Something For Kate are celebrating their 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion the band is touring around the country and re-releasing all their albums on both CD and vinyl. Singer Paul Dempsey and drummer Clint Hyndman formed the band in 1994, bassist Stephanie Ashworth completed the line up a few years later.
OUTinPerth chatted to Stephanie ahead of their national tour.
Something or Kate are celebrating their 20th Anniversary, what’s the secret to longevity?
The boys formed the band as teenagers, it’s been twenty years since their first show when they were sixteen or seventeen. I think part of that friendship is responsible for that longevity. The basis of the band is being friends. Those two met in high school and had really similar tastes in music and grew up together. I joined in ’98 which was four years later. We’re just really close friends and I think it’s a lot easier for a three piece to stay together and whether the storm over the years rather than a five piece. There are less perspectives involved.
Bands are unusual in that we expect them to stay together, nobody every comments on a group of plumbers who went their separate ways after five years. Why do we measure bands success by length?
I think it’s something that happens when you do something creative, it can be often full of disaster. It’s one thing when you run a business together, but another thing to work together on a creative thing which includes music and artwork. All the decisions you have to make are creative. I guess you’ve got to make sure you’ve got a combination of personalities that work well together.
All your albums are being re-released, what’s that process been like?
It’s been really amazing. It’s been interesting re-releasing it on vinyl again. All of the vinyl sold so quickly when it originally came out. Fifteen years ago it started featuring ridiculously inflated prices on E-Bay and collectors were paying $500 – $600 for all the vinyl versions of our albums and EPs. We were always aware of that and always thought we’d like to make it available to people again. Just because it wasn’t designed to become a collector’s piece it was designed for people to hear. We’ve enjoyed the process of making that available again, and vinyl has become so popular again.
It’s been really great too looking at all the art work and having designers piece it all together. We had to go to Sony and say “What have you got?” Only one of the album’s art work was digital, the rest was all analogue.
Something for Kate has always generated a lot of material, you’ve had lots of B-side tracks and cover versions. How do you narrow down which material to include in your upcoming shows?
It’s so so hard. There have been a lot of heated debates in our rehearsal room. We all have our own agendas on what we want to play. But it comes down to focusing on what fans want to hear and what we haven’t been playing recently. I’ve been learning songs that I’ve never played since I joined.
Are there songs which you think “Oh please don’t let then ask for that one!”
Sure there are, there are songs that Paul completely refuses to sing, [laughs] but I won’t tell you what they are.
Something for Kate will be playing a SOLD OUT show at The Astor Theatre on July 4th. The released version of all their albums are available now.
Graeme Watson
