‘We weren’t sure what we were doing’: How Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey found their sound

Machines are taking over the world, one pop song at a time. Human evolution is morphing as we surrender our skills to faster, smarter technology. Our screens are awash with fake faces and robo-voices: windows to the looming end of our world. But hey, that’s enough 1980s flashback for the moment.

It’s early on a Monday morning in 2024, and Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey have emerged from a weekend rehearsing their new, humorously named band, Fanning Dempsey National Park. For the frontmen of guitar-based rock legends Powderfinger and Something For Kate, new album The Deluge is fresh sonic terrain. Just as it was in the ’80s.

“Time is a flat circle,” Dempsey offers across the breakfast table. “That’s from True Detective,” he confesses, as his fellow pop culture nerd chuckles in recognition. “Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over again,” goes the rest of the oft-memed quote, borrowed in turn from Friedrich Nietzsche.

“Primarily it was about sounding different from ourselves,” Fanning says of the deliberately retro-futuristic vibe of the pair’s new album. “We set up the goalposts around 1977 to 1985, but that’s the only thing we set up. Like all bands, we weren’t exactly sure what we were doing. We were just feeling our way.”

Dempsey adds: “The aim was to have fun and hopefully to do something unpredictable. We established this sound palette that we wanted to use and that was really exciting to me because it meant I had to learn my way around analogue synthesisers. I got to learn how to create sounds from scratch.”

In conversation, the fun quotient is hard to miss. As the hours count down to Fanning’s flight home from Melbourne to Byron Bay, the friends’ coffee shop banter reflects a hundred band rooms shared since Something For Kate first opened for Powderfinger at Melbourne’s Corner Hotel in 1996.

Like teenagers jabbing a jukebox in a John Hughes movie, they jump from Gary Numan to Robert Palmer, Duran Duran to Icehouse, Joy Division to Depeche Mode. They talk about a golden era of discovery, when synthesiser companies would rush-release products to Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush or Prince, hoping to fast-track their smashing new sounds into the pop charts.

“I remember when Triple M kicked off in Brisbane,” says Fanning. “[Phil Collins’] In The Air Tonight was the first song they played. I was in that kind of classic rock mode, so I was aware things were changing and I didn’t like it at the start: that unnatural drum sound, that ‘manufactured’ sound.”

Yet resistance to the likes of Ultravox, Pseudo Echo and Eurythmics soon proved useless.

A few years younger, growing up in Melbourne, Dempsey’s musical experience was mostly confined to his mother’s Irish folk circles. “I think that’s why, when I first heard Ashes to Ashes, the first Bowie song I remember hearing, I was like, ‘This is music?’ Suddenly hearing this stuff with synthesisers and big drums was kind of shocking to a five-year-old kid.”

And don’t get him started on the video. “It literally gave me nightmares,” he says – not uncommon for kids growing up to the simultaneous dawn of MTV and the threat of nuclear winter. As fashion went all Blade Runner and a brooding new breed of pop stars began turning raincoats up against the fog machine, the thrill of this new music seemed hardwired to dark futuristic visions.

This is where the “flat circle” of time does a spooky spin. Lyrically, The Deluge is very much here-and-now, but it feels loaded with a familiar, looming sense of techno-fear. Politics blurs with reality TV. Polarised stalkers fact-check their thought bubbles. There’s “metal rain falling down” against a “deep fake sunset”. Human systems overload, machines override.

“The Deluge is the name of the first song,” says Dempsey, “but it works as the umbrella title of the whole record because it brings up not only themes of information overload but also climate change and … I mean, everything feels like too much at the moment. The whole world feels like too much.”

Fanning: “We didn’t direct any of that. It’s just that we’re both inherently political in our thinking so it’s bound to come out. I guess there are echoes of that [early 1980s] era now. That sense that something big’s coming, you know? The same way it was in the ’80s; the same as it was in the ’30s …”

Dempsey: “We’ve both touched on wider issues in our lyrics before, no matter how cryptically.”

He suggests that perhaps the album’s subtly pervasive air of apocalypse “is just something that happens when you take people who aren’t afraid of a minor chord and then apply that to synthesisers. Suddenly, it sounds sort of ominous.”

