Legendary Australian songstress Kate Ceberano is like a kid in a candy store.
And, she can’t wait to open the New Annual festival at Newcastle’s Civic Theatre on Friday 22 September.
The artist – who has garnered 11 platinum and eight gold albums, 10 Top 10 records, 15 Top 40 singles, three Countdown accolades and four ARIA Awards – will take to the stage to perform My Life Is A Symphony, kick-starting the 10-day extravaganza.
It’s a breathtaking celebration of her songwriting, featuring her most iconic songs Brave and Pash, and favourites reimagined amid the grandeur of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
“I’m the headline, which is about bloody time,” Ceberano laughed.
“These days I don’t yearn for awards and things like that because I don’t really need to know that I’ve come and gone.
“It’s all very nice, however it’s not what I live for.
“But, to be in a festival environment, to be in a large theatre like the Civic with The George Ellis Orchestra and to know that I’m bringing it to Newcastle is something really memorable.
“I probably won’t get to come back around and do this ever again, especially this kind of scale.
“So, it almost becomes a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.
“That’s good… and important to me.
“I’ve just done the first show at Hamer Hall with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
“And, I have never felt more empowered to know that I pretty much wrote the bulk of the material on stage.
“To be able to have the language of an orchestra play how I always dreamt the tracks could feel.
“I mean, I sit at the piano and I strike three chords and it sounds pretty basic, right?
“Then you go and find yourself 40 years later, the same songs, but they are re-orchestrated in a way that gives them this kind of breadth.
“Oh my God, it’s so emotional.
“Everyone in the audience, including myself, were just in tears… it’s beautiful.”
Ceberano’s been a force of nature from day one.
As a teen, she declined advances from UK pop stable Stock Aitken Waterman to cut her teeth instead in the rough and tumble of Melbourne’s live scene.
Her pop outfit Expozay — “Saturday Night Fever meets the Breakfast Club,” she recalls — tore up the sticky carpet of the Chevron with Divinyls.
So began a wide embrace of multiple musical genres that continues to this day.
First contact for many was Ceberano’s magnetic cameo as a scene-stealing backing singer on The Models’ No 1 smash Out Of Mind, Out of Sight circa 1985.
By that time, she was already singing for ARIA’s Breakthrough Act of 1986, I’m Talking.
The band’s platinum debut, Bear Witness, brought her jaw-dropping voice and irrepressible charisma to national attention via their three top 10 singles Trust Me, Do You Want To Be? and Holy Word.
It led to gigs as historic as Live Aid and Australian Made alongside INXS, Jimmy Barnes, Divinyls and the Saints.
I’m Talking took Ceberano on the road, including her first 36-date tour of the UK.
Her showstopping cover of Rose Royce’s Love Don’t Live Here Anymore was early warning of another string to her bow: an interpreter of exceptional taste and skill.
However, her maiden Countdown Award for Most Popular Female Performer foreshadowed her inevitable shift to the centre spotlight.
Recorded live, Kate Ceberano and Her Septet presaged the cool jazz crossover of the early ‘90s to sell platinum in 1987.
You’ve Always Got the Blues, made with Wendy Matthews for the ABC TV series Stringer, was another hit, marking her third platinum award and her first ARIA (from nine nominations) for Best Female Artist.
Brave, her debut solo pop record, was a landmark.
A skilled consolidation of her journey through dance, pop and soul, it sold triple platinum to become one of the smash albums of 1989.
Bedroom Eyes was the highest selling Australian single of the year, one of five from the album including her inaugural charting singles as a songwriter, That’s What I Call Love and the title hit Brave.
As if to reassert her mercurial nature, Ceberano followed it with a second jazz offering, Like Now.
In 1990, four MO Awards and two ARIAs — her second for Best Female Artist — sealed her status as a true cross-genre sensation.
From Sanctuary Cove with Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston and Peter Allen to the World Music Awards in Monaco with Prince, Sting and Grace Jones, the world would become her stage.
Nothing, however, had predicted the bona fide phenomenon of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Her starring role as Mary Magdalene opposite John Farnham elevated her to the highest echelon of musical performers.
The show played a staggering 80 arenas, while the ARIA-winning cast album was the biggest-seller of 1992, sitting at No 1 for 10 weeks.
As the ‘90s waned, Pash was yet another milestone, this time more personal.
The first album to bear Ceberano’s songwriting credit on every track, it gave her yet another hit and, with the classic title track, her biggest triumph since Bedroom Eyes.
The 2000s witnessed an evolving blossoming of her creative frontiers.
The 2004 arrival of her daughter, Gypsy, is naturally her proudest achievement.
Bigger than winning Dancing with the Stars, judging X-Factor, publishing (with Tom Gilling) her autobiography I’m Talking, or even that Order of Australia “for significant service to the performing arts, particularly music, and to charitable organisations” in 2016.
