INTERVIEW: Kate Ceberano on her upcoming Australian Made tour: "This is where we come from, this is the history of Australian music and I want to tell all of those stories and put it back on the map.”
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Ian Laidlaw
Published: 16 April 2025
The words ‘legend’ and ‘icon’ get thrown around with seemingly indiscriminate ease in the music industry, but when it comes to Kate Ceberano, they really are the only two words that come anywhere close to describing her impact on the Australian pop music scene.
First bursting onto the scene in 1984 fronting the Melbourne band I’m Talking, their debut single ‘Trust Me’ hit the top 10 in Australia and Ceberano quickly became one of the most magnetic personalities in Australian pop. With a fresh, European funk-disco-electro-synth sound not made by any other Australian artists at the time, Ceberano and I’m Talking’s success would become a seminal moment in Australian pop.
After four more hit singles and a top 20 album, I’m Talking broke up and Ceberano launched a solo career in 1989 with the classic single ‘Bedroom Eyes’ becoming a massive hit, followed by the album Brave which peaked at number 2 in Australia, spawned a further four hit songs and earned her two ARIA Awards from three nominations. And she has never looked back.
40 years, 30 albums, 20 ARIA nominations and 11 platinum albums later - to name just a few of her accolades - Ceberano is now celebrating her incredible career with her Australian Made tour, which will visit 22 mainly regional towns across Australia throughout June and July.
Named after the groundbreaking Australian Made 1986-1987 concert series Ceberano was a part of - the first ever touring festival to feature all Australian acts - this tour will see Ceberano perform some of her biggest hits as well as other iconic Australian songs that have inspired and informed her own career, from I’m Talking through to Jimmy Barnes, Divinyls, Silverchair and Sia amongst others.
“It’s so important for me to express my culture, my Australia, in song,” Ceberano says. “This is a love letter to the artists, bands, audiences and storytellers who I’ve travelled with over this vast continent for four decades, a deep dive into what makes ME an Australian artist: my hungry heart holding their words to my chest, making them the soundtrack to my life.”
Not just one of Australia’s most successful and beloved artists, Ceberano is also one of its most versatile and talented. While consistently proving she is a pop genius, she has also successfully and authentically segued into multiple other genres, including jazz, blues, rock, musicals, orchestral and even lullabies. And on top of it all is that magical, incredible, powerful, gentle voice that can convey every emotion you can ever think of with a devastatingly precise nuance.
With 40 years of brilliance under her belt, Australian Made will be a joyous celebration of one of Australia’s greatest musical treasures and a nostalgic look at some of the finest moments in Australia’s music history. We recently sat down with Ceberano to talk more about what she has in store for the shows.
Hi, Kate. I have to say to begin with, the press image for this tour of you in that red kimono is just such a beautiful shot. I love it, it is everything!
I love everything! I’ll have everything, everything's awesome! That's my kimono, I make kimonos.
I now kind of need one of your kimonos
You kinda do!
You have announced your Australian Made Australian tour, and I was so excited to see this. You've had a gargantuan career that navigates the visual and the physical and the sonic world of art and storytelling, and this tour appears to be a collection of pretty much most of those. First off, what was your motive for this tour when the idea was germinating and you were deciding what to do?
I was on tour with Jon Stevens, and we always look to each other to work out how each artist is surviving, and especially in an age where the tools are being crafted by the artists, and then they are being facilitated by agents and promoters all around the country, which is kind of opposite to the way it's been for a very, very long time. Usually the “innovators’, or apparent “innovators“ - and I put apparent in parentheses - are the promoters who get a great idea, and then they come to the artist, but when you're an artist, that's actually not the way it works best. The artists themselves needs to see themselves in the space before they get there, and you need to craft that feeling, you need to craft the relationship you're going to start with with an audience. You want to tell them a story and hopefully deliver them something, an experience, that they feel they haven't seen before from you or anyone else.
Something I'm a little bit allergic to is simply being an artist doing other people's material. I love writing my own work, I love crafting my own art, but I realised people's memories are their memories, you can't alter or go back and change the simple fact that a person's memories are often accompanied by a song and when you hit the song, a person gets some energy restored to them from when they were there. They feel bolder, they feel younger, they feel more emotional about their lives and their relationship to the people around them. I was watching the audience really carefully on the Superstars Live tour with Jon Stevens and I went, holy fuck, we have to go out there and do this for people right now, because there's so much that's distracting them from their own story and their own truth, and the musicians need to remind them who they've been.
