With it now clear that their bass player was departing, “we asked him to stay on long enough to finish the first album and travel to New Zealand with us to record,” says Dempsey.
Being in a band isn’t for everyone, it does get quite lonely being away from loved ones,” says the drummer, now a father himself. Hyndman was equally respectful of his bandmate’s decision “touring and being away from his partner all became too much for Julian. “We were sad when he informed us but there were personal reasons why he couldn’t keep up the touring schedule (which was only getting more demanding) and he had decided to move to the country,” Dempsey recounts. The first early chapter in the band’s story was about to come to a close, when Carroll decided that the lifestyle of a touring bassist was not for him. “We wrote, recorded and released three EPs in 12 months and dragged ourselves repeatedly up and down the East Coast playing every shitty gig imaginable and it was fantastic.” Jump to 18 months of shows down the line, and Dempsey, Hyndman, and Julian Carroll began recording what would become their 1996 debut EP, The Answer To Both Your Questions, at South Melbourne’s Seed Studios, next door to Studio B, where a Murder Ballads-era Bad Seeds were rehearsing. “It was the only gig we had booked but the house sound guy came up to us immediately after the show and offered us a gig with his band the following week and suddenly it just seemed like we were playing all the time.” “I think we scared a good proportion of the audience.” “We were as sloppy as anything but we jut went for it and got completely carried away,” he says. That first ever gig was on Monday 12th September, 1994 at the Punters Club in Fitzroy, opening for The Heard and Bleeding White Noise, as Dempsey perfectly recalls. They were booked, “which also meant we were pretty much stuck with the name,” Dempsey says. Pressed for a new band name over the phone by the booker, a young, panicked Dempsey looked to his shopping list and saw the request to get ‘Something’ for his dog, a Jack Russell named Kate. That is, until it became a phrase that a Melbourne venue simply would not advertise. Though they luckily failed to fulfil on that namesake, once they found a bass player – Julian Carroll, enlisted through an advertisement – they did saddle themselves with ‘Fish of the Day’ shortly after. “Dempsey and the Hyndmans was our school wannabe band, Paul and I made up during an economics class,” Clint reveals. It turns out that even at a fresh 19 years of age, high school friends Paul Dempsey and Clint Hyndman – who first bonded over a love of Descendents – were not any good at band names. Well when it belongs to treasured Melbourne-based three-piece Something For Kate, it happens to be two decades worth of fertile yarns, starting with the one behind their original moniker, ‘Fish of the Day’.
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