The Remote Island Where Something For Kate Penned Their Breakout Record

After 20 years on the scene, Something For Kate have reissued their catalogue (all of which are currently in the ARIA charts) in conjunction with a national anniversary tour. In the third of a six-part series, we ask Paul Dempsey to reflect on their breakout record Echolalia.

Because things were growing and getting bigger all the time – Beautiful Sharks was a Top Ten record and it went Gold – suddenly you’re touring for longer and you’re doing a lot more out on the road. It was our first tour overseas on that record. Suddenly there’s less time for songwriting, you’ve got less time to sit in your room and noodle around. After touring Beautiful Sharks for ages and ages we thought, ‘Ok, better think about the next record,’ and there weren’t any songs because there just hadn’t been time.

So we started getting together and rehearsing; we set up in a rehearsal space and we’d go down there every day and just mess around and I just couldn’t get happy about any of the stuff we were coming up with. I guess we had also started to hold ourselves to a higher standard. We always just feel like whatever we do, if we don’t think that it’s way better than the last thing we did then we’re not there yet. It’s not that we weren’t writing. At the time I called it ‘writer’s block’ because that was the only thing I knew to call it, but now in retrospect I would characterise it differently. We were writing, I just wasn’t letting any of it past. I was being so hard about everything. I wasn’t satisfied with anything. That went on for months, our little rehearsal space, just going down there and getting shitty about everything and getting depressed.

Eventually, one day, we walked into rehearsal, and I can’t remember who it was, but one of us just said basically ‘Fuck this, let’s go somewhere, let’s just get out of here.’ And literally the three of us walked out of that studio, it was on Chapel Street in Prahran, and we just walked down the street and into Flight Centre and we sat down and just said ‘Ok, where can we go? We just want to go somewhere.’

So a couple of days later we were on an island in the Gulf of Thailand, and we brought our guitars, I don’t know why. I remember getting there, I remember vividly taking three different sized boats to get to this island and then just dumping our bags and just walking straight out into the water and just swimming around in the water and staying underwater for as long as I could. It was really funny – I came out of the water and went into our room and got my guitar out of its case and wrote Monsters. Just the whole thing at once, which never happens. And it still never happens. But when you say that it’s not true. All that really means is that you’ve been writing that song in the back of your brain for three months and it’s just popped out. But it popped out and then I was just like ‘That’s pretty good,’ and started to feel good.

There we were in Thailand for a week or so and we sat in this little bungalow with our guitars. We had these stupid little, y’know, battery-powered amps, we would just sit in this room, and Clint [Hyndman] would be like banging on pillows. We just sat in this room and wrote half the record. It was great. We went home. That was also the first time, with that record, that I started to record things. I got a hard-disc digital audio workstation and I started doing all our demos and actually buying microphones and getting interested in engineering. So I recorded all the demos for that album and we sent them to Trina Shoemaker, because we were really liking the stuff she was doing, and she got back to us and said ‘These are the weirdest, strangest demos I’ve ever heard, and I’d really like to make this record. What did you do?’

Trina was such a great teacher… She could see that I was interested in the studio set-up, she could see that Steph [Ashworth] was interested in the mixing process, and she completely invited us in and taught us how it all worked while we were doing it. It’s probably never been said before, but Steph co-mixed that record with Trina. Steph and Trina mixed that record together. I guess Steph as well, her position in the band and everything was completely solid then, not from Clint and I’s perspective, obviously she was always solid with us, but I guess she felt more confident with her perceived place in the band. I remember her making us do stuff again in the studio. We’d be about to mix something and she’d go ‘I think we need to re-record this from the start.’ Ok…

We felt like we had a bunch of songs that were a leap from anything we’d done before. So much of this business, you look back on it now, so much of this business is just luck, it’s just dumb luck. We were lucky that we heard the records that Trina made and we were lucky that we called her and she was available and she was interested. We were lucky just to get in the studio with her and we were lucky that we got along. 

You don’t have to be a genius to realise that you can’t control, you can’t even guess, how something is going to be received and it’s just stupid to try. You’re never going to be able to please anybody, you’re never going to know what sound is going to be the new sound next week or next month, so we just don’t think about that that much. We already felt then that we were occupying a kind of weird place in the scheme of things anyway. We didn’t sound like any popular bands, we didn’t sound like any fashionable bands, so we had no reason to think that were suddenly going to, and we didn’t care. At that point in time everybody was referring to us as a ‘cult band’ which basically means that you have a really big following and you sell a good amount of records and you can play good-sized shows and all that, but nobody knows why, and that almost sums up the history of Something For Kate.

I’m not a sentimental person. I don’t get nostalgic. I’m quite cold when it comes to notions of time, and [Echolalia] just is. My general answer to virtually anything that happened a minute ago is ‘Well, that happened.’ It was an amazing time, because when things started to pick up, it got played on triple j and then it started to get played on commercial radio and then it started to get played everywhere. It was that weird thing where everything starts to go so right you start to wonder if you’re at the centre of some music business conspiracy. That you’re going to be the flavour of the month whether everybody likes it or not. Sometimes it felt like ‘Oh, ok, our moment has arrived, it’s happening now.’ Like someone just turned a big spotlight on us and suddenly we were in the glare. It was amazing. It felt arranged. It felt like organised crime. It felt like ‘How can this be possible? Just a few months ago we were the cult band.’ Suddenly everyone is saying nice things about us and maybe that’s just more something to do with our suspicious nature than anything else.

Interview by Mark Neilsen and Hannah Story.