Tall, dark and brooding – maybe like a knot of trees in the mythical Fanning Dempsey National Park you might say – there’s a mood around Paul Dempsey. Or so it always seemed to many of those not in the inner circle of Something For Kate. But wait, there’s more.
Completing the set, after last week’s interlude with Bernard Fanning, of the duo making up the new cross-border band called, yes, Fanning Dempsey National Park – whose first album, The Deluge, is out now – Wind Back Wednesday extracts from the files this 2016 interview with Dempsey, and finds that “more”.
There’s wicked dancing, evil priests, emotional struggles and missed birthdays, strong mothers, absent fathers, bent backs and broken metal. And assumptions shattered.
A strange loop? And the rest!
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PAUL DEMPSEY CELEBRATED HIS 40th with a long, long party in May. It finished well after dawn with many guests, who had come from interstate, overseas and even up-country Victoria, nursing sore heads and deciphering wobbly photos (hardly any of which made it onto social media) on their trips home.
They weren’t alone. The birthday celebrating frontman, songwriter and dark eminence of Something For Kate, and occasional solo artist, had suffered a bit more than most.
“I'm actually still nursing a bit of a back injury," says Dempsey a week later over lunch, with a couple of excellent red wines of his selection, at a Peruvian restaurant in the grotty but storied AC/DC Lane. "There was some very exuberant dancing and I was doing some sort of Circus Oz-type moves that I really don't have the physical fitness or training for. But it was a lot of fun.”
It may be hard to reconcile this dancing wildman with the image and sound of the usually stern looking Dempsey and the intense if always melodic rock he’s made with Something For Kate for 20 years. In reviewing his new – and more varied than some expected - solo album, Strange Loop, I joked that if you were to hear Dempsey’s singing soundtracking a breakfast cereal advertisement you’d have to consider if this whole breakfast thing might be a bit too traumatic.
“You’ll notice that Something For Kate is notoriously absent from car campaigns,” Dempsey says drolly. “I don't think our music has ever been used to sell anything, not even life insurance. Or funeral plans.”
However, the man had some excuse for the (relatively) wild behaviour – which it later transpires was inspired by a selection of Iron Maiden tracks that awoke the never entirely buried teenage metal head within - and not because he had hit some milestone. It was his first birthday party.
Really. This was the first time he can remember ever having a party.
You see, he was born on the same day as his mother (his 18th fell on her 50th), two of his three sisters have birthdays in May (his 21st was a sister’s 30th) and one of his two children and his wife were also born in May. Add to that Mothers’ Day and you’ve got 40 years of too many things happening most years to fit in a party just for Paul.
It might explain why he’s never been one for big events, including skipping the hoopla by getting married to his longtime Something For Kate partner, Stephanie Ashworth, in a hotel room. Because "every time we attempted to plan it, it became this overwhelming ordeal and we thought ‘fuck it, let’s get married in a hotel’.”
Could have been worse. It could have been the night of his 21st when he was playing a solo show at the Empress Hotel in Fitzroy to a crowd of, well, “nobody was there”. Nobody until future VJ and broadcaster Jane Gazzo happened to pop into the pub and saw him eating his free meal.
“She was more sad [for me] than I was,” Dempsey says. “I was just enjoying my dinner.”
If you are going to feel sorry for him, given he has had birthday nights in New York, Paris and a few other cities not quite as famous but maybe a bit cooler than Fitzroy, save it for the fact he now reveals that Gazzo calls him PeePee.
“Yeah,” says the two metre tall singer. “Suits me.”
That Paul Dempsey is drier, funnier than what might be suggested by his thick dark hair over almost as dark Irish brows, and today’s dark jacket and pants over a blue shirt, is almost a cliche now. But it still takes a bit of adjusting in conversation, making you hesitate a beat while you make sure that what you just heard was a joke.
