Kate Ceberano: ‘Michael Hutchence climbed on my balcony one night … and stayed for breakfast’

Kate Ceberano has been one of Australia’s foremost singing talents for the better part of four decades. This week she announced her Australian Made tour – 22 concerts around Australia, starting in June.

Kate Ceberano is going back on the road. “I’m like the last of the Mohicans.”Credit:

Fitz: Kate, let’s start with congratulations on your multi-faceted career across so many music genres, with hit singles, platinum records, musicals and TV shows, together with acting and producing ... the whole enchilada.

Kate: [Laughing] Thank you!

Fitz: What interests me about your announcement this week of your Australian Made tour is the format of mixing your songs with storytelling from your career about many of the other artists you’ve worked with over that time. I saw Bruce Springsteen do that in New York just before COVID-19 hit, five years ago, mixing his songs and stories in a theatre on Broadway holding just 2000 of us, and it was fantastic. Was it that kind of format that was your inspiration?

KC: Yes, exactly that! I’m like the last of the Mohicans, Peter. There was a six-capital tour I was part of when I was a little girl that was just extraordinary: the original Australian Made tour of 1986-87, with Jimmy Barnes, INXS, the Divinyls, the Saints and others – I mean, the whole panoply of Australian music. And of that whole lot it’s just Jimmy, Sean [Kelly] and I who are the last frontmen left standing. So, the idea of my coming tour is to mix my music with stories of them and other greats I’ve worked with and engage with the audience so I can take requests and play the greats’ songs, too.

Fitz: The mind boggles: you, so young, in the middle of that lot, in those wild times? I note your father was a karate champion. Was he inclined to play the protector back then, and hover backstage?

“I want a piece of whatever she’s having”. The Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett on stage at Homebake in 2007.Credit: Domino Postiglione

KC: No, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Australian rock had leg hair and teeth – it wasn’t a polite place – and I wanted to be amongst it! I was out there. Nothing would have stopped me. I was a tearaway. I was completely and utterly intoxicated by music and the whole scene. And no man could have kept me from it.

Fitz: OK, so let’s get into it. You’ll be familiar with Paul Kelly’s wonderful autobiography How to Make Gravy, where basically he divides his life up from A to Z. Could I throw a few letters at you, to prompt just enough anecdotes about the greats you’ve worked with that we go, “Geez, she’s got some great war stories”, without going so far that we reckon we don’t have to turn up to the concert because we’ve heard them all?

KC: Sure.

Fitz: OK, A is for Amphlett, as in Chrissy Amphlett, the late, great, wild one of the mighty Divinyls. You were a young woman making your way in the singing world and seeing this legend closely, at her height. Did you look at her and go, “I’m not sure what I’m doing, I’m not sure where I’m going, but I’ll tell you what: I want a piece of whatever she’s having”?

KC: Yes! As a 16-year-old I stood in the wings on an all-women’s bill that started with myself, and then it was the Divinyls, Renee Geyer and Colleen Hewett. And watching Chrissy was mesmerising. It was like watching a predator, sleek and dangerous, who was so intoxicatingly herself that I just practised being her. And she called me on it. She said, “Would you just f--- off and get your own vibe? Get off me. Go make your own self. F--- off, you little nerd!”

“There was a time when the guy [Jimmy Barnes] wasn’t quite as family-friendly as the always-smiling bloke we see now.”Credit: Jessica Hromas

Fitz: “Oh, and welcome to rock’n’roll!” All right, I’m in. Put me down for a ticket. But here you are, a neophyte young woman in the middle of the wild excesses of 1980s rock’n’roll. Did the older women look after you, protect you, tell any of the male predators to back the hell off?

KC: No, darling! There was none of that kind of going on. It was much more, “Here’s another one! Let’s throw this kid in the creek and see if she can swim or drown.”

Fitz: B is for Barnesy. Jimmy’s got to be the hardest-working bastard in Australia. Everywhere I go on book tours, they say, “You should have been here last week. Jimmy Barnes was here last week and he was signing many more books than you!” And that’s just his books, let alone his concerts …

KC: Well, I just want to say, I need to take Jimmy back to when he was a legend for how menacing he was. There was a time when the guy wasn’t quite as family-friendly as the always-smiling bloke we see now. That wasn’t the Jimmy I was raised around, right? I’m just gonna say that much. I need to give him back his teeth because back then, as I said, Australian rock’n’roll had hairy legs and sharp teeth and he was a huge part of that. I remember seeing him tear apart an entire studio at the Countdown awards in front of 12,000 people in Sydney. He just pulled the set to pieces with his bare hands. You could argue that it was all this great theatre, but at the same time I just really think artists were immersed in the act of art. They weren’t so bothered by how they looked at the time that they were “arting”. They just “arted”.

