High Steaks: Why Kate Ceberano has a tornado in her belly
Kate Ceberano wants to rock on for the rest of her life, and hopes to fulfil a special dream she had at just 14.
NSW
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When Kate Ceberano was pregnant with her only child Gypsy, something “really weird” happened to her larynx.
After surgery to repair a small tear, she wasn’t allowed to speak for six weeks and doctors warned her voice may never be the same again.
For the multi-award-winning artist with the jaw-dropping vocals – who had dreamed from age of 14 to one day perform at Carnegie Hall – the news should have been crushing.
Instead, Ceberano looked down at her growing belly and thought: “You know what? It doesn’t matter. I’m good with that, whatever happens.”
It’s that appreciation for every single one of life’s gifts – and the voice of Gypsy in her ear keeping her “real and authentic” along the way – that has made Ceberano one of the most enduring and humble Australian artists of all time.
As she “heads towards 60” and prepares for her upcoming Australian Made Tour, she has a stirring in her belly of a different kind – a “tornado” if you will.
“I still have that Carnegie Hall dream. I want to perform there,” she says.
“In fact, if I make it to the US, this time round I’ll likely stay a while. I want to take Australia to the world and I want to take iconic Australian brands and artists with me.”
Ceberano says she has earned her iconic status.
“I am iconic to Australia. I’m not apologetic for that. So how about we start applauding the people that are really representing this brilliant country that has given me so much.
“I want to represent middle aged women. I want to be a 60-plus-year-old woman on stage like Tina Turner, or Etta James, or Billie Holiday, and saying, ‘This is what I did my whole life. It’s what I plan to do for the rest of it’.”
Ceberanos’ call to arms is as broad as her imagination and collaborations can take her.
“Let’s put our culture back on the plate,” she says.
“Just this week I have approached RM Williams, Qantas, Vegemite. Whether it’s about sponsoring a tour or sharing promotional opportunities over there, let’s all work together. I would love influential Australians to consider becoming a patron. Our opportunities are endless.”
First though she will share her “love letter to the artists, bands, audiences and storytellers who I’ve travelled with over this vast continent for four decades” with gigs across the country, ending with the Mundi Mundi Bash.
“This tour is sort of like an upside down tornado,” she explains.
“We go regional and then we go into the inner city, where I’m normally performing, then big cities and big cultural centres, like opera houses, and then my end goal is the dream that I had when I was 14. Carnegie Hall, I need to make it happen, and that’s what I want to do. This is my tornado.”
Ceberano was perfectly positioned in the ’80s to make her dream her reality. But family came first.
“When I had the highest selling single of the year, Bedroom Eyes, they invited me to go to Monaco to celebrate the World Music Awards,” she said.
“At the concert on opening night was Prince, Bob Geldof, Grace Jones, myself … I was probably 20 and I woke up in my hotel in Monaco and did that Christian Dior ad for the French perfume, where all of them are opening the balcony of that place … and I opened the shutters after 40 hours of travelling, and I jumped up and down on my bed with nothing on going, ‘I f--king made it, I f--king made it’.
“That actually was the greatest moment of my life. I had the chance to chase my dreams but, honestly, I was homesick and missed my grandmother. I didn’t want to leave the country without having spent the rest of her life with her. I didn’t want to miss that. I just couldn’t do it.”
Grandma was instrumental in young Kate’s life, practically raising her while her mum and dad worked.
“I came from a very long line of distinguished martial artists but I always wanted to be a dancer,” she said.
“Expression and creativity is a very watchable and beautiful thing, and it hurts no one. So I went, ‘That’s it. I’m gonna be a dancer’. I knew that was where I was going to get my power. And then that just evolved into singing. I guess in the ’60s and the ’70s, being a singer in a band was kind of relegated to being at the circus. There’s nothing kind of professional about it.
“You didn’t have record companies putting all this money behind you. If you were in a band, you were kind of like a bunch of mates who drank together, mostly, and sang together. There lies the early starts of ACDC, Cold Chisel or Australian Crawl. But dance was like something perfect to me.”
Ceberano was well established in the music industry when Kylie Minogue popped up with her hit song I Should Be So Lucky.
“Kylie’s trajectory was built on many different reasons. There was a shift in the mentality of Australian music at that time,” Kate recalls.
“It was a time when Australian music was dirty … It’s like, Mad Max, you’re in a big truck out, pushing your way through at pubs and gigs, and then suddenly we turned your corner, and pop music came up.
“And it was like, suddenly, with the yellow brick road, and all of the poppies came out in the fields, all the rock and roll culture and we were like ‘What the f--k are we looking at here?’ And Michael Gudinski, to his credit. He’s the one who said, ‘That’s the future mate’. He was literally the maverick of all mavericks. He said, ‘You want to put your bucks somewhere? Put your bucks on Kylie’.”
Ceberano, like many of her peers, was miffed with Minogue’s instant success.
“I was best friends with the writer who coined the phrase ‘Singing budgie’ … and if I look back now, we were all doing the classic Australian thing, which was to tear down.
“But to put it in context, my other peers were Renee Geyer and Chrissie Amphlett, and they were 15 years older, and they were singing with Chaka Khan and Tom Jones and everyone was like ‘can this girl even sing?’. Someone said to me ‘don’t buy into that – if you want to be in this business for a long time you’re going to need to stick together’.”
Ceberano says, looking back, she is embarrassed about “following the pack”.
“Sometimes you need to kill off other versions of who you’ve been and then start rebranding and be an entirely new version of you?
“It’s called humility, and it’s also called maturity. How many times in one lifetime will you need to look at yourself and go, ‘hey, chill out girl, change your mind’.”
Today, Ceberano is “fearless on stage”.
“I am completely free. The stage is my safe space. It is the quietest place in the room when the lights are off, almost the lights kind of cradle you.
“They hug you in a sort of false sense of isolation, and you’re in this cuddle of light. And pretty much it’s your whole existence is up to your imagination in that moment.
“I find a purity and a Zen in that space. When life is messy or a chaotic, noisy place, the stage is almost like a vacuum. It’s without noise, it’s without sounding, until you make the noise.”
Kate’s Australian Made tour runs across regional Australia in June and July; tickets at www.kateceberano.com. Tickets for Mundi Mundi Bash, in August, at www.mundimundibash.com.au
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Originally published as High Steaks: Why Kate Ceberano has a tornado in her belly
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