The man behind “International superstar Hans” on his childhood, music and the inspiration for his alter ego
HE’S wowing the world as Hans, but as Matt Gilbertson takes off the makeup and sequins, he talks to SAWeekend about his childhood, growing up “different” and finding his place in the world through music.
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IT WAS a summer’s afternoon on a not-too-extraordinary Tuesday in 2003 when South Australian singer and cabaret performer Catherine Campbell wandered into Adelaide’s Central Market.
Call it sliding doors. Call it fate. But on that day, an “international superstar, sex symbol, accordionist, home-wrecker, Madonna fan” was born.
His name would eventually be Hans — and his glittery, over-the-top performances have made him the only Australian to make it to the live performances of talent show juggernaut America’s Got Talent, to be held later this month.
But on this day 15 years ago, he was simply Matt Gilbertson, a “stick thin, really a stripe” of an 18-year-old who had taught himself to play the piano accordion in his six-week summer break, between finishing Year 12 and starting a university degree at the Elder Conservatorium of Music.
The young man had been given the instrument by his former classical piano teacher, Teresa Biernat, whose husband was part of an accordion band in the 1970s.
Already accomplished as a classical pianist, he got the hang of the squeeze box in no time and decided to make a bit of summer holiday pocket money by busking around the city. On this particular day, he was playing at the Central Market. Campbell recalls meandering past him.
“I didn’t even think anything of it until I walked down the aisle away from him, when I realised that he was playing ’80s music,” she says. “So I backtracked.”
At the time, Campbell was one of a handful of performers in a weekly romp of a show, Berlin Cabaret, which ran on Friday nights at the Weimar Room in Hindley St as a celebration of the jazz era in post-World War I Germany. The actors all had alter-egos, fishnet stockings and outrageously fake German accents.
Campbell immediately thought one thing about this lanky, young, accordion-toting kid playing ’80s music: Perhaps he could join the show as an interval act? So she approached him.
“It was funny that I went up to Matt because just the week before I’d gone up to a girl playing the violin and I thought she could play gypsy music and be a guest, but she said she’d have to ask her parents because she was only 16,” she says. “So one of the first things I said to Matt was: ‘Are you 18?’. He must have thought I was a nut case, but I had kind of been scared off going up to random buskers.”
Gilbertson didn’t hesitate in saying “yes” and not long after found himself on stage each week as the show’s interval act. It was here he began to develop the craft of talking back to members of the audience, while he also continued to master the squeeze box — both are critical to his alter ego. Later that year, he was invited to join the show as a regular cast member. What would he look like? What would he be called?
“I went shopping with one of the other cast members and we bought some fishnet stockings, because I wanted to make the character a boy, but a little bit out there,” Gilbertson recalls.
“I had shorts that were almost like underwear and at the top half was a white shirt, a vest and a hat, and I put on Doc Marten boots. And then there were the blue eyes, eyelashes, red lips and blush. Then I just picked the name Hans because it seemed like one of the most stereotypically German names. Heidi for a girl. Hans for a boy.”
And there he was. Hans. An over-the-top, arrogant, tap-dancing boy wonder “from Berlin”, whose talent was … everything!
But how did Gilbertson suddenly end up starring in a show that celebrated the seedy underground of Weimar Germany? Well, for that, you have to go back …
BORN in Adelaide in 1984, Gilbertson grew up in the western suburbs — where he still lives — to parents Joanne and Peter. The eldest of their three children (his siblings are sister Holli and brother Jay), he attended a local Catholic primary school.
Early on during his childhood, there were signs that Gilbertson wasn’t typical. When his father, Peter, took him and his siblings to football games at Alberton Oval, he would end up inside the clubhouse playing piano for the volunteers making the scones and tea, uninterested in the sport.
And from the age of three, he was obsessed with Kylie Minogue.
“My grandparents used to run a hotel in Willunga and I would get up — aged three — with the band and sing Locomotion. I was always obsessed with Kylie and I thought I was going to marry her. At the time, my aunty was a nanny in London, so at Christmas time, the family would put a cassette player on the table and record our conversations and send them to her so she would know what was going on. In about Year 10, we found all these cassettes and on one there was another aunty and my mum saying to me: ‘Matt, Kylie’s going to marry Jason (Donovan)’ and I was on the tape crying.”
Gilbertson’s mother, Joanne, says it was obvious from a young age that her son was a human being who would “beat to a different drum”.
She recalls discovering his love of classical piano in an unusual way: “When he was about four, Pete and I walked past his bedroom and we could hear this music coming from there and we knocked on his door and said: ‘Hey, Matty, what are you listening to?’. And he said: ‘It’s ABC fine music’ … he’d come across this by himself and he just absolutely loved it.
“But also, from a young age, he loved all those comedy shows like Full Frontal and Fast Forward. He would be killing himself laughing and I’d say to Pete: ‘There’s no way he could understand that’. But it was the mimicking and the voices.
“He was always passionate and so I started him off in dancing when he was about eight and he did jazz and tap.
