Something For Kate

The soundtrack to many lives.

There was a casual clothes day at school, Paul Dempsey wore a Descendants T-shirt. That was enough for Clint Hyndman to come over and start a friendship. They formed a band. They got a record deal. After a few different bass-players, Stephanie Ashworth joined them and the three-piece band created some of Australian music’s most-loved songs and albums.

“We’ve just been lucky because we’ve got this really natural chemistry between the three of us.”

SFK is about to turn 21, and any cursory inspection shows there is an astonishingly high quantity of high quality right throughout that catalogue.

There’s so many moments in there; Captain (Million Miles An Hour), Electricity, (“It’s about energy,” Dempsey explains, “but wanting to be energy. I wish sometimes that I was a pulse of energy. I feel like I can’t keep up with myself sometimes and wouldn’t it be great to be a subatomic particle”), Roll Credit, Dean Martin, 20 Years, Say Something, Deja Vu, Pinstripe, Monsters, Big Screen Television, Working Against Me, Hallways, Whatever You Want, Three Dimensions, Cigarettes and Suitcases, Miracle Cure, Survival Expert, etcetera, etcetera.

The other thing that strikes you is the endlessly unusual forms the songs take – if it was architecture it’d win global awards. There’s few traditional structures, yet there’s beauty and grandeur there, and to the test of time, it stands.

Speaking of time, if memory serves, about 15 years ago they kindly agreed to take a break from recording an album to play Meredith, even though they weren’t doing shows at the time. It was at the old site and it was a dusty weekend. Paul swallowed about two paddocks of topsoil during the set, bellowing it out as he does, mouth wide open, and when they got back to the studio they couldn’t record the vocals cos his voice was shot for days (sorry about that Paul). Uncle Doug’s planted kikuyu since then.

They said it wouldn’t sink… and they were right.