After four decades in the spotlight and dozens of awards, Kate Ceberano wears many hats: jazz chanteuse, pop singer, actress and TV personality. During the pandemic lockdowns she made quilts and customised guitars with her art. She wrote the music for an alt-rock album with Steve Kilbey and Sean Sennett. She recently published her second book, Unsung, a collection of anecdotes, photography and artwork. “My first manager said I was without definition, he said I was a musical enigma,” Ceberano says. He wasn’t wrong.
Over one recent two-week period, Ceberano sang at Ron Barassi’s state funeral, appeared at both the Arias and the Mushroom 50th mega concert, performed intimate gigs with both her jazz trio and an orchestra, and appeared at several launches for Unsung. When we met, in the lobby of a Canberra hotel, it was during a rare two-hour break in her schedule.
The 57-year-old is still uneasy about where she fits. Most artists will create and stick to a particular brand, but Cerebrano chops and changes according to where her instincts take her. In typically restless Ceberano style, Unsung recalls meetings with k.d. Lang, Michael Hutchence, James Freud, Michael Legrand and Martin Sharp, interspersed with confessions and slices of wisdom. As she writes: “My industry is what it is. It’s a business and the art of making music and business of making music will always be poles apart … My big girl boots are on and I am walking to the beat of my own drum.”
Ceberano grew up outside the mainstream. Her father is of Hawaiian and Filipino heritage and her mother is Anglo Australian. It’s a close family and one of her brothers, Phil, has been her constant guitarist. Hers was a nonconformist household in suburban Melbourne, dominated by her maternal grandparents.
“My mum taught karate at a rape crisis center. My grandparents were very 1930s eccentric. They didn’t take drugs. They were mung beans and nudists and whole foods and brown bread. I never had a cake until I was 17. I had almonds and apricots at my birthday parties,” she says. “That might have something to say for my very strong immunity.”
Her grandparents were early adopters of Scientology and raised their family in the church. “And in many ways, I’ve found that to be a blessing and a curse,” she says.
Ceberano remains a committed Scientologist. She does not proselytise her faith but believes her career has been stigmatised because of it. “I’ve been misrepresented by ignorance and small-mindedness and unfair prejudice, actually,” she says. “I think my merit as an artist has proven itself time and time again. Yeah, I am very prolific. I work really fucking hard. And I love what I do.
“But I don’t talk to people about [Scientology] any more. I’m quite happy to study and experience my own enlightenment in any which way I want. I am entitled to that now. I question everything. I read the fuck out of everything.”
As she writes in Unsung, school was not a happy experience. When she was just 14, she quit. “I literally walked out of school,” she recalls. “I walked down the hill to Grandma’s house. She was shucking peas and she said, ‘What happened?’ ‘I said, ‘Well, I don’t fit in. I can’t make it happen. I can’t make this happen.’ She said, help me. So we sat quietly, shucking peas.”
By then she was already singing jazz in jazz clubs and cafes on the side four nights a week. Soon she was being talked about throughout the thriving early 1980s Melbourne music scene, the milieu that produced Nick Cave and the Birthday Party, Models, Essendon Airport and a gaggle of intellectuals with keyboards. Ceberano was enlisted into the postmodern disco band I’m Talking and immediately started making hits.
But instead of concentrating entirely on a Top 40 career, Ceberano launched her jazz alter ego simultaneously. Her band included the cream of young Melbourne hipsters and was acclaimed from the get-go.
“I was trying to do something beautiful. And cool. And a bit sexy,” she says. “I wasn’t looking at it from an intellectual point of view. I didn’t actually understand jazz. I just felt like I was responding to images that I’d seen of jazz artists like Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf. I was built with an hourglass body and no one else in Australia looked like me so I just went to all of my dusky classics. I just sang and looked and felt like them, and I was really happy.”
Her 1989 solo debut Brave was a multi-platinum success. Being cast as Mary Magdalene opposite John Farnham in Jesus Christ Superstar in 1992 was another trip. She acted in short films and Paul Cox’s feature Molokai. She met her husband, the director Lee Rogers, when he was tasked with filming her at the State Theatre and she later starred in his film Dust Off the Wings. Their daughter Gypsy also works in the arts, having started writing songs, singing and modelling.
In the early 2000s Ceberano and Rogers relocated to Los Angeles to pursue various opportunities. Things didn’t go to plan and they returned to Australia feeling chastened. Then Covid struck and work dried up.
Ceberano is still making up for that lost time – but she is not one to wait around for invitations. Last year, she approached the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and ABC Records to re-record her own compositions. The result was a Top 10 album and a sold-out national tour.
“I’ve always had blind faith in my courage to get up on stage,” she says. “I know that I can impact people, I knew that as a teenager – whether it was to sex them up, or it was to exhilarate them or to get them to dance or to make me cry, or any of these things.”
But performing with an orchestra has been a whole new adventure. She describes the experience onstage as “the same majestic feeling of knowing a storm is imminent … you don’t know whether you’re titillated or shit-scared.”
She believes she’s no longer performing “to pump up my own tyres. I know that people are not focused on me as a focal point. They’re remembering things, forgetting things. They’re taking on things, letting them go. By the end of the night, we’re like, ‘Wow, that was great. That was an experience.’
“I reckon that now I’m finally reaching myself as an artist. I could hang my hat on this.”
Kate Ceberano’s book Unsung: A Compendium Of Creativity is out now. She will perform her show My Life is a Symphony at Sydney Opera House on 3 January and with the MSO at Hamer Hall on 27 April.