That's such a beautiful way to look at it, and you're so right, it like you need a cry and you know you’ve only got five minutes, so you put on a song.
Yes, of course you do! That scene is the service of the arts, right? You need to get an injection of humanity. You go and discover what it is that remind yourself that you are an organism which requires contact, requires communion with others, to actually fire, to spark. If you're simply on an island all alone and there's only you, I'm not certain that's living the fullness of your whole life, your whole existence. Your whole existence includes having fights with people. It includes having tears, it includes feeling scared and feeling unsure. It also includes courage and great strength of character, and all of these songs we the artists, are trying to give you without words.
I love that, you're so absolutely right. And it goes back to the idea that you're giving the thing that people are craving and almost demanding in the modern world, that their artists be on social media and tell them things all the time as it's happening, and guide their political choices and all these things that was never necessarily part of the job. But really, all they're asking for is the story behind the song.
Yes, they just want their energy restored. I don't like to discuss things of which I'm not expert, I steer clear of getting into areas that I'm not a professional for. But I am a professional entertainer, and I am a professional artist in that I make a living out of what I do. It doesn't mean I'm any better than anyone else, it just happens to be I chose this craft for my survival. It's all about just how we survive, right? And when you say people need this, well, they do -they don't know they need it until they have it.
I watched people, at my invitation, and I asked them to just lay their heads back for a minute on the chair, don't look at me, just evoke the memory of where you were when you heard the song - this is as much as therapy for you as it is for me. Let's just don those clothes of our youth when our skin felt tighter and our muscles felt leaner and we had hearts and bellies full of hope and optimism, and let's just bring that in the room.
I love this so much. I'm just seeing a room full of people closing their eyes and trying to sing along with you to ‘Bedroom Eyes’!
I know! We intentionally kept this tour lean, the two artists that I'm taking with me have been selected for two reasons, one they weren't born at the time of [the original] Australian Made, and so the lore of what Australian music felt like before social media will be in this story and it's for them to learn and keep the legacy of it. And the other thing is, they're fucking amazing players! Kathleen Halloran is, I think, probably one of the most exciting new electric guitarists in the country. She's been fettered by all the blues players all around and kind of dubbed the next in line to be rock and roll royalty. She's only just early 30s, and and she'll be opening up the show, she does a set of her own originals. And Darren Harts [who performs as Harts] is this kind of genius guitarist who Prince picked out of a pile of millions and said, ‘You're it’ and he worked under Prince's tutelage for a bit. He's also become a filmmaker, and he's going to be documenting a lot of this on the road as well as playing. And then I'm in the middle, I've got a key station and a drum station and we all kind of swap instruments all night and we just pull out this history book.
You're giving back to the audience, and you mentioned you didn't want to sing anyone else's songs, but then you had this realisation of what that does for people. Because of that, I imagine that for you, going on this tour, is going to need a very different head space to any of your previous tours?.
Yeah, absolutely, it is already. I'm daunted by the idea. Do you know when you've been and done things as a kid, and then you just drive out of that lane and go, I hope I never go back to that place? At this age, I actually love going back in there. It’s a perverse kind of ‘Hey, let's go back there!’ When I was a 14 year old, I was watching Nick Cave in his seminal moments and it was just like literally watching a wild man and a music cannibal, and now you come into a world where he's this auteur of high fashion and and literature. And then being between Renee Geyer and Chrissy Amphlett was like being in the middle of a cat fight. When I began there was nothing about the industry that was insulating or comforting. It had teeth, it was a bruising match of mine is bigger than yours. And this is where we come from, this is the history of Australian music. We can't whitewash how we are and who we were, and I want to tell all of those stories and put it back in and on the map that this is the way we were created. We come from this culture of breaking through cultural and multicultural boundaries and reclaiming this energy of, this is what I'm made from, I am Australian made.
