Kate Miller-Heidke digs deep for Eurovision with Zero Gravity
Kate Miller-Heidke’s campaign to win Eurovision for Australia is in full swing but the chart-topping pop and award-winning opera star had no idea what she was in for.
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Ernie Miller Nuttall hates the sound of his mother’s singing.
Unlike the tens of thousands of fans of Kate Miller-Heidke, the adorable two-year-old emphatically insists his mother desist with any attempt to share her prodigious talent with him.
The baby boy she and his father Keir Nuttall lulled to sleep with the music of heavy metal band Megadeth isn’t enamoured of any of her extensive repertoire of pop, opera or musical theatre.
“Ernie hates my singing, he’s not a fan. I have tried to show him my episodes of Play School and he goes ‘No, no’. He prefers the other presenters,” she says, laughing.
“I asked him why and he said he likes the real mummy … maybe it freaks him out to see me on TV but he’s not particularly a fan of my singing. I think he likes the spotlight himself.”
The spotlight is firmly on Miller-Heidke as she throws herself into the campaign to win votes at the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest.
The 37-year-old singer, songwriter and performer won the right to perform in Tel Aviv next month at the inaugural Australia: Decides show in February, orchestrated by SBS to engage the nation in the selection of our representative.
And she did it with an over-the-top marriage of pop and opera, the musical intersection which has won her awards and acclaim not just in Australia but around the world, from the English National Opera stage in London to the Coachella festival in California.
Zero Gravity is exactly the kind of brilliantly bonkers song Eurovision loves.
As she embarks on her first day of what she calls “promo coma” to rev up the Australian public’s interest in Eurovision — even as cynics continue to question our presence at the European contest — Miller-Heidke admits she is beyond proud of how Zero Gravity has struck a resounding chord with not only her own legion of fiercely loyal fans but those passionate Eurovision diehards.
Perhaps it was the perfection of her soaring operatic runs, maybe it was the melding of her opposing musical loves but for many people — as evidenced by the online reaction to the song ahead of the Australia: Decides event — Zero Gravity connected because of its brave and unique depiction of depression.
Before Ernie arrived on June 2, 2016, Miller-Heidke had carved an enviable career doing what she loved.
She juggled the disparate callings of pop star, opera performer and writer of musical theatre. As she endured the promo coma in mid-March, she and Nuttall were also ironing out the final tweaks of their score for the opening of Muriel’s Wedding’s Melbourne season.
This flurry of creative activity is a relief for the woman who feared she might never recover from the fog of post-natal depression and artistic inertia which lasted for two years after Ernie’s birth.
Zero Gravity captures the feeling of emerging from the darkness of depression into the light of living.
She says there were moments when she despaired she would ever feel the “weightlessness” of joy again.
“Especially as some people describe having a kid as a life sentence,” she says, before pausing. She means it as a joke in the “it’s funny because it’s true” vein.
“That needs context … because Keir and I have collaborated on so many projects, when Ernie was first born, I think we just sort of leapt into the concept that ‘OK, this is our new project together, we’re a great team, we can do this, blah blah blah’.
“And gradually the realisation dawns that this project never ends. And I am different now and it’s never going to be the same again. But then, for me obviously, it was a gradual process (to recover) that in the song, for the purposes of time limits, we have distilled into three minutes. But it was a lot longer than that, it was two years. And it was a variety of things that ended up (working). Therapy, which I have found immensely useful at points throughout my whole life, and Ernie getting older and slightly more self-sufficient and sleeping better and giving me the time to do things for myself and get my energy back and see my friends, that kind of thing. It was great to see those girlfriends who could say ‘Yeah it’s f … ing lonely’. Parenthood, especially in the early days, is really hard so just to hear everybody goes through that to some degree was helpful.”
Miller-Heidke hadn’t considered what comes next when she won Australia: Decides, held on the Gold Coast in February.
The first hurdle to occur to her was she was going to have to perform the stratospheric opera runs and hit those soaring notes dozens of times between now and her performance in the first semi-final of Eurovision on May 14.
So she went for a vocal tune-up with her coach Allison Bell.
The video of their sessions shared to the singer’s social media is hilarious and looks more like rehearsals for a stand-up comedy routine than serious training to build muscle memory.
She is humming what sounds like the Flight of the Bumblebee as she blows into a bottle of water through a giant straw.
