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Paul Dempsey If you’re good at picking musical trends, then you’ll have cottoned onto the fact that Australia’s got quite a knack for churning out some killer singer-songwriters. Whether you want to look up to the big guns - think Paul Kelly, Archie Roach, Grant McLennan - or to members of the modern guard like Courtney Barnett and Julia Jacklin, there’s certainly no shortage of witty songsmiths to come from Antipodean shores, many of whom have been notable guitar slingers in their own rights along the way. In this department, there’s few figures quite as seminal as Something For Kate’s Paul Dempsey. Somewhat underrated in the public domain but revered by critics, keen fans and contemporaries, Dempsey’s been an integral force in Australian music for the better part of 25 years, turning in no less than seven studio albums with the acclaimed three-piece and a respectable three solo albums on his own accord. While it’s his soulful vocal tone and figurative, delicate approach to songwriting that tends to resonate with many listeners, Dempsey’s also a grossly underrated guitarist with a deceptively snakey playing style, frequently opting for a beaten-up Fender Jazzmaster to bust out his intricate licks and textural guitar arrangements. It’s a combination of these factors - or perhaps, just the fact that he’s a really genuine bloke who knows his way around the fretboard - that’s led for him to team up with Fender to help launch their latest six-string innovation: the dynamic American Acoustasonic Jazzmaster. “I couldn’t have dreamed of it,” Dempsey says of his partnership with the brand. “I had really cheap, crap guitars for my whole teenage years, and I remember dreaming of owning a Fender - it just wasn’t realistic for me as a kid. I just thought ‘Man, to get my hands on a Fender one day…’ - it’s pretty special to be involved.” Dempsey’s love affair with the Fender Jazzmaster, like many guitarists of his age, stems back to its affiliation
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with the alt-rock trailblazers of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. He recalls guitarists like Thurston Moore and Kevin Shields leaving a lasting impression on him as an adolescent, which led to him acquiring his first Jazzmaster at the age of 19. “I remember being a kid and seeing the guys in Sonic Youth playing Jazzmasters, just hitting them with drumsticks and and just smashing the hell out of them, and I thought ‘Well, that looks like a pretty solid workhorse’,” he says.
“...I can find a tone that falls somewhere in between an acoustic tone and an electric tone,’ and yet, at the same time, it’s not either. It’s a whole new thing.” “I’m also 6’6”, so when I put on the Jazzmaster, it felt right straightaway instead of feeling like a ukulele, and I realised that Thurston Moore is also around that height as me, so maybe it’s just a tall guy’s guitar.” Tall guys aside, Dempsey notes that there’s several other factors that drove his fascination with the Jazzmaster, listing of the idiosyncratic design quirks that
have made it such a divisive instrument among guitarists for the past sixty years. “I think the floating tremolo systems on them are the best tremolo anyone’s ever made, and the fact that you can hit strings behind the bridge to make this whole other noise that other guitars just can’t do, I really love as well… I feel like I can do things with a Jazzmaster that I just can’t do with other guitars.” Anyone privy to Dempsey’s work with Something For Kate or as a solo artist will know that he’s prone to picking up an acoustic for some of his more balladeering moments, which he says makes the hybrid design of Fender’s Acoustasonic Jazzmaster all the more appealing to his songwriting process. “As a writing tool for me it’s amazing,” he says. “When I’m working on things usually I’d have to make the decision ’is this going to be an acoustic song or is it going to be more of a kind of an electric rock thing?’. This allows you to just you can you can even fall somewhere in the middle.
“A thing I always do a lot in the studio is play electric guitar and then track an acoustic underneath it to give it a bit of brightness. Sometimes, you’re going for a tone that you’re not sure is a gritty electric tone or an acoustic tone, and you don’t know what to do so you end up doing both.
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