This is really interesting because, of course, there's this pride that goes around Australia, weirdly, hand in hand with the tall poppy syndrome, of we're cas, no one fights here, we're super cool, she'll be right. It's all bullshit, but this story isn't told. Do you feel that comes from that place of they just feel they need to shout and fight so much louder here, because we are logistically so far away, and also so few? That to be heard, to break the boundaries of this country, you were almost deliberately pitted against each other.
Oh most definitely, we were a cock fight. And I don't use that term without intention. It was mostly blokes with guitars. We were very annoying and we were swatted away: ‘would you just fuck off, get out my face, you’re too optimistic, too cute, too young’. In reference to what you're alluding to is that we shouldn't be smothering our history with some sort of vanilla icing. We are a young country, and we're trying to make sense of how our immigrants and all of us together have created this sound of Australia. It only makes sense when you actually sing the songs. We could sit and try to explain it until we're fucking blue in the face, as many authors do, but Paul Kelly will sing it best. Nick Cave will sing it best. Or Megan Washington, I've been listening to her a lot lately, and there's a lot of depth and space in her that is actually like the countryside itself. You can feel it. You can't name exactly what it's doing to you, but, you know it's all a part of being Australian.
I think that's really beautiful, and maybe there's a hesitance to name it, because we still live in this kind of very new, very timid mindset - what are we, what do we stand for? Also, our history is dark, but where do we create the beauty? We can't just keep talking about the landscapes.
I know, exactly! It's the artist's role to put the pointy bits back in all the soft bits and poke around a bit. So I'm going to let the songs do that, and they were the things that I used. I built a suit of armour out of all the songs I was listening to at the time, from as early as the 70s, to be honest. And then as I met my heroes, I started to see the cracks amongst their armour, but the songs themselves were their protection.
Making art is a way to build yourself bigger than you perhaps were born. If I’m in a room when I'm feeling troubled or I don't know my position in space, I always go to a higher space, and that higher space in a room has always been the stage for me. And when I'm up there and I have a bit of space to myself, I can look around and work out how I want to interact with others, rather than just being taken by the group, by the mass thought on this or that. I can just sit from that place up and above it all, and just work out where I want to be in it. So these songs, they're my coat of arms, my suit of armour, my face mask.
That's so good. Most of us just can't sing them and create them to your ability. But we still have them!
That doesn't matter, you are singing them. You're living them. The minute I sing it, your memories come to view, and suddenly you're in the place again and your energy was created by you in that moment. I remember sitting in a room with The Reels playing ‘Quasimodo's Dream’, and it was a song that was sort of the sound of my heart at the time, and every time I’d go to see their gig, there was this guy, I didn’t even know his name, and we would find each other and pash! At every Reels concert! Like some weird little magnetic moment where we just went there to find each other, and we'd never see each other again until the next gig. Isn't that the cutest story in the world?!
I love that so much, and it's also so much better that there was never anything else, but just, ‘well, there he is’!
I wonder where he is now! That’s the way I see ourselves. You connect with a kiss, and suddenly your feet lift off the floor, and there you are in amongst the disco ball.
Kate Ceberano Australian Made Tour 2025
6 June - Yuin Theatre, Batemans Bay, NSW
7 June - Anita’s Theatre, Thirroul, NSW
8 June - Theatre Centre, Canberra, ACT
12 June - Art House, Wyong, NSW
13 June - RSL, Sawtell, NSW
14 June - Twin Towns, Tweed Heads, NSW
26 June - Civic Centre, Cowra, NSW
27 June - Alpine MDF Theatre, Wangaratta, VIC
28 June- Entertainment Centre, Albury, VIC
29 June - Arts Centre, Frankston, VIC
3 July - Astor Theatre, Perth, WA
5 July - Entertainment Centre Princess Theatre, Albany, WA
6 July - HEART Theatre, Margaret River, WA
10 July - Karralyka Centre, Ringwood, VIC
11 July - Costa Hall, Geelong, VIC
12 July - Ulumbarra, Bendigo, VIC
17 July - The Round, Nunawading, VIC
18 July - The Wedge, Sale, VIC
19 July - Her Majesty’s Theatre, Ballarat, VIC
24 July - Tanks, Cairns, QLD
26 July - Entertainment Centre, Darwin, NT
21-23 August – Mundi Mundi Bash, Broken Hill, NSW
