Paul DempseyWith the slow death of music festivals in this country, it now feels like so many tours are high-stakes. Oasis re-united for the first time in decades. Taylor Swift kept the United States out of a recession with her record-breaking Eras Tour. The endless cavalcade of Ed Sheeran’s and Coldplays coming to Melbourne to try out-do the amount of times they play Marvel Stadium on one tour. Even smaller indie acts tour with a level of attention, hype and demand for tickets that can over awe the gig itself.
So there’s something quietly refreshing about a gig just being a bloke with a really good voice belting out covers on a Friday night at your local pub. It just so happens that this bloke with the really good voice also happens to be one of the best songwriters Australia has ever produced and his band has sold over 750,000 albums – but this gig isn’t about any of that. It’s about the covers.
The role of the cover is so nuanced. Done poorly, you’re lambasted as karaoke. To say you’re in a covers band is sneered at, there’s a level of cultural cringe that you don’t have your own material to play. And everyone has that one memory of being stuck listening to some bloke with a terrible voice absolutely murdering one of your favourite songs whilst you’re just trying to enjoy your parmigiana.
And yet the legacy of covers is so important. Blues artists traditionally used covers to ensure the important stories from their ancestors stayed alive. Folk artists used them to spread the message they were preaching. They’ve also been a universal sign of respect one artist shows another and a rite of passage for young bands coming through.
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Look at early Nirvana setlists and they are littered with covers of bands like Shocking Blue and Kurt Cobain famously used his MTV Unplugged performance to cover David Bowie (The Man Who Sold the World), The Vaselines (Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam, Son of a Gun), Lead Belly (Where Did You Sleep Last Night), and the Meat Puppets (Plateau, Oh Me, Lake of Fire). These performances, and his choices, were lauded at the time.
And whilst everyone is sick to death to reading about, and potentially hearing Jeff Buckley’s cover of Hallelujah, not enough has been written about his cover of the old Broadway song Lilac Wine or the sheer audacity of his covers from his famed gig at Sin-é where he played everything from Van Morrison to Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Nina Simone, Edith Piaf and even Pakistani composer/songwriter Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
And yes, I am using Buckley and Cobain specifically as my examples here because I know what demographic will be reading this review. But what I am trying to say is that the art of the cover is a tightrope. If you nail it, it’s all flowers and applause. Fall off the rope, and people are walking away laughing.
Which makes Paul Dempsey’s tour all the more interesting. I don’t know if there’s ever been another artist of his fame or songwriting talent do an entire tour playing nothing but covers. Call it a shrewd hole in the market. And I kinda get it. Something For Kate have been around for 30 years, I am sure he’s pretty bored of playing Monsters. He still wants to be on stage, he still gets his kicks playing music under the big lights, but it must be a fresh challenge for him to play R.E.M.
And Losing My Religion is the perfect Gen X way to kick off this Gen X night. And from there, the hits just kept coming. Atlantic City by the Boss, Grant Lee Buffalo’s Mockingbirds, Last Goodbye by our old mate Jeff, Pearl Jam’s Better Man and Bowie’s Ashes To Ashes. Honestly, it was like a live version of triple j’s morning show in 1998. And the crowd were lapping up every second. Berlin Chair is still such an amazing song, and Tim Rogers would’ve been proud of the justice Dempsey did it.
But he wasn’t just here to play the songs of his generation; he also challenged you to know the songs your parents would have been playing to you growing up. Lloyd Cole’s Rattlesnakes was a deep cut, as was Tom Waits’ Downtown Train. But being the seasoned veteran he is, Paul always knew when to bring the crowd back with some catnip like I Want To Break Free, Never Tear Us Apart and Boys of Summer. Surprisingly, Against All Odds by Phil Collins elicited one of the biggest sing-alongs of the night, but when I say surprisingly, it shouldn’t be. It’s an absolute banger.
He coyly asked the crowd at the start of the encore whether we could belatedly celebrate what is commonly known in the Something For Kate fandom as Pinstripe Day (“You're the last day of April every year,” IYKYK) which was befitting the Double J vibes of the night and it only seemed fair he got to play one of his own songs after paying homage to everyone else all night. David Gray’s This Year’s Love was the understated highlight of the night. And a unique choice by Paul where the strength of the song won out over the dagginess of the artist. Yeah, Tom Waits is fucking cool, and David Gray is not. But that song is something else. And he knocked it out of the park.
But we knew that couldn’t be it. Not on such a beautiful downer of a song. He had to have one more crowd-pleaser up his sleeve. And all of the universally loved pop songs from the 90s. Songs that are loved equally by the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads…it’s Sheryl Crow’s If It Makes You Happy. And before you come at me, that’s a quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, if you haven’t noticed that I am trying to pack as many generational gags into this review as I can.
But yeah, Sheryl. What a chorus. What an influence. And such a trailblazer. There is now an entire genre of music blending rock, pop, and country, and Sheryl started that. I’d bet $50 that Phoebe Bridgers has her self-titled album on vinyl. Inspired choice. Well done, Paul. That’s how you end the night.
Shotgun Karaoke is the best low-stakes gig you’ll see this year. And that’s most of its charm. It’s someone with nothing left to prove in this industry, having a fucking great time. And for a man who has built a career out of writing very serious music for very serious people with very serious lyrics about life, death and the meaning of it all, there’s a wonderful cognitive dissonance watching a big smile on his face as he howls his way through a Queen cover like he’s in Wayne’s World. You can officially add tightrope walker to Paul Dempsey’s CV. No one in this country does this better than him.
