They scored an ARIA award nomination for Best Alternative Release, and cemented their place as a leading live band on the Australian circuit. They toured extensively throughout the second half of the year, playing with Powderfinger and headlining their own shows. I had an interesting discussion to singer and band stalwart Paul Dempsey about these developments and the future ahead.

Q. You’ve had a fulfilling year with the latest album "Beautiful Sharks", an ARIA nomination and an excellent line-up of gigs. Has it all met your expectations?

A. It’s been brilliant for us. First of all, I didn’t set any definite expectations of what I wanted to achieve. It’s an unpredictable business and I’m just happy whenever we book another gig or organize a tour. Everything that’s happened to us has been fantastic. The Powderfinger tour was great. The Livid Festival was fantastic. It’s been really good, especially after a couple of rocky years. I’m not complaining about it. That’s the last thing I’m going to do. I’ve always wanted to play music and that’s what I’m doing. The last two years were hard going. There was a lot of turbulence. This year everything has been smoothed out and we have a great team. The band feels great about what’s going on, and we’re working with fantastic people and having fun.

Q. Any major highlight this year?

A. I can’t pinpoint one particular thing. Releasing another album into the stores has been a highlight, and going on tour with Powderfinger has been a highlight. Really, just getting gigs is something to look forward to. Not all jobs are like that. That’s the good thing. There’s always a show ahead.

Q. The album "Beautiful Sharks" has seen the brooding lyrics and well-structured arrangements. There seems to be a stronger presence. Did you have to revise the band’s status, or feel as though you had to push boundaries?

A. I don’t think we had an agenda about what type of music we were going to make. It was a new band and we just scrapped our way of doing things from the past, and just decided that, as a new band, we should lock ourselves in a room and go about it. We walked back out with some material to mould into finished songs. It was a natural and rewarding process.

Q. You travelled out of Australia in preparation for the album, going to Dublin and Toronto amongst other places. Would you consider that to being more beneficial than anticipated?

A. It was a combination of things. After the events of the last two years, I wasn’t really inspired to write music and just decided to take a trip to Dublin to see my family. The other two band members decided to go away as well. Clint has family in Montreal and Stephanie has family in Los Angeles. We had money saved up from going on tour all the time that we’d never touched. So we thought we needed to do this, and we hooked up again in Toronto where we blasted out all these songs. It was a good time.

Q. I suppose you saw things there in a different light as a songwriter…

A. It was a real head-clearing experience just to get away. It’s very easy to get bogged down in everyday normal processes, and thinking that everything is difficult. Sometimes it’s good to play a game of golf.

Q. Stephanie Ashworth (formerly of Sandpit) joined the band in between the two albums. What difference has she made to the band?

A. I feel that she has busted the potential wide open for what we can do. Before she joined the band, I just controlled everything because I didn’t have the belief in what the band could do if I didn’t control it. I was just a control freak. I was scared to let go and see what happened, which may be right or wrong. For better or for worse, that’s the way it was. When Stephanie joined the band I was at a point where I was just more willing to drop my defences. And she was in Sandpit, which was a great band. I know the role that she played in Sandpit and many people don’t give her enough credit for who wrote the songs. For that reason as well, I had much more faith in her as a musician, and so did Clint. The three of us were willing to let each other go and do whatever we wanted, and it fell into place, thank God.

Q. How did you feel personally about the roller coaster ride of fortunes for the band?

A. I didn’t know what was going to happen. When things weren’t going well with Toby (Ralph), we just broke up because it wasn’t much fun. It wasn’t clicking for a lot of reasons. When something like that happens, you have to re-evaluate your position. But twenty minutes after Toby left, Clint turned around and said, "I wanna keep doing this. We’re not done yet." That inspired me to go on with more enthusiasm. Stephanie was originally going to join the band before Toby did. It’s just that Sandpit had a release out and were busy. She wasn’t sure about it then. When this happened, Sandpit was winding down anyway and she was ready for us. As for me personally, I am ultimately satisfied. All I ever wanted out of this was to have a roof over my head and food in my mouth, and to be able to continue doing what I love. That’s what I’ve got right now. In the last year, we’ve been able to go off the dole and actually start paying our rent from our music. I can’t ask for much more than that. I don’t crave for a big house and flashy car. It’s nice to make a living and be excited. It would be nice to own a home, but that will come with work. I feel that things have really straightened out to where they should be now. The band is functioning in a very easygoing way. We’re playing gigs and our manager is fantastic to us. It finally feels natural.

Q. Are you now looking to take the band overseas, either playing gigs, or to find new inspirations like you did prior to Beautiful Sharks?

