Taking their time pays dividends for Something For Kate

5.00pm -By MIKE HOULAHAN

Melbourne band Something For Kate are big fans of New Zealand.

Lead singer and guitarist Paul Dempsey is a frequent visitor, and Something For Kate recorded their debut album in this country.

Playing live though, has been harder to arrange.

"I've been back many times just to hang out, and I came over a few months ago when we were writing this album just to sit on the beach and finish off lyrics," Dempsey says.

"I love it in New Zealand, but it's just proved strangely difficult to get the band over here. Hopefully we can turn that around."

The first step in the process is playing the Big Day Out festival in Auckland on January 16.

With the huge number of distractions - musical or otherwise - available on the day, Dempsey says Something For Kate won't be disappointed if Kiwi fans don't initially take to what is one of Australia's biggest bands.

That's because Something For Kate are used to taking their time to impress people.

"We've never really done anything overnight, we've always taken it slow and taken it at a steady pace," Dempsey says.

"We're more interested in touring and playing live and making records and try and keep everything on that level and not get ahead of ourselves.

"We've always been more concerned with having a long-term career rather than shooting for some sort of massive success or stardom or any of that stuff.

"We've always just done our albums, done our tours, and seen what's happened."

What's happened has been nothing short of spectacular.

After two critically acclaimed albums, Something For Kate moved into the big-time with their double-platinum selling third album Echolalia.

The record reached No 2 in the Australian charts, and saw the band receive six Aria nominations, and be named best band of the year in the Australian Rolling Stone magazine.

New album The Official Fiction has done even better, knocking teen star Delta Goodrem off the top of the Aussie charts.

"We're much happier it's our fourth album," Dempsey says.

"If our first album had got to No 1 and then we hadn't repeated that the chances are we wouldn't still be making records.

"If you create that huge expectation for yourself and a massive commercial expectation straight away on your first album then it's pretty hard to maintain.

"By the time our fourth album came out I guess we had developed enough of a following to get to No 1.

"It was more satisfying this way, I think, because we knew it wasn't courtesy of a marketing bonanza that it was there.

"It seems a more sensible way to do it, rather than staking everything on trying to release a hit single."

A crucial factor behind Something For Kate mellowing their abrasive earlier material into the deeply thought out rock they play today was the band meeting US engineer/producer Trina Shoemaker.

Shoemaker, who has previously worked with artists as varied as Queens Of The Stone Age, Pearl Jam, Sheryl Crow and Whiskeytown, was suggested as a possible perfect match to the band and the idea got Dempsey excited straight away.

Band and producer met, hit it off, and worked together fruitfully on Echolalia.

"I had heard a lot of the records she'd worked on and they all sounded fantastic," he says.

"I went and did a bit of research and listened to as much of her stuff as I could and she's just a fantastic engineer and so diverse -- she's made records with the likes of Victoria Williams and Emmylou Harris and on the other side of the ledger with people like QOTSA and Pearl Jam, and everything in between.

"We knew she was obviously someone who was very versatile and someone who had a broad range of tastes in music, and that's what we wanted. We wanted to do a lot of different things and use of a lot of different instruments."

With Echolalia doing so well, it wasn't hard to get back on the phone and book Shoemaker to produce The Official Fiction.

"We felt like we'd come up with another album which was a new and separate body of work to anything we'd done before," Dempsey says.

"Having enjoyed working with Trina before and become great friends, it was very much an automatic decision.

"We felt the music and songs were completely different and we had taken a very different approach, a more acoustic-based approach on the new record, and a lot more strings and piano, so we weren't worried about repeating ourselves ."

* Something For Kate play Big Day Out in Auckland on January 16.

- NZPA

Something For Kate