One of the few times there is not even a hint of humour is when the subject of his past struggles with depression arises. His frank discussion of depression a decade ago paved the way for many other local artists - such as Melody Pool, whose recently released second album is confrontingly honest and has earned her Dempsey’s praise - to feel more comfortable writing about it and then talking about it.
Dempsey takes no credit for that, citing a “long, long tradition” of artists being upfront about depression, “whether it’s Black Flag screaming about depression, or Drake”. But he concedes that what he calls his “illness” was talked about then "because I thought it was better to than not to” to get past the stigma.
While happy to discuss it with anyone, especially other artists, who ask now, he sees it playing less of a role in his life than in the “lost years” of 2003 to 2005.
“There’s me before and me after [that period] when something broke,” he says. “Now when I talk about it, because I haven't had those sorts of problems since, I look back on it and it might be more appropriate to characterise it as a sort of nervous breakdown. Everything since has continued to get better."
Not that all the issues around those “lost years” have disappeared from his work. Fluid identities are a central theme of Strange Loop: some in a mess and given up; some looking; some having forgotten how to do this.
“They’re all just ways that I feel. and it's fun to put that into a song and not into your life,” Dempsey says, agreeing with me that uncertain people make more interesting people, as well as more interesting fictional characters, than those who are sure of everything.
"You get suspicious of them don't you? You find often it's a faith thing: if it's not a religion then it's something that's substituting for religion," he says, happy to add the self help industry to religion as another target on the album. "Because essentially what they're doing is saying we can fill that hole for you."
Not that Dempsey wants anyone to think that this discussion is a sign that turning 40 engendered extra philosophical introspection.
"What I do is a very reflective pastime anyway. It's quite insular and there's a lot of self-analysis. Maybe not self-analysis as constantly looking at the world around you and try to place yourself within it,” he says. “My 20s were better than my adolescence, my 30s were way better than my 20s. The past decade of my life, every year has been better than the last so I am more than happy getting older.
“You have the tools and you’re better equipped to know how you want to live and what it is you value in your life."
As happens throughout the album, in Dempsey’s own life recognising you don't have the answers turned out to be just as important a life lesson to learn.
"Absolutely. That has been the point from which my life has gotten better and easier. My late 20s was when I crashed a bit and since then it's been process of being okay with not always being okay. Being okay with the fact that there probably are no answers and that essentially my experience of being alive is a lot of questions that may never have answers."
Which is not the way of the faith in which he was brought up, of course. But then Catholicism may have left him sometime before he left it.
He tells, with a mixture of matter of factness and there-but-for-grace-of, a story of how he in his early teens he had been an altar boy in a Victorian country parish where a now notorious paedophile priest was active – quite a few of his classmates, he says, were later suicide victims attributed to the abuse.
A dismissive comment about women from the priest, relayed at home, fired up Dempsey’s mother to addressed the priest firmly, not something that happened often even in the ’80s. Given he was in many ways the ideal candidate for such a predatory priest – a boy without a father, who had died when Dempsey was two; not always solid ties in the community given the family moved often in his childhood; a staunchly Catholic household - Dempsey believes this fiery exchange probably spared him the hands of a priest wary of a potentially combative mother.
Instead, it was his father’s death that influenced him most of all he thinks.
“That means that you grow up with this awareness that it could all be over like that. You could go out to work one day and not come back,” Dempsey says.
And that brought a layer of stress and “consternation” that was laid on permanently. However, acceptance of this uncertainty changed all that.
“One day it all went away and you have to re-assemble. And it’s amazing. Now I’m not anxious, I don't feel afraid, I don’t mistrust. That’s what I love to read about, the art that interests me too, stuff that addresses how we are all so cocky [in our mistaken certainty].
“And there’s humour in that too,” Dempsey says with a small flicker of a smile. “Humans are never funnier than when they are unwilling to acknowledge their own fallibility.”
Well maybe only funnier when they’re dancing to Iron Maiden at their 40th.
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Fanning Dempsey National Park - The Deluge, is out now through Universal
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