Kate Ceberano and Kate Langbroek ‘used their witching powers’ to set up their children, who are now dating
Gypsy Lee - the daughter of Kate Ceberano - is coming into her own, launching a singing career and revealing her private battle with stage fright, which left her ‘absolutely horrified’.
Stellar
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Gypsy Lee wasn’t so sure she wanted to go into the family business. As a teenager, she would sing non-stop during 10-hour car rides between Melbourne and Sydney. She loved to write songs, too.
Of course, when the family firm is showbiz and your mother is revered Australian singer/songwriter Kate Ceberano, comparisons are inevitable.
So, too, is that tired “nepo baby” tag.
Then there was the matter of the aspiring artist’s debilitating stage fright. “I was actually horrified,” Lee tells Stellar.
“I had all these unconscious thoughts and, I guess, [a sense of] competition in terms of Mum being who she is. I didn’t really want to go and make a fool of myself or have people say, ‘She’s got a horrible voice’ or ‘Her songwriting skills are not as good as her mum.’ There was all of that.”
The impetus to pursue songwriting as more than a musical diary fashioned in her bedroom and not shared with anyone came during the Covid lockdowns.
At the time, Lee was 16 and forced home from boarding school. Feeling lost and without purpose, she was encouraged by her mother and filmmaker father Lee Rogers to write one song each day, just for fun.
Her first collaborator was Ceberano’s longtime backing vocalist Jessica Fairlie, who Lee has known since she was four.
The results were judged good enough by her parents for Rogers to spring into manager mode – he also takes care of Ceberano’s music business. Thanks to his industry contacts, Lee was eventually paired with Australian writer and producer Andrew Lowden.
The musical duo got each other. He helped her shape the sounds floating around in her head, craft those notebook lyrics into proper songs and better understand how to use
her voice as a singer. “He treated me like I was completely my own artist from the minute I met him,” Lee, now 20, says of Lowden.
“And he inspired me to really become a singer, to get brave. As we recorded each new song, I got a little bit more confident in singing.”
With an album’s worth of songs, including her debut single ‘I Realised You Lied When You Said I Was No One’, Lee decided to tackle the stage fright by fronting a couple of showcase gigs last year at Melbourne’s Bakehouse Studios.
She invited her nearest and dearest along, including her boyfriend Lewis Langbroek-Lewis and his family.
Lee laughs as she notes that his mum, radio and TV personality Kate Langbroek, and Ceberano “used their witching powers to set us up, in a way. Kate Langbroek and Lewis have the same bond that Mum and I have.”
She adds of their relationship, which Langbroek publicly confirmed during her chat with the Stellar podcast Something To Talk About last September: “It’s something I never expected was going to happen. It did … and it’s been very, very nice.”
Record label staffers and music industry tastemakers were invited – and in attendance – at the second night’s showcase.
But the nerves that gripped Lee before her first show melted away the moment she stood centre stage under the lights and started to sing. “They were my songs.
I didn’t have to be anyone else, and no-one in that crowd was comparing me to Mum,” she recalls.
“They just wanted to hear what I had to say. It felt so easy, I just felt so comfortable being up there, delivering the songs the way I wanted to deliver them. And I knew: this is so totally what I want to do.”
As she and her father made the industry rounds, before ultimately deciding to release her music independently, an out-of-the-blue opportunity landed in their inbox.
Soon, Lee had signed a contract with Chadwick Models.
She reveals that body image was something she had struggled with as a teen, due to the unrealistic body and beauty standards imposed on young women who are “not tiny or not plus-sized”, telling Stellar that whether it was “my size, my shape, my boob size or whatever”, she didn’t feel like she fit in – or that anything really fitted her.
During the Covid lockdowns, she and Ceberano had developed a keen interest in the Instagram page of US model Paloma Elsesser, and when Elsesser featured on the cover of British Vogue last year, Lee finally felt seen.
“I never really thought modelling would be an option. Last year, Paloma was on the cover, and it was crazy because it was so familiar,” she explains.
“She looks what Mum and I look like. I haven’t experienced seeing a lot of people in the modelling industry that look like us right now. And I thought, well, f*ck that. I’m not going to sit around and wait for that to change. I want to be part of that.’”
Lee grew up raiding her mum’s wardrobe and make-up, and falling in love with fashion along the way. She dyed her hair pink and wore winged eyeliner to school. And then fashion broke up with her.
“I think one of the reasons I got so upset about my body when I was younger was because clothing wasn’t being made for people with curves and boobs and actual real body parts,” she says. So modelling can now be the vehicle she utilises to make up with fashion, a Trojan horse move to motivate the industry to cater for a variety of sizes and shapes.
“I love fashion and I want to wear it. Clothing should be made to fit you; it shouldn’t be the other way around, that your body needs to fit the clothing,” she reasons.
That same determination to shift the dial in her favour fuels Lee’s debut single.
A self-love anthem that veers wildly from dark electronica to an epic rock orchestral crescendo, it leaves little room for comparisons with Ceberano. “I totally want to have a go,” Lee says of her music career. “If I’m going to do it, I’m really going to do it. I need to be proud of my songs – and I’m excited about this one.”
Gypsy Lee’s single ‘I Realised You Lied When You Said I Was No One’ is out now. Visit gypsyleemusic.com
Originally published as Kate Ceberano and Kate Langbroek ‘used their witching powers’ to set up their children, who are now dating
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