“Whenever we went to barbecues, Matt might have been one of the younger ones, but all the other kids dreaded him coming because he’d have them all organised in a play and doing a production.”
Gilbertson recalls a similar story himself: “I was always putting on shows. The night of the Madonna concert in Adelaide in 1993, I was not there because I was eight years old and I was furious that I couldn’t go. My mum had people over and I had all the kids down one end of the house choreographing this full-on Madonna concert.”
He might have loved Madonna (until recently he held the world-record for continuous accordion playing, squeezing out almost 30 hours of continuous Madonna songs) and adored his tap dancing lessons, but it was at the black and white keys of the classical piano where he had obvious ability. Gilbertson started under Teresa Biernat’s private piano instruction aged about 10.
He was talented, right from the beginning, Biernat says. “A bit lazy, but he was very musical; he’d do things like play Dancing Queen in the middle of a sonata,” she says.
“I remember one day he was playing Dubussy’s Reverie and I became so emotional listening to him. I see students who are technically brilliant, but you can’t teach them soul — and Matt was born with that. He was a gifted child.”
But, like many kids, he hated practising and it was the source of many fights.
“My mum played basketball for Australia, so she has that thing that you learn through sport of where you train and train and train, and she put that onto us,” he says.
“I did like playing piano, but it was also the source of big fights. I was a bit like the teenage girls — you know how teenage girls and their mums fight — that was mum and me. She was always saying to me that if I quit piano then I’d have to quit dancing as well, but dancing was fun because I was in a group and I was around all the girls and it was like party time.
“I loved tap. I wasn’t the best, and I wasn’t the worst. But I was the only boy, so I got all the best parts and at the dancing competitions, there were never many boys there.”
Joanne fondly recalls the beautiful dancing of her son when he was younger. “Oh, back in the day he was a beautiful tapper,” she sighs. “Now he’s sloppy, but when he was really doing it well, he was so upright. But he loved it. He didn’t care that he was the only boy doing all this stuff, because he just loved it.”
Did he ever feel different growing up?
“Yes,” Gilbertson says pensively. “But I never thought it was bad. I never felt like it wasn’t OK to like the Spice Girls.”
But, Joanne says his childhood wasn’t always easy. “I’m quite sure in primary school, he didn’t know he was gay or whatever, but he never really liked playing football or soccer,” she says. (Today, he is openly gay and was a vocal supporter of last year’s Marriage Equality Yes vote.)
“He always liked playing with the girls because he could get them to do plays with him. I will always remember this one day, he was in Year 7, and I got called into the school. He was in the library; Matt had gone in there to escape because the boys said they were going to break his fingers if he didn’t stop playing the piano.
“When he went into the library, the teachers asked what was wrong and he said: ‘I feel like I’m a balloon and I’ve been filling up and filling up and filling up and finally I have burst’.
“In a way, it has made him a pretty strong character. He’s very sensitive, but he’s strong also because of what he’s gone through.”
Gilbertson agrees that being occasionally picked on only made him stronger and more determined. In some ways, he exaggerated his difference with the other boys.
“I think it was good to get picked on a bit,” he says. “I never got beaten up — I never got into a fight or anything — I was too tall (he’s now 192cm). But I think it made me ramp it all up. It was like: ‘I’ll take the mickey out of myself before you do’. It’s probably where Hans comes from a little bit.”
Come Year 9 and Gilbertson found himself at Marryatville High School on a music scholarship, something Joanne calls his “saving grace because he could be who he wanted to be”. “He was encouraged to take his tap shoes to school to do a performance,” she says. “They really nurtured all those kids who were talented.”
And after school came the busking. “I taught myself to busk by playing pop songs on the piano accordion in Rundle Mall and the first few times I was thinking: ‘What the hell am I doing?’,” he says. “But then, because what I was doing was different, people would walk past and I’d see them double-take once they’d worked out that I was playing an ABBA song. I really liked that.
“And I really liked watching people as well. When you’re busking, you can watch people all day and make up stories about their life. What I do in my shows now is quickly going through the audience and making judgments of them.”
His busking supplemented the money he earned either working at Subway or teaching piano to kids. Busking also got him out of tight spots. While at university, he always made sure he had his piano accordion in the car and if he needed money throughout the day — to pay for his carparking or some such — he would simply take it out, put a hat on the pavement, tinkle away for a little bit and, less than an hour later, there would be his parking money.
But most crucial for his story was the day he found himself at the Central Market.
CAMPBELL doesn’t think too much about the what-ifs: What if she hadn’t turned around that day at the market? What if he had said ‘no’?
“It was that really incongruous, crazy thing, but I think there’s a very good chance that if we’d never met, that Matt would have developed a totally different character who was a showman; I don’t see how he would have kept himself down,” she says. “He would have striven to get out into the world.”
After Berlin Cabaret ceased in 2005, unlike the other performers, Gilbertson kept his character alive. He was hired by the Unley Rd Moulin Rouge-themed bar, Boho, where he roamed the room poking fun at guests. Here he was spotted by a Nova 919 radio producer who asked him to team with the station to promote the upcoming Schutzenfest.
