Kate Ceberano is sitting at home in Melbourne’s Elsternwick, bubbly and vivacious, wearing an army-green Husk coat and a bright, elated smile. Any wonder, given the news that arrived earlier this year, which she’s still processing: namely, her ascension to the ARIA Hall of Fame. Her induction takes place next week, and will place her in a once-unfathomable pantheon, alongside everyone from AC/DC, You Am I and Crowded House, to Olivia Newton-John, Archie Roach and Jimmy Barnes.
Big names, heady company – yes – so it would be easy to imagine she views the honour as a lofty dream come true. But talk to Kate Ceberano for any length of time – as I’ve done over the years – and you understand that self-confidence is rarely in short supply. I can’t help but notice right now, for instance, that she’s sitting in front of an acrylic Melbourne streetscape painted by Peter Robertson, while also knowing there’s another Robertson canvas she’s quite fond of, too: the full-body nude the artist did of Ceberano to win the Packing Room Prize at the 1994 Archibalds, a statuesque portrait with almost defiant nakedness.
She isn’t shy, either as a model or in analysing her career, which is what we’re here to talk about.
“I am the pure definition of what an artist is,” Ceberano says, looking me straight in the eye. “I’m universally flawed. I write from places where I’ve needed to self-heal. If I listen to any of my albums, I’m saying pretty much the same thing, which is, ‘Yes, it’s all f—ed up, but we have to keep up to stay in the game.’ ”
Staying in the game is what she’s done for more than four decades now, an unbroken stretch of working and striving that flashed before her eyes when she learnt it was about to be recognised on a national stage alongside Gurrumul, Jenny Morris, Spiderbait, The Living End, and Vika and Linda Bull.
Where did her mind go? It went back to rehearsing in a Nunawading garage with Expozay at 15. It went to winning Melbourne’s Battle of the Bands with them at 16. To joining the post-modern, genre-defying band I’m Talking in 1984. To every stop on the solo career she chased all over the world since then, in a discography traversing pop, jazz, soul and rock.
She’s still at it, too. Still indefatigable. Even now, at 59, Ceberano remains one of the hardest-working women in music, touring her Australian Made show in which she belts out a 50/50 mix of her own hits and various Oz classics, from the Models to the Divinyls. Whether she’s playing a regional gig or hosting a conference in Tasmania (as she was last week), she prides herself on bringing an almost guttural commitment to every show, drenching them in the same drive that powered her youth.
“I have lived across four decades of creating music, but I don’t think I’ve always nailed what I was shooting for,” Ceberano says. “Thankfully, I have been given time and grace to keep going, and understand what my position is on the field.”
That didn’t come easy, either. Crossing genres – from post-disco to pop, then pivoting to jazz – meant she was often overlooked or dismissed in her younger years. But she wears those battle scars proudly, almost as badges of honour – proof of all the steps taken on a very weathered path. Ceberano won her first ARIA Award as Female Artist of the Year in 1989. Thirty-seven years later, her Hall of Fame induction, she notes, is a much-needed moment to make peace with the journey.
“I am chuffed to be inducted, seriously thrilled – and it’s about time,” she says. “But I don’t think this could have happened sooner.”
She had to go through it all first, from the flamboyant club scene of Melbourne in the 1980s, to time in the UK and then the US, just to give her career a chance. Only the other day she was telling her husband, Lee Rogers – a filmmaker, and now her manager – how often her wins can be traced back to the multitude of losses that came before.
“You’ve been fuelled [by] rising above adversity for so long in different ways, and punching up and out of it,” she says. “Then somebody gives you an award like this, makes you feel all the emotions. Thank god I knew I was being inducted before the event, or else I’d be a mess on that stage.”
Finding herself, and her musical identity and style, wasn’t simple. In the 1980s, when Kylie Minogue was owning the girl-next-door persona, Ceberano was pitched as Australia’s Madonna, leaning into new wave and post-modernism. That confidence saw her take off for London, where in 1987 she met Malcolm McLaren, the famed promoter of everyone from Adam and the Ants to the Sex Pistols, for what Ceberano hoped would be a collaboration for the ages.
She recalls being both naïve and excited to meet him. Their connection was made possible by her then manager and friend Ken West who, before he started the Big Day Out in 1992, had toured the likes of New Order. (Ceberano even lived on his couch for a while.) “Ken was like the David Lynch of modern pop music,” she says. “He was like a happy Buddha and we were chasing something big.”
Ceberano wasn’t quite the safety-pins-and-torn-tartan image of the punk surge at the time, but she found her feet and voice in that space anyway, along with a love for rebel designer Vivienne Westwood. Style was always important. The first time I ever saw Ceberano she was performing on Countdown, back in 1984. I was a child at the time, and shocked – in a -delighted way – to see a girl on TV with short hair; she was punk in my eyes. But it was nothing compared to the raw Mohican cut she got in London.
