Kate Ceberano looks back at first kiss and looks forward to meeting her David Guetta

SINGER Kate Ceberano has been plying her craft over four decades. She talks about her first kiss, working with Paul Kelly and one aspect of her work she doesn’t like.

KATE Ceberano doesn’t like being in studios. Can’t stand them. She is born to sing on all stages great and small.
“I hate recording. I shouldn’t say that,” she says, pealing into her full-throated, room-rumbling laugh.

Well, Kate, you’ve fooled all of us for 35 years. In her 50th year, Ceberano on Friday released Anthology, a three-disc collection capturing the diversity of her 35-year career, 53 tracks from a catalogue of 23 albums.

Anthology includes new tracks with Paul Kelly (we’ll get to him), hits such as Brave, Bedroom Eyes and Pash (we’ll get to the story behind that) and covers including David Bowie’s Heroes (you guessed it, we’ll get to that).

First though, a little story. Ceberano was the artistic director for the Adelaide Cabaret Festival for three years and in her outgoing year, 2014, she recruited Tamil Rogeon and Ryan Ritchie, founding members of True Live and The Raah Project, to join her playing standards as The New Score.

Rogeon, (who Ceberano calls “a clever man, like a modern-day Mozart”), picks up the story.

Retro Kate Ceberano

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“We were rehearsing with an orchestra and every time we practised Nina Simone’s Wild as the Wind it was dying. Flatlining. Then on the night of the show she just brought it and it brought the house down and Wild as the Wind was the biggest song of the night,” Rogeon says.

Ceberano was born in 1966 in Melbourne to dad Tino, a karate champion American with Filipino blood, and her Australian mother Cherie. “I was raised on this diverse musical diet. I was a kid from the ’burbs in this multiracial time with no real place to call
home,” she says.

Her brother Phil Ceberano introduced Kate to The Thin White Duke.

“He gave me David Bowie as a kid. Being my older brother, he set out on the path ahead of me and he’d turn around and say, ‘Check this out, Kat, you gotta get into this.’ My brother is an underrated artist. He’s the quintessential rock star, he lives it and breathes it.”

The two cover Heroes on Anthology.

Kate recorded with her first band, I’m Talking, and released album Bear Witness in 1986. It reached No. 14 on the charts. She sang back-up on Out of Mind, Out of Sight with The Models, then hit the big time when her third album (and first “pop” record) Brave gave the world Bedroom Eyes, Love Dimension and Young Boys Are My Weakness.

As a giddy 11-year-old, I saw the clip for Young Boys Are My Weakness on rage, despite my Catholic parents banning the ABC music video program for being “too racy”. Seeing Ceberano gave me jelly legs.

Maybe she meant me.

“Ohhhh, it’s become the campaign song for all of my gay mates,” she says, laughing.

Does Ceberano feel she was born at the right time?

“Hmm, yeah, I think so. The ’80s spawned Annie Lennox, Stevie Wonder was still doing it, Prince and Michael Jackson, this huge melange of interesting self-made acts who could really slam it live,” she says.

“When MTV hit there was a lot of ‘my clip is better than your clip’, so much money was involved. Nothing will thrill me more than seeing Talking Heads do Burning Down The House live at Radio City Hall then in the same week a clip of Grace Jones doing Slave To The Rhythm. She was giant. I thought I’d jettison that and become all my fantasies. I even got to go into
the fiction of Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Ceberano’s turn as Mary Magdalene in 1992 spawned the hit Everything’s Alright .

On the subject of religion I attempt a segue to Ceberano’s background as a Scientologist.

“We don’t talk about that during music interviews, nah, let’s nix that,” she deflects.

The secret to Ceberano’s success has been her consistency and ability. It echoes the quote from MP Tony Windsor: “The world is run by people who turn up.”

“That’s exactly my point. We get to a certain era in our lives, I’m walking towards it, I’m not there yet, where nobody can unmake you,” she attests. “I can do big orchestral shows, I can do festivals, I can do television. I don’t wanna retire into a career of covers. I don’t wanna tune down my originality.”

Hence, she’s done two new songs with Paul Kelly: The Cake and The Candle and You’re Gonna Lose Her.

“We’re the two that are the least likely to hang out and when we do it’s the most natural thing,” she says. “I found writing with him very easy. Much easier than writing with, quote, unquote, professional songwriters. He doesn’t apply any system to it. It’s organic. I sat at the piano, he sat at the guitar, we came up with something at short order.

