When Something for Kate singer/guitarist Paul Dempsey and former Powderfinger vocalist Bernard Fanning began talking about making an album together, they saw an opportunity to confound expectations. “It wasn’t so much that we talked about what we wanted to do,” Dempsey tells Apple Music. “It was more that we talked about what we didn’t want to do. That early discussion was like, ‘What would be the most predictable thing that people would think this partnership would sound like?’. To hazard a guess, it would likely be a lot of acoustic guitars and country-ish aspirational anthems.” So they headed in the opposite direction, embracing their mutual love of music from the late ’70s to the mid ’80s, a period, says Fanning, “where keyboards and synthesisers in particular were starting to edge out guitars as the main instrument”. Namechecking artists such as David Bowie, Gary Numan, Duran Duran and Robert Palmer, the duo’s debut album hues closely to the sonic aesthetic of that era, wholeheartedly embracing synths and an almost krautrock-style devotion to driving, minimalist rhythms and instrumentation. “That period of the ’80s for pop music was so wildly inventive, people could have hit songs that were so unique and unusual and unlike anything else in the Top 10,” marvels Dempsey. “We really gave each other permission and freedom to explore.” Here, Fanning and Dempsey give Apple Music a guided tour through Fanning Dempsey National Park and their debut album, The Deluge. “The Deluge” Fanning: “This is the first song we completed, where we got a really solid idea for a full song.” Dempsey: “We had worked on other ideas and other bits and pieces. But I think this is the one where, by the time we got it into a finished shape, a little flag went off and we both went, ‘That is a vibe. We should go in that direction. Let’s follow that energy.’” Fanning: “It felt like a really good launching point.” “Born Expecting” Dempsey: “It’s that idea of a simple, propulsive, chugging kind of bassline. But then the guitar is doing this really off timing. It gives it this wiry tension, and then it just sort of explodes into the chorus. It’s probably the only song on the record that does that. It’s sort of an ode to Scott Morrison and his ilk, Donald Trump and the rest of them, all the people who just fail upwards into the highest, most powerful positions in the land.” “Disconnect” Fanning: “It’s essentially about trying to find your place after you’ve had some kind of failure, whether it be in a relationship or your workplace or whatever it is. It’s that idea that you can kind of reclaim it.” “Eyes Wide Open” Fanning: “We were writing these songs during the pandemic, or the tail-end of the lockdown periods. There was so much intensely weird information flying around, and there were people latching on to ideas that were just ludicrous. It’s looking at that idea of how quickly that rabbit hole can narrow for people. So at the beginning they’re making these grand statements, by the end of it they’re just spouting lunacy. Then the music becomes more and more intense as the song progresses, and kind of represents the mania that set in for a lot of people.” “Blood” Fanning: “Sophie Taylor-Price is Bob Hawke’s granddaughter, and she did a eulogy at his state memorial service. She used not exactly that line, but something very similar: ‘My blood is your blood. My stories are your stories.’ I thought it was really beautiful, in the context of having my own kids. I just adapted that into some lyrics that I had already started to work on around that idea of parenting and how, once it begins, it never ends. It’s about that genetic connection, and how it’s physical, but it’s also mental and almost telepathic.” “Never Pass This Way Again” Dempsey: “Michael Urbano played drums on the record. He brought along several drum kits, and this was the song where he really got to use the biggest one. We were allowed to use both live rooms [at Sausalito’s 2200 Studios, formerly known as the Record Plant]. So we got to record in the room where Fleetwood Mac did Rumours. Then we also got to use the other room where Metallica did a couple of records and where Lars [Ulrich, drummer] literally had the ceiling raised to make [his drums] sound bigger. It’s a fun song.” “Strangers” Fanning: “It’s directly out of the Joy Division or Suicide playbook, I guess. But imposing melody on it. Paul added a really simple guitar line, plus this guitar feedback. It helped bring a little bit of humanity to the mechanics of it, because the beat is the same the whole way through, and that sequence is kind of relentless. It’s again pointing to what’s going on in the world, the polarisation of ideas, and how the middle ground has fallen away. There’s very little space now for people to agree to disagree; they just more aggressively disagree or wholeheartedly agree, but there’s very little crossover.” “Past Tomorrow” Dempsey: “It’s about someone who is never able to live in the moment. They’re always looking past, or behind. Some people just have this anxiety or this itch that there’s always something they’re missing. I guess we have a term for it now: FOMO. I think some people can go through their entire lives like that without ever realising that there is a moment, and they weren’t in it.” “Dunning Kruger National Park” Dempsey: “There are people out there who have a lot of certainty about everything they say and believe and think, and it’s a sort of bullish, bulletproof certainty. A lot of them bring along concepts of good and evil with that—their certainty is based on their goodness, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them, or doesn’t have the same kind of certainty, is by default evil or morally questionable. There is no such thing as good or evil. They’re not universal. They’re not laws of nature. It’s a human concept. Everywhere around us, in politics, in society, culture and everything, this is good, evil, good, evil. It’s like, no, it’s just us and our brains and how we interact. I hasten to add as well, I say that with a healthy sense of uncertainty.” “King of Nowhere” Fanning: “Paul had written the music for that. It was a little more uptempo and shuffling, and we made it into a dirge because, lyrically, it was looking at war. I’d read this stuff that these Ukrainian poets had been writing from the frontline and also from home, like housewives and whatnot, as well as soldiers on the battlefield. They kind of all came back to love being the ultimate act of resistance. That comes into the song towards the end, once we’ve finished eviscerating all the fuckwit autocrats around the world.”