Paul Dempsey has lead his band, Something For Kate, for over a decade, and has seen it all – from the three-piece’s earliest beginnings with Dempsey chumming it up with schoolmate and skinsman Clint Hyndeman, through various shuffles of bass players before settling on long-term partner Stephanie Ashworth, to headlining theatres throughout Australia to releasing a best-of compendium.

Something For Kate are something of a minority in Australian musical circles – they’re one of few bands to have signed, sealed and delivered on a major label contract.  Most bands are dropped before they come close to completing a seven-album long contract, but Something For Kate have endured where others have fallen by the wayside.

And now, having refocussed himself on the future, what’s the next step for Something For Kate’s frontman?  To release a solo album, naturally enough!

“I’m working,” he confirms, “for the solo record.  Although writing’s writing – and some stuff feels like Something For Kate so obviously it’s not going to go on my solo record, otherwise there’d be little point in doing it.  But I’m going to repeat myself, and writing’s writing, and there’s always a surplus of material that will end up somewhere at some point.”

Dempsey released something that could, vaguely, be considered a solo album between the release of Something For Kate’s debut Elsewhere For 8 Minutes and follow-up Beautiful Sharks.  Under the moniker Scared of Horses he banded together a disparate collection of singers from indie groups such as Bluebottle Kiss, Not From There, the Paradise Motel and others besides to record vocals over instrumental beds he had laid down.  But, he explains, he never considered that a ‘solo’ album.

“I don’t really consider it a solo record,” he says of that experience, “and I didn’t write any of the lyrics or sing on that record so it felt like a group effort, whereas this is a totally self-indulgent exercise.

“It will be more of an instinctive thing,” he says of the future solo release, “and it’s not going to be right until I know that it’s right, and I don’t know what that means and I don’t even know how to pick it – so I’m just going to write and going to try to put the songs together in a different way. 

And obviously by not collaborating with Clint and Steph and being completely self-indulgent that will produce different results, and having different people play different things is going to make it different.  There’s a number of things that will make it different.”

He sighs, announcing the obvious – “Probably at the end of the day people are just going to hear my singing voice and go ‘uh, sounds like Something For Kate’.  But whadayado?”

Wanting to make the solo release without the burden of expectation or required scheduling, the new best-of for Something For Kate was, he says, an easy assembly, with the biggest decision being what SORT of collection it was going to be. 

“We had to decide whether it was going to be a bunch of singles, which would be boring, so we came up with the concept that we just wanted this to be a collection of our favourite songs, and the songs that we would want someone to hear if they didn’t know anything about us and this was going to be the best Something For Kate mix-tape you’d give to someone if they didn’t know anything about us and they could hear all the different sides of the band and hear the songs that we considered to be our best.

“THAT is the record we wanted it to be,” he says emphatically.

As such, the compilation runs the gamut of Something For Kate’s career, from go to whoa, and finishes with a flourish of covers (or ‘interpretations’) of a bevy of other artists.

“It’s not all singles tracks, it’s not in chronological order, we’ve just jumbled it all up,” he says.  “We threw the covers on there because it’s another element of what we do and if you were giving this to that hypothetical stranger you’d want them to see that we’ve done some interesting covers too.”

When it came to each band member having their pick of favourites, Paul explains that the three members of the band submitted their own individual tracklist…and then when it was pooled together each was fairly close.  “We only had to compromise and debate over four or five spots,” he says.  Refusing to elaborate on any particular favourite that missed out, Paul said that there’s at least one for each.

Having thought about the past, it’s now all about the future for the band – with the writing of the solo record finding Paul also coming up with band material, he says that the solo material will be the priority.  “The reason I’m doing it now is that Clint and Steph, as much as anybody, are saying that a solo record should be next before Something For Kate album number six – it’d be good for a lot of reasons to break it up.

“That’s why this best-of is happening now too,” he explains, “as it breaks it up and for the next year even though there may be songs piling up in different baskets I definitely want to do this solo record.”

Something For Kate’s The Best of the Murmur Years is out now.

Clint's gone solo too.....click here for more details