He adds, “It is a lot of fun playing with new toys,” steering back to the F-word for perspective, “but no amount of awesome synthesisers can make a good song.”

On that score, The Deluge is very much a story of combined strengths. On the 10 tracks, distilled from about 20 demos the pair recorded in Norway last year, they share vocal duties in random permutations, sometimes interleaved like connected thoughts, sometimes standing back as the other takes flight.

Their polarities as writers can be best illustrated by Blood, Fanning’s song about family and memory, and Dunning Kruger National Park: a classic illustration of Dempsey’s flair for the kind of black comedy that has you Googling science theory. Born Expecting, a withering portrait of the kind of God-bothering world leader that “fails upwards every time”, seems likely to have sprung from his famously rationalist mindset. The affecting mix of tenderness and bleak imagery in the closing track, The King Of Nowhere, stems from a book of Ukrainian war poetry Fanning found online.

The suggestion that Fanning might be the heart of this project and Dempsey the brains makes them laugh just a little too hard. “Rather than ‘brains’, I’d prefer something more like ‘gear nerd’,” Dempsey says, looking pained.

Fanning: “It’s more like a Venn diagram. But I think there’s elements of truth to it because when I would send something to Paul, it generally would still have some kind of acoustic instrumental flavours to it, which kind of warmed it up. And then Paul just kept pouring ice on it and it always improved it. He was in this kind of crazy synth-buying frenzy.”

The key difference in their processes, Dempsey suggests, is that, “You just write heaps of songs, all the time. I’m more likely to have one song idea and just drill down on it and every production iteration of it.

“I write music all the time, but lyrics are really hard for me. Whereas you, you just sing. I think you’re a lot freer with your voice. I’ve known lots of people like that. Sarah Blasko can just sit down at the table and start singing! It took me a long time to feel anything remotely like a singer.”

Assembling singers planted some vital seeds for what became Fanning Dempsey National Park. When Something For Kate opened for David Bowie’s last tour in 2004, Dempsey forged a bond with pianist Mike Garson, which led to an invitation to join the alumni memorial concert, Celebrating David Bowie, which sold out the Sydney Opera House in early 2017.

“They asked him to get some other singers,” says Fanning. “Paul knew that I was a Bowie fan so he got me and Sarah and Chris Cheney.”

The Powderfinger singer closed the show that night, singing Under Pressure with Holly Palmer. During the COVID lockdown years, he and Dempsey recorded their own long-distance YouTube version of the song: again, an appropriate recycling of an early ’80s anthem for anxious times.

When it came time to record The Deluge with producer Craig Silvey at the studio formerly known as the Record Plant in Sausalito (see Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Springsteen, Metallica), their Celebrating David Bowie contacts came in handy again: drummer Michael Urbano and bassist Craig McFarland brought the live energy that makes the album rock.

They, along with American synth wiz Adam McDougall, were hugely important to what the album became, Dempsey says. There are necessarily different players involved on the tour they’ve begun rehearsing; partly why they opted for a name bigger than just Fanning Dempsey. The National Park was appended “because it’s so pompous it made us laugh”.

As well we might. For all his nightmarish visions of the future, Bowie was a pretty chipper chap in his spare time. “Make the best of every moment,” he advised in one of his last interviews, with Esquire magazine. “We’re not evolving.”

Fanning laughs. “Isn’t it the way it’s always been with art, that it takes two steps forward and then one step back?”

“Do you think he’s just talking about art?” his friend asks.

Fanning: “I think he’s probably talking about everything. He was also really fascinated by the internet, all the great possibilities and the terrible consequences of it, and he foretold that pretty early.”

Again with the techno-fear.

“I think it depends how you view evolution,” says Dempsey. “I think we all have this idea that evolution means everything gets better. I don’t think that’s what evolution necessarily means. Everything evolves until the heat death of the universe, whether it’s good or bad or … People are panicking about AI but, I mean, if we end up half-machine, how is that not still evolution?”

It sounds like a great idea for an album.

The Deluge is released on August 2. Fanning Dempsey National Park play the Enmore Theatre, Sydney, on Saturday, October 12; and the Forum, Melbourne, on October 19 (sold out) and 20. For full tour dates, see fanningdempseynationalpark.com

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