A. The next step is to try this whole thing overseas. Who doesn’t like the idea? It’s fun for every reason, as a songwriter, and it gives you a different perspective on what you’re doing. Touring around Australia can get you thinking that it’s the most all-encompassing thing. But when you set foot in another country you realize that Australia is Australia. I’m not marginalising it, but it’s one place. You realize you want to play your music in these other places. So that’s the next plan.

Q. The album contains an interactive CD-ROM that gives the fans the chance to sample more of the band, in terms of gaining an insight into the band and its music. Is that something you’ve been keen to do for a while?

A. We think that it’s important to interact as much as possible with the fans. We try to, in as many ways as possible, eg in-store appearances, CD giveaways, and an Internet newsletter. We want to let them know that we’re aware of them. We don’t exist without them. We’d been running around with a video camera, taking some funny footage and it had been accumulating. So we decided that we could edit it into the CD. It didn’t cost us any more to produce it. We didn’t do what others tend to do and re-package it with the album six months later. We didn’t like the idea of making the fans buy the album twice in deceiving fashion. That’s blatant capitalism. So it’s there in one complete package.

Q. The latest single "Whatever You Want" is beautifully delicate and moody. It should be a winner at the live shows as it builds along strongly. Does it have a meaning that you’d like to share with us? Tell us also about "Belief", one of the best B-sides you’ve recorded?

A. It does have a special meaning to me, but I’d rather leave it open to other people to interpret. It’s a song about common sense. Other than that, it’s best to leave it to others to derive their own meaning. "Belief" is a song that was recorded with all the other tracks on the "Beautiful Sharks" album, but it just didn’t end up on it. We later thought that it should have been in there.

Q. With regard to your experiences in North America, what impressions did you gain about their music scene, and perhaps its effect on Australian music culture?

A. I don’t think that the US scene is any different to Australia’s. It’s just that it’s a hell of a lot bigger. There are two entirely separate worlds in music. There is the world of MTV, music videos and marketing. Then there is the simple world of live music with bands on tour playing their own music to audiences, and not playing to a DAT machine. As for the former, Australia is largely sucked into everything that comes out of the USA. Those two worlds exist in Australia also. People do buy into it. The live music scene here is the same as the US, only not as big. Therefore, the touring circuit isn’t as big and doesn’t produce the same number of bands. The demographics of people going to see bands or watching videos is the same. It’s just a bigger pond over there. There are a lot of good bands overseas; some of them are amongst my favourites. They don’t really do anything that bands in Australia don’t do. There are as many good bands in Australia. There isn’t anything in the water that makes American bands any better or important. It’s just that much of Australia tends to cringe at its own artists. There are endless great Australian bands and a good amount of support, such as the Australian-only Homebake Festival, which sells out every year. The fact is, however, that we don’t have 260 million people here, so no Australian band will ever sell a million records here. Whereas an American indie band can put out a record, tour and achieve high sales figures. It’s purely because of the population. If Australian bands want to make a living and own a home and have a family, they have to leave Australia. I don’t even like the idea of travelling around America in a van and surrounded by America. I’m going to have to do it because there are people there who are into music and I want to play music as much as I can in as many places as I can. We are a small country. For a band like Powderfinger to come along and sell 200,000 records is a freak occurrence. Don’t get me wrong. Powderfinger are a great band and I am a huge fan. They deserve every success they’ve achieved, but you’re not going to see another band like that. They and silverchair have been able to sell to those figures. There will never be a situation, in that genre anyway, where bands like Powderfinger, silverchair, Grinspoon, Jebediah, etc all sell 200,000 records in the same year. It’s the population factor; the size of the pond. Powderfinger are going to have to go somewhere else. They just won’t be able to sell 500,000 records in Australia.

Q. Another thing you did this year was a contribution to the Duran Duran tribute album. Tell us about that?

A. Rae Harvey, the manager of The Living End, put the project together. She is a huge Duran Duran fan and decided to compile this album. She chose the bands that she wanted and also the song that each band had to sing. She called us to ask whether we could do "Ordinary World". We’d never heard of the song before, but it was fun doing it.

Q. I hear that you are considering releasing a compilation video with some live footage…

A. It’s actually going to be a compilation of all our video clips. It just occurred to us that a lot of people, who have come to see the band in the last two years, might not have seen our first five or six video clips. We’ve made ten videos now. We thought that, like the CD-ROM, it’s something else that we can give to our fans.

Q. Will it follow that you’d consider re-releasing any early recordings?

A. Yes, we are releasing our first two EPs. They were deleted two years ago. It will be repackaged together as one CD and we’ll only charge ten dollars for it. The fans have been demanding it through letters and email messages. We decided to meet those demands.

