Rock singers Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey join forces for debut duet
Two of the great Australian rock ‘n’ roll frontmen – Powderfinger’s Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey of Something For Kate – unveil their first single under an unusual new banner.
Two of the great Australian rock ‘n’ roll frontmen have pooled their talents for a collaborative project named Fanning Dempsey National Park.
On Friday, Powderfinger’s Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey of Something For Kate unveiled their first single under the unusual new banner.
The song, titled Disconnect, sees the singer-songwriters trading lines amid a bustling rock arrangement coloured by synthesiser and saxophone, before harmonising in a shimmering chorus.
If that sounds surprising, that’s intentional. As Dempsey, 47, notes in a press statement: “We agreed straight away there’s no point doing something together if it’s going to be what people think it’s going to be. It’s not the two of us with acoustic guitars singing campfire songs.”
Between their respective careers, the pair have notched nine No.1 albums: five for Powderfinger, two for Something For Kate, and two for Fanning as a solo artist.
As well, they’ve achieved in excess of 2.7 million album sales, had 38 songs ranked in Triple J’s Hottest 100 music poll, and won plenty of ARIA and APRA Awards.
Disconnect marks a stirring debut for Fanning Dempsey National Park, ahead of further anticipated collaborations to come.
Though they have each been known and admired since the 1990s for their distinctive vocal tones – both with their bands and as solo performers – their shared musical history goes back only a few years to the Covid lockdowns.
The first time that many people heard them singing together was a remote recording issued in August 2020, when they combined to perform a stunning duet cover of the Queen and David Bowie hit Under Pressure.
“I love the challenge of taking a really huge, epic song — a massive arrangement — and reducing it to an acoustic guitar,” Dempsey told The Australian at the time. “I think that’s the ultimate test and ultimate display of a really well-written song.”
Earlier that year, Brisbane quintet Powderfinger had reformed to perform its first gig in a decade: a remotely recorded seven-song set which raised more than $500,000 for music industry charity Support Act and Beyond Blue.
Later, when Melbourne trio Something For Kate released its seventh album, The Modern Medieval in November 2020, Fanning featured as a guest vocalist on the track Inside Job.
There’s a Bowie link to the new material, too, with the great British artist – who died in 2016, aged 69 – continuing to stand tall as an inspiration for both Australian performers.
“Disconnect always had a lot of ‘serious moonlight’ energy, right from its beginnings,” said Fanning, 54, referring to a line from the 1983 David Bowie single Let’s Dance.
“The swapping lead vocal plays with the idea of connecting and disconnecting by juxtaposing the confidence/indecision with each consecutive line,” he continued. “We originally wanted to use sax on everything. After we roughly finished a demo we’d say, ‘What else does it need?’. The answer was inevitably, ‘more sax’.”
As for the unusual name for the new project?
“We didn’t want it to sound like a Fanning record or a Dempsey record – we wanted it to sound like a band,” said the Powderfinger frontman. “We wanted the sense of an organisation bigger than the two of us. We settled on the name because it’s so pompous that it made us laugh every time we said it.”
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