Between the two of them, former Powderfinger frontman Bernard Fanning and Something for Kate’s Paul Dempsey have accumulated seven Number One albums, 10 multi-platinum albums, 23 ARIA Awards and 73 ARIA nominations. As bona fide Australian rock royalty, they clearly have nothing left to prove.
Which is why the duo’s new project, Fanning Dempsey National Park, is such a delight: it’s the sound of two men defying expectations, venturing into new sonic territory with gleeful abandon and, most importantly, having fun.
Rolling Stone AU/NZ caught up with the duo at Forbes Street Studios in Sydney to partake in a freewheeling conversation about their debut album as creative partners, The Deluge — an Eighties-inspired, synth-heavy collection that aims to sound like nothing either of them have done before.
Fanning Dempsey National Park
Rolling Stone AU/NZ: Let’s start with the most pressing question: why not ‘Dempsey Fanning National Park’?
Bernard Fanning: Why are people asking us that all the time?
Paul Dempsey: Because they presume we must have had a fight about it.
BF: Which we did, it was a death match. A D-grade celebrity deathmatch.
PD: They’d like to expose that there were fraught egos. It sounds better than ‘Dempsey Fanning National Park’. It can be read like a verb — fanning the flames. So ‘Dempsey Fanning’ is like Dempsey trying to put out a fire in a national park.
BF: The whole reason it was called ‘National Park’ is because it was as pompous as we could make it, basically.
When did you decide to start making music together?
BF: Something for Kate came up to record at my studio in Byron in 2019 and they asked me to come in and sing on a song called “Inside Job.” We’d always been friends and knew each other pretty well. We did lots of festivals [together] over the years. So our friendship rekindled a bit and then Paul was doing weekly broadcasts during the lockdowns from Melbourne and he asked me to do the Bowie side of “Under Pressure.” It was really fun.
PD: Just the nature of how easy it was and it sounded good [we thought] ‘this could be a thing.’
BF: Then Paul recorded something and said, ‘Hey, look, I just recorded this and here you go, see what you think of this,’ and then I put a vocal on it within a day or so and sent it back to get the ball rolling. And we were like, ‘That sounds pretty good.’
PD: Straight away, I was like, ‘Jeez, I really like this thing of someone else doing half the work.’
BF: Yeah, totally [laughs].
PD: We were like, ‘This seems like it could be really good, but it has to be fun. As soon as it’s not fun, then why are we doing it?.’
BF: We started trading songs, sending stuff back and forth and finishing each other’s ideas. And once we had about three or four songs, we thought maybe we should make a record.
PD: At that point it had started to get a sound of its own as well, because once there were a few ideas in the can, then it was kind of like, ‘OK, what do we want this to be? We’d like it to be different ‘cause it’ll be more fun if it’s different.’ We started screwing around with synthesisers and sequencers and stuff that wasn’t really in our wheelhouse. That kept on going and it opened up this whole world of sound and toys. I love toys — I’m a gear head. So any excuse to go right down a gear rabbit hole and learn about synths or whatever. It’s like discovering the guitar all over again. I’ve literally been selling guitars to buy synths.
BF: To put that in context, he’s been selling some of his collection of, like, 30 guitars. It’s not like he’s getting low on guitars or anything.
PD: I do have a lot of guitars. Now I have a lot of synths [laughs].
Did anyone try and push you to make music that sounded like stuff you’d already done?
BF: We weren’t interested in that. I think our labels and our agents and our managers would’ve been really interested in that [laughter].
PD: Keep doing the thing that’s working.
BF: Our fans may have wanted that too, but we trust people that like our music enough to want to come along, and maybe bring new people that would ordinarily be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I know what Fanning and Dempsey do’. Maybe now they don’t.
Fanning Dempsey National Park
Why the suits in all your promo photos?
BF: We figured we should be dressing like we’ve got important work to do.
PD: There was an element of that Eighties synth explosion where there were a lot of suits because the synth was a very sophisticated instrument. They were sophisticated artists using futuristic tools. You had to look sharp.
BF: Suits were also big because of David Byrne. Cos David Byrne was like, ‘Fuck all those punks, they look so bad, I wanna look as different as I can to them so I’m gonna dress like a guy from Wall Street.’
What feedback have you gotten for the album?
BF: My brother is a massive Bowie fan, and he messaged me recently because he sat with the album for a few weeks before he got back to me. And he said, ‘OK, first few listens I was surprised, but now it sounds like the album between Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and Let’s Dance that Bowie never released,’ and it was like fuck, that is high praise, because he’s not an easy critic. He’s like, ‘That’s a piece of shit.’ He’s said that to me a few times before [laughs]. Generally, very encouraging, but he’s also honest. He also said that we should get two really hot young Germans like Milli Vanilli to go out and do this and he said, ‘It’ll be massive worldwide, I’m telling you.’
PD: ‘If you two just stay out of it [laughs].’
BF: ‘The songs are awesome, but no one wants to see you.’
This article features in the September-November 2024 issue of Rolling Stone AU/NZ. If you’re eager to get your hands on it, then now is the time to sign up for a subscription.
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