“You two idiots should make a record.”
So declared Something for Kate bassist Stephanie Ashworth to her frontman husband Paul Dempsey and their musician friend Bernard Fanning backstage at a Melbourne festival in early 2021.
It was a familiar scene for the trio, one repeated countless times over the past 25 years, these giants of Australian rock music hanging out whenever they crossed paths on the road, at a festival or awards show. Or indulging their passion for dining out.
In between their sets at the festival, Fanning, 54, and Dempsey, 48, had asked each other what was next? They both shrugged their shoulders and offered the same answer – probably a new solo record. Ashworth suggested that instead, they should do something completely different and combine forces.
While neither musician had floated forming a duo before, they had shared some special musical moments in recent years which appeared to signal a future collaboration.
Perhaps the seed for their double act was sown when Something for Kate were recording their 2020 album The Modern Medieval at the Byron Bay hinterland studios Fanning owned with producer Nick DiDia. It was a no-brainer for the band to ask the former Powderfinger singer, who was hanging out at the studio, to share lead vocals on the track Inside Job.
“Oh, that sounds cool,” Dempsey recalls thinking of how their voices sounded together on the song.
That vocal chemistry was on display again when they shared the mic to sing the majestic Queen and David Bowie duet Under Pressure at a benefit concert in Sydney in 2019.
The singers reprised that performance with a remote acoustic duet from their home studios to entertain fans during the Covid lockdowns in August 2020.
“We never really talked about making a record or anything until a couple of years ago,” Fanning says. “I think we both admired each other’s work, so it was just really easy; the whole approach was to throw a few ideas back and forth and see what happens.
“And then once we did that, we were like, this is pretty good.”
The pair naturally gravitated to each other, as frontmen tend to do, when Powderfinger tapped the nascent Something for Kate as one of the support acts on their ambitious P2K tour of Australia in 1999.
At the time, Powderfinger were the biggest band in the land, their Internationalist album a multi-platinum smash which would sweep that year’s ARIA awards. Something for Kate had just become altrock Triple J darlings with their second album Beautiful Sharks.
Fanning and Dempsey became fast friends over the 35-date tour 25 years ago; besides an innate respect for each other’s talents, they shared a dry wit and easy conversation about life, the universe and everything. Like all great duos, their camaraderie has become a default stand-up act, the pair trading quips and sledges as they reminisce about that tour.
“We were mere children,” Dempsey recalls.
“Straight away, I knew that tour was going to be fun. We’d played with Powderfinger once or twice prior to that.”
A chuckling Fanning interjects: “But we wouldn’t let him in the bandroom.”
Fanning remembers a “really easy union, just natural and fun” between the two rock bands. He jokingly agrees with the characterisation of he and Dempsey as the “serious young insects” in the corner discussing world politics and sport.
“I guess so because Clint (Hyndman, Something for Kate drummer) and JC (John Collins, Powderfinger drummer) were busy falling off bars … I hung out with Paul and Steph quite a lot at that point. It was just fun. We were all so young and enthusiastic and excited about every moment that was happening.”
Powderfinger called it quits in 2010 with Brisbane’s Fanning – now based in Byron Bay – releasing four solo albums, kicking off with his award-winning debut Tea and Sympathy in 2005 during a band hiatus.
While Something for Kate continues to tour and record, Dempsey – who lives in Melbourne – has put out three solo albums since 2009.
It’s a rare thing, two frontmen who also have successful solo careers, making a record together. It would be like fellow ’90s rock figureheads Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl or Damon Albarn and Liam Gallagher joining forces to create another entity.
They were acutely conscious of expectations, of a record sounding like the merging of their band or solo selves.
To thwart any possibility of them defaulting to their individual creative processes, Fanning and Dempsey fashioned a few rules, the first being to push the guitars into the background and step away from the grand piano.
This would not be the pair of them playing duelling acoustic guitars on campfire songs.
“It’s pretty hard to reinvent yourself, to convince people you have done something really different. What you have to actually do, is do something different,” Dempsey says.
He embraced the mad scientist vibe of their creative adventure, developing an expensive obsession with synthesisers; there are racks of the electronic instruments piled high in the four corners of his home studio.
The digital music files of works-in-progress they traded during Covid, cooped up in their homes because touring was forbidden, were infused with myriad shared references.
Their adoration of David Bowie, love of ’70s and ’80s synths and saxophones, the soundtracks of John Hughes’ movies like Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink and the inescapable influence of closer-to-home heroes including Split Enz and Icehouse.
“One of the most thrilling parts of it was like getting a WhatsApp from Paul saying, ‘there’s something for you in the Dropbox’, it was called the Defenders of the Realm Dropbox,” Fanning says.