Q. Your live shows indicate a different attitude or tone to what the CDs may demonstrate, in the overall mood and feel. What are your views?

A. I’ve always been completely baffled by the perception that it’s moody, or dark, or negative. Maybe it’s my voice or something in the particular chords I play on the guitar. I’ve always thought that, essentially, what I’m saying is very hopeful and if the songs were saying something moody, I would quell it. I would be more inclined to call it agitation. And it’s agitation to get something done; to get on the move; to get going. That’s what it is – a frustration at this apparent rut you can feel in a lot of things that don’t make sense. I don’t cope well with that. If it’s anything moody or dark, it’s not meant to be negative. The other thing I would say is that a recorded version is more of a document of a song. It’s a like a giant full stop behind that song. The song might have grown or evolved into something else and become different. But when you record an album, that’s it. You have to nail it, and it’s the last time the song is ever going to be documented. When we play live, the songs are still growing and there’s a different approach to when it was recorded. Sometimes in the lyrics I am taking a storyteller’s angle or a bit of a hypothetical angle. I’m not always talking about how terrible everything is or how awful I feel. There are different ways of getting a message across. Sometimes I paint a picture or narrate something.

Q. Like other Australian bands, you’ve been unlucky not to achieve greater success because of the circumstances in which we live. How do you view the bigger picture in the Australian music jungle?

A. Bands sign to record companies so they can have financial aid in making records, and have practical aid in marketing and promoting them to a target audience. That’s all completely respectable. There’s nothing wrong with that. You need help with making people aware of it. The record industry is often portrayed as being dodgy and evil, and preying with bands. That hasn’t been my experience. Mine is that we’ve been given financial assistance to make whatever record we felt like making at the time. Then we’ve been given great help making the public aware of it, through posters, advertisements in the newspapers, etc. That’s all fine. My big grievance, and it’s probably more due to the music media than the record industry, is that one of the big side effects of promoting a product through videos, posters, interviews, etc allows it to become egocentric. The media, in order to sell papers and magazines, have to cultivate something around the musicians or actors, or whoever, to make people so interested that they’d want to read about it. Often it involves cultivating a myth; making people appear to be superhuman or extra-special. Whereas, musicians are no different to the bakers, plumbers, and electricians of the world, in that they do something and do it well. It’s just that it’s a public thing. The media will have you believe that you need to know about all these musicians and actors, and what they said was so smart and interesting. I hope that, in years to come, people will just listen to and buy music and they will see an advertisement or video clip to prompt them to buy the CD. They won’t believe the hype.

Q. There has been a fascination in Australia towards celebrity…

A. But what is celebrity? It’s a cultivated myth. It’s a badge, a t-shirt. Look at me, for instance. I’m not a celebrity. I’m a guy in a band. There are a few thousand people out there who know who I am, or might recognise me in the street. But I am no celebrity. Yet, I still find myself explaining and defending how I’m not dark, or I’m not moody, or I’m not angry. This has been something built up around me to make me look more interesting because I probably give boring interviews. People asked me questions on music that I try to answer as honestly and as straight as possible. That’s not enough for people. The feature article, that you see in magazines like Juice and Rolling Stone, is always given to the bands that are doing the wackiest thing, or the most "out there" thing, or the silliest thing, or like "Look at this photo; look at him now." That’s the way the industry is going. It’s becoming less about music and more about celebrity and video clips. I’m not complaining because I’m very happy with the way things are going for us. But we don’t get a quarter of the coverage that some bands get, which haven’t achieved a quarter of what we’ve achieved. Good for them. It’s funny when our publicist might come back to us and say so and so are not going to do a story about us this month, upon the release of a new album, because they feel……… Then you might catch that issue and see a six-page feature article about a band that you know can’t sell out a small venue or sell five hundred records. I don’t expect there to be some great justice in this industry. It’s not the Supreme Court. There’s no right or wrong, and there’s no way you can predict what people come into it. It’s not a case of "Poor us". The point that I’m making is that this band, which had the feature, still can’t sell five hundred records or sell out a venue. We are chugging along nicely because we get out there and play music. The same applies with Powderfinger. They’re not plastered across every magazine. They are a good, honest, hard-working live band, and I daresay, they would have achieved that with or without the support of the mainstream music media, because they are a good live band.

Q. What’s coming up over the New Year period for you?

A. We are doing the Falls Festival at Lorne on New Year’s Eve, but we requested to be out of there by 8.30pm so I can spend the last couple of hours of the millennium with my family. We have the Big Day Out festivals around Australia, before hoping to go overseas in March. We need to keep ourselves moving ahead and playing to new audiences. Our website will be further developed to contain video and audio, and having occasional web chats with the fans.