“Dare I say it, Paul is simple in his design, I can relate to that. We’re not talking about a Nick Cave-type guy. He’s a sensitive, articulate social commentator.”

Tina Arena, a contemporary of Ceberano, was lauded when she was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame recently and took the opportunity to criticise radio stations for not playing women aged over 40. Ceberano did not join in the chorus.

“Hmmm. Nah, see look, it’s funny, it was moving and all those things but, to me, no one regards ageism when we’re talking about men and it’s like, f---, it’s putting attention on some sort of social disability.
In my opinion,” she says, then goes back for more. “Meaning: just make music, love, just enjoy the music,” she laughs, knowing she’s fired a shot across the bows.

Ceberano is managed by Arena’s ex-husband Ralph Carr, with “industry insiders” saying Carr and his management stable were upset Arena didn’t thank him in her speech.

“Receive acknowledgment if it comes your way. That sounds very in contrast to what people felt of that speech, doesn’t it?” Ceberano says. “I don’t think about radio airplay any more. That’s not important, that’s not gonna happen. So to argue for it on behalf of other women, it makes you feel old.

“ Do you know what I think I have a problem with? People on awards nights using opportunities to get all bravely political about something when actually the people are awarding her on that night. It’s an expression of gratitude.”

Ceberano has won three ARIA awards and in 2014 was the first woman inducted into the Australian Songwriters Hall Of Fame. But what is her best song?

“It could be Brave for the right reasons, that was the first ever song I wrote,” she says. “But I still love Pash because I wrote it to be a Blondie-type song, a pop poem.

“There’s got be a lot of vanity when you’re a songwriter, right? The second verse, Pash beneath the signs of a neon mall, Lost between the now and the human sprawl. Now, I was talking about Westfield Shopping Centre (Doncaster) at the age of 14 and I think that’s quite good. It was my ode to my first kiss.”

Melbourne indie group Dorsal Fins did Pash for Triple J’s Like a Version.

Nowadays, certain indie record labels don’t want anything to do with her, maybe because of the Dancing with the Stars exposure (she won in 2007), maybe because of the Scientology connection. Ceberano still forages for new music and would very much like to bust up the charts with a dance remixer’s touch.

“I need to find my David Guetta (French DJ). I did a track with Frankie Knuckles and one with Arthur Baker. This wonderful genealogy of dance history. I need someone to blur my lines.

“I saw Prince two months ago and I felt like a d--- at the time because I was one of the first to get up and give him a standing ovation. There’s 2000-plus people at Hamer Hall, why haven’t they jumped to their feet in ecstatic joy? I felt like a seal. You could see people behind their phones when I turned around saying, ‘Oh my God, is that Kate Ceberano?’ ” she says in a faux hoity-toity tone. “I was like, this is f---ing amazing. This is like an alien creature come to join us for a night. I was so moved by him.

“I just uploaded this great music by a hip-hop girl, Sampa The Great, she’s got something fabulous,” she says of the Zambia-born, Australia-based artist.

“I love her. It’s so foreign and different, I don’t wanna hear the samey-same stuff, the lightweight insipid vocal stuff. I like strong singers and people with a strong viewpoint. I worship Sia, if I could be more consistent with my dance music, I’d love to write with her.” Hence, the Guetta envy.

Ceberano is on the APIA Good Times tour with Daryl Braithwaite, Jon Stevens and John Paul Young.

“We did the MCG (last week), we kickstarted it that way. This is how sublime and absurd my life can be, the night before I was shooting a musical quiz television show, it was heady and in front of a live audience, then I got the ’G and I hadn’t worked with any of these people before, it’s like the first day of high school,” she exhales, “then the law of the jungle presides.

“I get to share the love between four of us, the crowds go crazy.

“The minute they started Love is in The Air I just turned into a teenager again and felt like a lead character in a Baz Luhrmann film.

“Daaaa daaaaa daaaa daaaa, daaaa daaaa daaa daaaaa,” she winds up, then goes for it. “Love is in the aiiiir,” bringing her A-game even for an audience of one.

Anthology, out now, ABC Music.
See Ceberano and pals at Ulumbarra Theatre Bendigo, May 27; Palais Theatre, St Kilda, May 28; Costa Hall, Geelong, May 29.

apiagoodtimes.com.au

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Originally published as Kate Ceberano looks back at first kiss and looks forward to meeting her David Guetta