“But me getting a Mohican in London was pretty passé to someone like Malcolm,” she notes. Ceberano suspects she came across to McLaren as a carbon copy of Bow Wow Wow lead singer Annabella Lwin, and therefore did nothing to spark his interest. As she recalls, “He said these really awful words about me, which are perfectly true, and he had every right to say. He said, ‘I’ve already had you.’ I asked him, ‘What could I be – or do?’ He said I wasn’t needed, but that I could do the background vocals on his Madame Butterfly album. I was just happy to be there.”
Nothing concrete ever materialised from that -encounter, even though she laid down some vocals, but Ceberano stitched herself into the very fabric of Australian music anyway. She was eventually on the same playing bills, after all, as iconic peers who have since departed, from Renée Geyer to Chrissy Amphlett and Michael Hutchence, to name just a few.
“I’m only just starting to understand my exact meaning to the Australian DNA and the Australian music industry,” Ceberano says. The stats are helpful. Ceberano has 31 albums under her belt – half of which made the top 10 on the ARIA charts – and released 57 singles, including Bedroom Eyes in 1989. She’s played more than 6000 shows – and counting – and feels most free when she’s on the road.
She is now in the studio recording a new track with Roscoe James Irwin, who produced her My Life is a Symphony album in 2023. It will be her first new song since early 2021 when she released the Sweet Inspiration album, featuring two original tracks that she wrote: the title track and the single Hold On.
“I put the tools down and never picked them up again after we made Sweet Inspiration,” she says of the creative lull. “Something felled me.”
The pandemic was a factor, but she also began doing other things, like working with her daughter Gypsy, as well as emerging blues singer-songwriter Kathleen Halloran – who joined Ceberano’s touring band. It strikes me that for someone who dropped out of school at 14, Ceberano was determined to make her career work one way or another.
“The younger me was a zeppelin,” she recalls. “I was once inflated and airborne. I stayed there completely impervious to reality for perhaps a good 15 years. That zeppelin did not come down until I had some pretty major losses with record labels. I’ve been signed and dropped by pretty much every major label in the world for different reasons – and it’s to do with the fact that I was a bit sniffy.”
By “sniffy”, she means she didn’t want to sing their material, but write and perform her own. Some labels didn’t want to invest in that. “I did question if I put myself far too forward. Did I ruin everything?” she asks. “I had to find some sort of humility in among this, but I don’t even know if I’ve found that yet. I’m confused sometimes by the humility. The truth is, I wanted world domination.”
She’s led an interesting life so far, existing within bands and as a solo artist. She’s been a TV judge (X-Factor), late-night talk-show host (Kate Ceberano & Friends), reality star, travel presenter, festival director and Archibald Prize model (three times).
I’ve kept tabs on her and connected often. A mate, the late photographer Pierre Baroni, was an art director at Mushroom Records and worked with her on video clips and album art. We’ve crossed paths at David Bromley art shows, met through mutuals at parties in Toorak and only recently hung out at a Kew mansion, celebrating the collection launch of our shared fashion designer friend Estelle Michaelides, who is making her dress for the ARIAs induction through her Saint Stella M label.
Throughout it all, Ceberano has seemed as she seems now: comfortable in her own skin. But not without difficulty. “I’ve had to grow up in front of people and traverse different decades of a life in music, from ingénue to being a parent to a television head,” she says. “I’ve arrived at the humanness of music: that music isn’t the answer to everything, but it’s the sip of air when you’re speechless with trauma, the gentle hug when you’ve been abandoned by someone you thought you knew better. Music holds you, in ways, when life might overwhelm you.”
Nowadays, she’s leaning into other more mindful pursuits, such as painting, or mentoring Halloran, who she dubs as a potent mix of Joan Armatrading and Chrissie Hynde (with a peppering of Jimi Hendrix) – and whose solo debut album recently hit No. 2 on the ARIA charts. And when her husband Rogers is off surfing, Ceberano uses the time to embroider in her studio – a chance to pause and embrace the here and now.
As her daughter Gypsy, now 22, embarks on her own artistic journey, Ceberano is also mindful of the message of the steps she’s taken before her. “There is only one thing in my life I would like to rectify with my younger self, and that is I would like to have had a voice that said, ‘Excuse me – no, I think I’m going to leave the business table now, because you’re a cock,’ ” she says, nodding. “To have stood up and said, ‘This isn’t actually what I want.’ Well, sometimes I didn’t do that, and if I could change one thing, it would be that. To have stood up for myself, and said what I wanted to say.”
The ARIA Hall of Fame induction takes place at Carriageworks in Sydney on Thursday, June 11.
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