The next minute the pop opera queen practices a long, extended fake burp before landing on all fours on the floor and crawling around while singing scales.
“I was only thinking as far as Australia: Decides and now I’m like ‘Oh s…,” she says, laughing.
“I haven’t had a singing lesson in years and years so I’ve just been having intensive coaching and Allison has given me some tools to really look after myself. She had a bit of look under the bonnet, gave me a bit of a tune-up so I’m just going to have to practise and stay healthy.”
Miller-Heidke has been playing with her voice since she can remember.
Born in Brisbane on November 16, 1981, her earliest memory of music was sitting in the tunnels of a park near her home every weekend and listening to her voice bounce around the concrete walls for hours.
The first music she owned was a cassingle of Kylie Minogue’s Tears On My Pillow she scored for her eighth birthday and she cites Joni Mitchell’s classic album Blue as the record that changed her life when she bought it at 15.
Two years later, she was drafted into her first band, a short-lived act which featured three flautists and “broke up for obvious reasons”.
Her next band Elsewhere, formed in 2000, wasn’t destined for longevity but it did introduce her up to Nuttall, who she met when they were rivals in a Battle of The Bands competition in 2002.
As she was completing her music degree studies at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music at Griffith University and then masters at Queensland University of Technology, she continued to exercise her pop sensibilities as a solo artist in Brisbane’s bubbling avant-garde music quarters and recorded her debut independent EP Telegram in 2004.
It was at this time Miller-Heidke reached a crossroads and had to choose between pop and opera.
Her single Space They Cannot Touch, a love song written with Nuttall, pricked the ears of Triple J and received considerable airplay resulting in her landing on the radar of Australia’s major record label talent scouts.
That song would also be the third single from her debut record Little Eve, released in 2007.
“After uni, I had to choose between Opera Australia and a record deal. I did have to focus on my own stuff for a while, I couldn’t do both but now I have found myself in this supremely lucky and awesome position of being able to incorporate different things, different challenges, different projects,” she says.
Her foray back into the “classical” world came when she was offered a role in the most unlikely of musical productions, Jerry Springer: The Opera.
The offer came as she was enjoying mainstream success courtesy of a string of singles from her second album Curiouser, with Last Day On Earth scoring her first top 10 in 2009.
“I nearly said no to Jerry Springer but then I heard the score and how funny it was; it was the first opera thing I had done since uni and was so surprised and shocked that I enjoyed it so much,” she says.
But it was another single from that album which would become a defining moment of her pop career and herald how entrenched Miller-Heidke would become in Australian culture not only as a recording artist but as a musical force for change.
Just as Zero Gravity has connected with those battling depression, so Caught In The Crowd, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in February, fostered an important dialogue about bullying.
The winner of the 2008 International Songwriting Competition Written, the song is narrated from the perspective of someone who didn’t intervene in the bullying of a school mate.
It reached platinum sales and is used by teachers to open discussion about “sticking up for your mates.”
Miller-Heidke still gets letters from children studying it and their parents who heard it the first time around.
There is no doubt the songs she has written from her most personal experiences resonate strongly with her audience.
“I guess a lot of music is like that, isn’t it? That song continues to have a life, young kids come to my gigs and that’s the song that was their window into the rest of my music, so now I get all these generations coming to the shows,” she says with a hint of pride.
“There’s power in being vulnerable because it makes people feel less alone to hear about stories and emotions that come from a raw place. There’s something about the power of music that allows you to access your emotions at a deeper level somehow. It’s always been part of my approach to dig out my shame and examine it in the light, it seems like a natural place for songs to spring from.”
Zero Gravity sprang from a similar place but it took her weeks to get there.
As soon as Miller-Heidke discovered SBS was soliciting songs to be considered for whoever would be chosen to represent Australia at Eurovision, she bunkered down in her home studio in Melbourne and penned many “terrible” songs.
The lightning bolt moment came when she started to explore the metaphor of emerging from depression into balance and trying to capture that in a pop song, using the dramatic verses to represent the fog and darkness and the operatic chorus to mirror the “sensation of colour returning to your life, of feeling strong, joyful and relieved.”
After trying out other collaborators, she returned to Nuttall for help to finish the song.
Their creative partnership has stood the test of time since their first endeavours back in her debut EP days.