At the time, the station had been wanting to inject celebrity gossip into its breakfast show and when the Schutzenfest collaboration worked, Gilbertson — as Hans — was asked whether he’d like to read the celebrity news. It turned from a weekly segment, into a daily segment and his star was on the rise. He was flown around the country to cover Logie Awards’ red carpets, television events and to interview the likes of Nicole Kidman, Pink and Fergie. Next came an offer to join NewsCorp’s Sunday Mail as gossip columnist in 2009.
The year before, 2008, he’d put on his first solo Adelaide Fringe show as Hans, featuring his dancing girls, the Lucky Bitches, and the live band, the Ungrateful Bastards. It was a family affair: mum making the costumes and working the door. Dad working the spotlight. Jay and Holli also involved. Joanne even recalls having to build a stage for one of his earliest shows. But by now, the character was developing further and was turning into a hyped caricature of who Gilbertson really is.
“I can pinpoint things that have happened in my life that are in Hans: like the Kylie Minogue stuff. The Spice Girls. Hans is really just me but on steroids and with a bad German accent,” he says.
Today, after almost 15 years of performing as Hans, the character has evolved and is a sparklier and more feathered character than he was in Berlin Cabaret, thanks to the deft sewing skills of Joanne.
Gilbertson surrounds himself with a handful of people — close friends and people whose work he looks up to — who provide feedback on his shows. He is influenced by the performers he adored growing up: the character Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, Bob Downe, the Kath & Kim comedic duo, Dame Edna, and anything Sound Of Music, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, Madonna, Spice Girls and, of course, Kylie.
He has crafted a knack for making people laugh, which he thinks has something to do with his day job, because working in a newsroom means he’s across all the news of the day and he then inserts that general knowledge into his shows.
“You drop a politician’s name, oh!, people think you’re so smart,” he laughs. “Really, it’s still just the celebrity gossip jokes, but about Barnaby Joyce instead. I think it’s made Hans a little more topical now. Even if I go to a new city, I’m always wondering what’s happening there politically or socially and finding out what people are talking about.
“In Perth earlier this year, their Lord Mayor had had a big scandal with travel rorting and I just had to say her name and the audience was on.”
But at the heart of the show is Hans, as the arrogant, opinionated, loud and confident character that he has become.
“As much as Hans thinks he’s amazing, the real joke is laughing at myself, which is universal,” Gilbertson says. “Whenever Hans says something to someone in the audience, he’s really commenting on how ridiculous everything is. I mean, you’re getting your outfit paid out by a 6’3 dude in hotpants … Who’s the joke really on?”
Joanne recognises that her son is essentially working two jobs and, to help out, she cleans his house each week: “He’s an absolute mess at home, but that’s because he’s got a million and one things going on in his head and he’s just trying to juggle, juggle, juggle.”
And it has been a particularly busy 12 months for him. Apart from his full-time journalist role, he has also ramped up his schedule and calculates he has done 54 shows since July last year, including the Adelaide Fringe and Adelaide Cabaret festivals, appearing in London last month, then heading to the Edinburgh Fringe for his second appearance there, where he is staging 16 shows. There have also been performances in Budapest and Perth.
And now there’s America’s Got Talent, one of the world’s most-watched talent shows, filmed in Hollywood. The brainchild of uber-producer Simon Cowell and now in Season 13, AGT averages more than 10 million viewers each week.
Gilbertson is not entirely sure how his act stumbled under the noses of the show’s producers; he suspects he was spotted during his first appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe last year.
He made the gamble to tour Hans to the world’s biggest Fringe festival because he’d spent close to a decade workshopping the show.
“By the time I went to Edinburgh in 2017, I was ready to go,” he says. “Hans was polished, so it was the right time, but it had taken nine years to get there.”
A year later and in his two televised auditions on AGT, he’s been able to put his frenetic, sparkly show in front of the world’s eyes.
And there have been plenty of them. His first audition — which screened in June with him performing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary in a sequined green jumpsuit made by his mum — has now been viewed more than 2.2 million times on YouTube.
In late July, he made it through the “Judge Cuts” with a frenetic performance of It’s Raining Men, and was put through to the “Live Shows”, which will start in mid-August. And watching him in the audience at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre — the same theatre that hosts the Academy Awards in Los Angeles — will be his mother and father, making their first trip to the US so they can support him.
What ultimately comes from his talent-show stardom remains to be seen. There is a $US1 million prize on offer, and a year-long residency in Las Vegas. But regardless, Gilbertson is looking to the future with self-deprecating humour.
How did he celebrate wowing the AGT judges after his first audition earlier this year? By tucking into an In-N-Out Burger in LA in his gym gear, of course. Life sure is glamorous when you’re an international superstar.
But win or lose AGT, you get the sense that this is only the beginning for Hans — and he has the lights of Vegas sparkling in his eyes.
Gilbertson will go up against 35 other finalists from mid-August. America’s Got Talent Live Shows screens in the US on NBC on Tuesday nights, starting August 14, and then in Australia on Fox8 on Thursdays at 7pm.