In the past dozen years, she’s made an album for mothers (Lullaby, with Nigel MacLean) and one for a Merry Christmas (with Ronan Keating).
Her endless thirst for collaboration has encompassed indie (Dallas et Kate, with Dallas Cosmas), atmospheric pop (The Dangerous Age, with Steve Kilbey and Sean Sennett) and two revered jazz records (Bittersweet with Mark Isham and the ARIA-winning Tryst with Paul Grabowsky).
Released in 2016, Kate’s Anthology featured 30 years of hits, rarities and duets with Farnham, Keating, Matthews, Paul Kelly and more spanning a staggering three CDs and 53 tracks.
Still, it couldn’t tell the whole story.
Her film and theatre roles going back to 1989.
Her ambassadorship for the National Breast Cancer Foundation.
Making history as the first woman in the Australian Songwriters Association Hall of Fame.
Her Ruby Award as artistic director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
Her burgeoning career as a highly sought-after and collectible painter, forged under the pressures of COVID lockdown.
“It’s amazing it has been 40 years,” Ceberano said.
“Sometimes, I can’t believe it.
“However, we blink and then suddenly life goes by.
“I think the pandemic put so much of a different spin on how long is a piece of string?
“Especially, with what we had to endure during the Victorian lockdown.
“So, two-and-a-half years seemed the longest period to just kind of wait and work out, oh my God, where are we going?
“But, I feel like such a grown-up now, performing with an orchestra.
“The material’s still very pop.
“I mean, there’s no question about it.
“However, the thing is, because of the combined intelligence of an orchestra, and Roscoe who did all the arrangements, he’s made it sound like my life in music.
“So, instead of it just simply being a pop song that comes and goes, it makes us think of the 80s.
“It’s the soundtrack to life… and, it’s anyone’s life who lived through those decades.
“When I was watching from the stage, what really moved me the most was I saw the members of the audience looking up into the sky at their own memories at that time, where they were and what they were doing.
“And, in the end, it sort of had almost very little to do with me, but more about them.
“I thought ‘oh, that’s probably the greatest thing you could ever wish to do as an artist’.”
Ceberano hopes it’s the same reaction in Newcastle in a couple of months.
“I am really looking forward to returning there,” she said.
“I’ve been coming up since I was 15, when I was with I’m Talking.
“So, I have witnessed it change, really change.
“And, I’ve seen Newcastle become a different city.
“I also saw that it went kind of quiet during and after COVID.
“But, I became a part of its rebuild when Brian Lizotte (from Lizotte’s) handed me a lifeline when we were stuck in Victoria.
“He said: ‘Look, come and play a few shows up and around here… and we’ll bring you back to life’.
“I, literally, the first day I got out of hotel quarantine, I drove to Newcastle and did a gig.
“When I opened my mouth to sing, I burst into tears.
“It was pretty intense.
“So, Newcastle means a lot to me.
“It has such a cool culture for ‘live’ music.”
The past 12 months have resulted in Ceberano’s stocks as a live performer reach an all-time high.
Her prime-time main stage and headlining spots on such esteemed festivals as Bluesfest in Byron Bay, the National Folk Festival in Canberra, the Big Red Bash and Mundi Mundi Bash have drawn a level of audience affection and participation reserved for the nation’s most iconic artists.
And, what does she put her longevity down to?
“You’ve got stay curious,” she told the Newcastle Weekly.
“No one can give you that enthusiasm towards your own life, no one.
“People try to get it through artificial ways.
“They sort of piggyback themselves to others.
“However, unless you can invent your own joy, I mean, it’s not worth it… it really isn’t.”
The new album, her 30th, and tour aren’t the only things on the horizon for Ceberano in 2023.
On 1 November, she’ll release Unsung, a beautifully-illustrated memoir featuring her inspirational song lyrics, stories, paintings, embroidery and much more.
“Who would have thought that… my own book?” she said.
“It’s very surprising; to me and everyone else.
“I’m very, very happy about it.
“It’s full of beautiful art and all my stories, short yarns, poetry, music and crafting.
“It really is a solid body of work for sure.”
So, what’s left to do?
“Well, I would ideally love to get back to music where I can also just feel like, I mean, full circle type of stuff,” Ceberano said.
“That might be some dance kind of style because that’s where I started.
“And, I think at my age, I can afford to put myself back in that place.
“A lot of house artists, for example, will often use heritage acts because there’s a kind of weight to it.
“Everything old is new again.
“I really love that.
“So, I have all of that to look forward to as well.
“Nothing ends here… it’s just the beginning.
“It is just another beginning of another beginning.”
Tickets for My Life Is A Symphony are available at www.civictheatrenewcastle.com.au/home
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