control room was like a smoke chamber. If you walked into a studio control room with a lit cigarette these days you’d be booted out.

It was just distracting and they had a ping pong table too. Clint [Hyndman, drummer] and I just spent way too many hours on that thing. I remember Steph [Ashworth, bassist] and Brian [Paulson, producer] coming out of the control room, saying "Guys, come on, enough of the fucking ping pong already." Clint and I are very intense about our ping pong. Clint and I, it’s funny, when it comes to any sort of competitive stuff, we’re pretty much on a par with everything. We play a bit of golf sometimes and we’re dead even as golfers. Dead even ping pong players. Dead even in chess. Every time we try and compete with each other it’s almost a tie all the time.

We were still young, we were still inexperienced, and we felt really comfortable with Brian [Paulson], so that decision [to have Paulson return as producer] as well just came from feeling safe and comfortable with him. It’s always a risk when you pick a producer, especially someone from overseas that you haven’t met in person before because it might not work out. I know a lot of bands who met up with someone from overseas and then been stuck in a studio with them for two months making a record and just not gotten along at all and hated every second of it, hated the way their record was turning out, and that’s scary.

There were a whole lot of things that happened in that year that I think contributed to that different sound on Beautiful Sharks. One of them was me making that Scared Of Horses record, because I played everything on that record myself and so I got a real crash course in playing drums and bass guitars and keyboards and stuff in a studio environment, and how to achieve different dynamics. That was a good experience leading up to Beautiful Sharks because then when we got into the studio to make that we had a much greater appreciation of bringing everything down, down, and then building up to a peak. There’s lots of moments on that record, like Slowdance and Big Screen Television, songs that begin as these sort of creeping little things and then build up to these very dense explosions.

I think when Steph joined the band as well we just wanted to make more atmospheric music. I think it was a new relationship in the band, it was a new chemistry between the three of us, it was the beginning of a relationship between Steph and myself, so there were lots of things that contributed to it. Also our changing tastes in music, I was probably listening to less Sonic Youth and more Thrill Jockey kind of stuff, indie bands like Tortoise, more kind of experimental type stuff. When the songs started coming for Beautiful Sharks there was just a bit more light and shadow and it wasn’t all yelling and screaming.

I’m proud of it, I’m more proud of it [than Elsewhere For Eight Minutes]. The closer they get to today, it’s a ridiculously obvious statement, like the less distance there is to that album, the closer I can relate to it, I guess. It wasn’t an album made by a bunch of 19-year-olds, you know? I think at that point we were 22, 23, so we’d learnt a little bit, and I was writing about different things.

As I got a bit older I started to take my own lyrics a bit more seriously. I wanted them to be better. I started to put a bit more time and energy into actually trying to express something in an interesting way and trying to make something that other people might actually be able to relate to and interpret and connect with. Lyrics started to become more important to me. I think the lyrics on Beautiful Sharks are a lot better than the lyrics on Elsewhere For Eight Minutes.

My criticism of the record would be that at the end we chose to work with Brian.

And the music’s a lot more interesting. My criticism of the record would be that at the end we chose to work with Brian; he’s not so much a producer as he is an engineer, so there’s still not much in the way of interesting effects or tones or textures. It’s still very much a raw, stripped-back kind of thing. You live and learn, and I think that the next album was the first time we worked with a producer and you can hear the difference and I think that’s why you can hear such a difference between the first two records and when Echolalia came along and it was real leap.