John Farnham and Kate Ceberano perform in Jesus Christ Superstar in Melbourne in 1992.Credit: The Age Photographic

Fitz: F is obvious. We, the people, think John Farnham has to be the nicest bloke that ever lived. You’ve seen him up close, on tour, backstage. There’s got to be some warts on the back of that guy’s head, surely? Or sometimes he doesn’t change his socks? You must have seen him snarl at someone once or twice?

KC: I think he’s an enigmatic man, even to himself. I reckon he looks in the mirror every morning and scratches his head, going, like, “Who is Johnny Farnham?” I think he’s tried so hard to be loved by so many different people. And I’ve suffered from this myself in my life. In the end, you don’t know your arse from your face because you want so much to be everything for everyone. But I’ve never met a more generous man. He should have been king, right? Because the amount of hands he’s held, the number of faces he’s stroked, the amount of grey hair that he’s patted. When we did Jesus Christ Superstar, hundreds of people would stay behind after every show and he would personally either talk to, or smile [at], or sign an autograph [for them].

Fitz: What about the late Michael Hutchence?

KC: He was very romantic, in the traditional sense of the word. He could turn you on. He kind of turned everyone on, and when you were around him it was hard to get turned off. You felt like he only had eyes for you. He was Don Juan, he was Lord Byron, he was Plato, he was all the romantics in one. He was every one of them, and you loved him for it.

Michael Hutchence? “I woke up … to find him asleep on my balcony.”Credit:

Fitz: Look, I’m keenly aware that I could be straying into something that is none of my readers’ damn business, those nosy parkers, but … did he make romance with you?

KC: [Laughs] After one really big night, after the [1986] Countdown awards where he was judged the “king of pop” and I was the “queen of pop”, I woke up in my room at the Cosmopolitan Hotel [in St Kilda] to find him asleep on my balcony. He’d climbed up in the night.

Fitz: And did you open the door?

KC: I certainly did! And we had breakfast together. I’ll say no more …

Fitz: L is for your husband, Lee [Rogers]. I’m told from an excellent source that you used to have a poster of him from Dolly magazine on your bedroom wall. Is that right?

KC: Yes, that’s pretty much the shape of it!

Fitz: That must be a postwar record for romance, to have the image of a man up on your bedroom wall and then be happily together for the next 30 years and counting?

Ceberano with husband Lee Rogers at the 2023 State Memorial Service for the late Olivia Newton-John in Melbourne.Credit: Getty Images

KC: [Laughing] Yes. But you also evolve to understand that what you saw on the poster – the lovely face and the charming smile – was just the advertising, whereas what is special is all the stuff you get to know for real.

Fitz: MMM is for Mad Molly Meldrum.

KC: He was the ringmaster. He knew that rock’n’roll was like a wild circus of exotic animals. And all of us had our power feathers and our frocks and tinsels and little pretty things. He was enamoured by it and hosted the show like a great audience member. Rather than trying to explain to you why you are you, he would just simply open the floor and say, “tell us about yourself”, so we could strut our stuff. You could be anything you chose to be. And he’d just sit in wonder and at the end he’d look at the crowd and say, “Well, there you go!”

Fitz: Do yourself a favour, Kate. You’re saying that Molly was more a superfan than an impresario, and that’s why he worked?

KC: Yes, absolutely right.

Fitz: As a bonus M, did you ever work with Marianne Faithfull, who died just a while ago?

KC: No, but I loved Marianne. My life is built on the power of women being people first, yes, and the best examples in my world are Marianne and Patti Smith – women who wouldn’t be rubbed out by the power of someone else’s glow, women who just endured. That’s something that you try to evolve through and into as you get older. And if you can sustain yourself long enough in any profession I think you do get a little bit of that. You get at least self-respect for having stayed in the game so long.

Fitz: Well, for staying in the game, no-one beats Marcia Hines, who also never looks any older. I asked her about it and she said, “Baby, black don’t crack” …

KC: And she’s right. But I can also say, “Beige don’t age!”

Fitz: Let’s finish with the great man – my hero after Bob Dylan – Paul Kelly himself.

KC: I love Paul Kelly. He’s got such a place in our folkloric element of Australian music that he’s like Vegemite, isn’t he? And I’ve known Paul since I was about 15. One day, I actually snuck away during a recording session to ask him to write a song with me, and I sat in his lounge room and we pumped out about three songs in about two hours. It was almost too fast. I enjoyed it so much.

Fitz: I presume you added “flour, salt, a little red wine/And don’t forget a dollop of tomato sauce/For sweetness and that extra tang”?

KC: He was the sausage roll, I was the tomato sauce. But we all know common phrases like that, and somehow he just has the ability to put them into verse and immortalise them. My song Pash has been my best go so far and a great one for me to be able to colloquialise my love of Australia. And, let’s face it, all roads lead back to love. And Australian Made is made and stitched together as a quilt, made with love by Kate Ceberano. And really, all I want to do is bring back people’s memories to that moment when they were very proud to be Australian and themselves.

Fitz: Rah! Thank you. I’m looking forward, KC, to seeing you and the sunshine band on the road in June …

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist. Connect via Twitter.