“We both expect a certain standard from each other, but the awesome thing was being surprised all the time. Paul would have been surprised to get a sequenced bassline from me because that’s the first time I’ve ever done it to write a song.”
While they joke they’re still asking themselves why they didn’t call their new band The Defenders of the Realm after their song-sharing vault, they decided on the equally chuckle-worthy Fanning Dempsey National Park.
Fanning’s sequenced bassline anchors the album’s sexy, hypnotic opening title track The Deluge, the first song they worked on.
He has described it as a “song about escape from reality and the grind of being dragged back into routines. Social, familial, political”.
The album’s second song Born Expecting is unmistakably political. While its savage commentary on the prime ministership of Scott Morrison shares DNA with Powderfinger’s canon of protest songs including The Day You Come (about the advent of One Nation) and Like A Dog (a searing hitout at John Howard’s refusal to move towards reconciliation with Indigenous peoples), the lyrics were “all Paul”.
Fanning cites the lyric, “there’s just so much less than meets the eye” as one of his favourite lines on the record. “It’s explicitly about Scott Morrison, and his tenure, but it applies to lots of people in positions of power that fail upwards and trade in mediocrity,” he says.
Dempsey adds: “It’s also about the culture that elevates a Scott Morrison to the highest office, because he doesn’t get there without a room full of people picking him.”
The Deluge takes an unexpected detour in its middle, swerving wildly from its social and political reflections, its stabbing synths and off-kilter riffs and rhythms, to the beautiful electronic ballad Blood.
Fanning says the song’s inspiration began with the profound yet simple tribute, “His blood is my blood and his story has become part of my story”, spoken by Sophie Taylor-Price during her eulogy for her grandfather, the late prime minister Bob Hawke in 2019.
It connected with him as a parent – he shares daughter Gabriella, 14, and son Freddie, 12, with wife Andrea Moreno – and had been tinkering with “a song about the battles of early parenthood. The sleeplessness, the overwhelming feelings of love, the wide-eyed wonder of a not-yet-verbal baby”.
Dempsey says recording Blood is one of his favourite and most memorable experiences ever in a studio, the perfect song that just “happened” magically during sessions which took them to Norway and Berlin, California and Byron Bay.
Proud dad Fanning says Blood – and The Deluge record – have received a positive review from his kids.
“Yeah, they’re right into it. I mean, they kind of end up being bombarded by it all the way along because I’ve got a studio just out the front (of his home) and, come four o’clock when they’re home from the bus, regardless of if I’m recording the gentlest, quietest, most sincere vocal of all time, they just come bounding in and start yelling at me,” he says.
“They’re becoming really musically aware now, both of them are (beginning to be) musicians and loving it.
“It’s great because I’m learning a lot from them as well, just from hearing Billie Eilish over and over, and it’s helping me to understand and relate more to pop music that’s being made now … especially the production.”
After weeks of signing thousands of vinyl copies, filming videos in Europe and Australia, cutting behind-the-scenes mini-documentaries and talking up their “overpowered super-duo” as one writer described their new project, Fanning Dempsey National Park has now released The Deluge into the wild.
Rehearsals for their national tour in October and November are well under way as they wrestle the synthtastic beast they created in the studio on to the concert stage.
It remains to be seen whether or not they will hire a saxophonist to recreate all the sexy ’80s-inspired sax on the record at their shows.
All three of usthink the dream musical guest would be Tim Cappello, the famous cod-piece-wearing, oiled, shirtless, pelvic-thrusting saxophonist of the era, who played with Tina Turner in the ’80s and ’90s and stole the show in cult vampire movie The Lost Boys.
“We did wonder as to his whereabouts,” Dempsey says. “I was definitely, ‘What’s that guy doing?’”
Fanning says if they do decide to book a sax player, “they have to be over 100 kilos, to be an absolute beefcake, be really muscly and wear hardly any clothes. A sax god”.
Regardless of whether these skinny men of rock are eclipsed by a sax god on their upcoming tour, the mere existence of such a “different” record from Fanning and Dempsey signals their mission is accomplished.
Another point of difference, compared to their hellraising younger years of life on the road is Fanning doesn’t drink on tour, hasn’t since 2005.
“I’m two weeks into dry July so I think I’m a saint,” Dempsey says.
But they will have fun nonetheless taking this ambitious music to the people. As Dempsey says, besides their visits to world-famous studios and restaurants while making it, if The Deluge had been a predictable singer-songwriter’s record, it would have been a waste of time.
“If it wasn’t going to be different, other than the two of us having a nice time, gallivanting around together and having fun, there wouldn’t have been much point to it.”
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