Not only do they co-write but they have also recorded together for their side project Fatty Gets A Stylist, releasing a self-titled record in 2011 ahead of her third solo record — and final major label album — Nightflight in 2012.
“Obviously our collaboration has deepened and become more instinctive over time. I guess Keir just has a deep understanding of my musical and spiritual DNA and vice versa,” she says.
“But he did say to me ‘Why didn’t you just come to me in the first place?’ He’s really clever, a really amazing lyricist and he can do comedy, as you would have heard in some of Muriel’s Wedding, but also beautiful imagery and emotion.”
It would have been no surprise to Miller-Heidke trainspotters that she won the lion’s share of votes at Australia: Decides against the worthy and well-received performances of electronic duo Electric Fields and pop chart-toppers Sheppard.
Fans have been the ones backing her career since she parted company with Sony after her third record and became an independent artist. Miller-Heidke set an Australian record for a crowd-funding campaign on Pledge Music in 2013, raising the funds she needed to make her fourth record O Vertigo! in just three days.
She has nurtured her relationship with her fans via social media regardless of whether she has a new project to spruik or not, and has been delighted to see how they have embraced her selection as our 2019 Eurovision representative.
A drag queen anointed herself Zero Dignity for the annual mardi gras celebrations, fans have covered the song on YouTube and the spiky silver crown she wore during Australia: Decides has become a popular unofficial piece of Miller-Heidke merchandise at her concerts.
But not everyone is going to love her in Tel Aviv and she accepts that her song will polarise as many of the Eurovision family as it will find her new fans.
“I’ve had people turn up to my gigs since then wearing these massive crowns. The poor people standing behind them. It seems to have entered the Zeitgeist which is cool,” she says. “But there is a whole subset of Eurovision fans who are so passionate about it and it is their whole lives and they are on another level and that has been amazing to discover. I was ignorant of the competitive aspect of it, the analysis of all the stats because in my mind, I thought of Eurovision as this big celebration, a concert and at the end someone did win but that was sort of secondary. I am staying detached from that competitive side of things because I will go insane if I try to control that on any level. It’s highly distracting and impossible not to take things personally. Impossible.”
With Eurovision 2019 being staged in Tel Aviv, there has also been political agendas to navigate.
Miller-Heidke and the 40 other contestants in this year’s concerts have been targeted by the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement which “works to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.” Lorde cancelled her scheduled concerts in Israel last year after being urged by fans to join the boycott.
While artists such as Brian Eno and Roger Waters support the boycott, others including Nick Cave and Radiohead do not and have made public statements regarding their stance on playing concerts in Israel.
Miller-Heidke admits it was a decision she did not take lightly.
“Look, I have done a lot of thinking about it and read a lot about the different perspectives and … what Nick Cave said resonated with me,” she says.
“Ultimately what he was saying was music and art exist to break down barriers and not build them and anything that provokes discussion is good. Music, art, learning, it’s about the free exchange of information. Obviously I can see all sides of this and it’s messy, it’s really messy. Eurovision was invented to bring people together across divides and it’s inclusive and that’s the reason it exists.”
In addition to those vocal exercises, Miller-Heidke and her team, including Australia’s Head of Delegation Paul Clarke — the man who convinced Eurovision to invite us to their singing party five years ago — are tweaking her costume, staging and performance.
The artist obfuscates when asked if she can win the title or match Dami Im’s supreme performance of Sound of Silence which made her the runner-up in 2016.
While we have generally found favour with the judges from the competing countries, our contestants have enjoyed varying degrees of support from the voting public, with Guy Sebastian finishing fifth at our first outing in 2015, while Isaiah Firebrace placed ninth and Jessica Mauboy at 20 last year.
But Miller-Heidke, an unashamed lover of all things Eurovision, who has wanted a shot at the competition ever since Australia got the call-up, is determined to make us proud.
While lobbying for votes isn’t something that comes easily — the only person she hassled before Australia: Decides was her nanna — she is hopeful of winning hearts and minds when she heads to Europe this week for those all-important fan parties.
“I am very aware it’s a big responsibility and there’s a lot on my shoulders. People voted for me, they have put their trust in me and it’s a real thing. I know it’s a risk but all I can do is do my best performance.”
Originally published as Kate Miller-Heidke digs deep for Eurovision with Zero Gravity
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