By the time Kate Ceberano was 20 years old, she had already won Countdown's most popular female artist award.
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Her band I'm Talking had won the show's most promising new talent, she'd knocked back offers from the British pop stable Stock Aitken Waterman, and performed in front of a live global television audience in excess of a billion at Oz for Africa, as part of the international Live Aid concerts.
In the four decades since, she's released 10 Top 10 albums, won Countdown awards, ARIAs, a Logie, Mo Awards, a World Music Award, and played more than 6000 live performances, appearing on stage as well as in film and television.
She is, in other words, a fixture in the Australian music scene, spanning generations and genres.
![Kate Ceberano performing in 2007. Picture by Kitty Hill Kate Ceberano performing in 2007. Picture by Kitty Hill](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/3BUUzmFAhrhLyX9rFCubPq5/42fea011-dea5-4525-9b91-693dc2e7e158.jpg/r0_255_3104_2000_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Ceberano will be performing in Canberra on November 18 and 19, 2023, at Tallagandra Winery. While the Saturday night show has sold out, there are still tickets available for Sunday. On November 20, she will also be joining me, for an ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author event at the ANU. We'll be talking about her beautiful, illustrated memoir, Unsung, featuring her inspirational song lyrics, stories, paintings and embroidery, and celebrating four decades of song writing and recording.
She'll be 57 in December and has just released her 30th album, My Life is a Symphony, a reworking of her iconic songs and personal favourites, in collaboration with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. She's touring the album nationally, switching in a local symphony orchestra here and there, selling out theatres from Melbourne to Adelaide and Perth.
So, what would she tell her bright-eyed 20-year-old self if she had the chance?
Would she hint at what was in store? Would she suggest any changes?
"I get asked this question a lot and I don't like it," she says.
![Ceberano's memoir, Unsung: A compendium of creativity. Ceberano's memoir, Unsung: A compendium of creativity.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/MUwv8t3Wj4u7LSUBpSbqhh/44473511-f2b5-4a7e-91fd-07636c3b7319.png/r0_0_4830_2716_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"I get that we're fundamentally nostalgic, we want so much to leave a trace of ourselves, leave warnings and prescriptions about what we would and wouldn't do.
"As I'm getting older, I kind of want to leave the past where it is. I don't try to reimagine it, or imagine what I'd say to me. A lot of artists get cast by the songs of our youth, people forget that we're still creating, always creating.
"If I think of her, she was just a work in progress, and I can't be bothered with her.
"Instead I'm constantly working out where will I be next, how will I engage people, in what way, how do I want to be seen - now - as an artist?"
It's not that she doesn't have fond memories of those early days. She takes a lot of pride in her achievements.
"I was fundamentally a bit of a punk then," she says.
"I didn't really give a shit what anyone thought, and I was like a banshee, just out there screaming for my life."
She's had to learn how to watch her Ps and Qs as she's gotten older. As a woman approaching 60, she's a bit over caring what others think of her.
But as an artist, she says, it's always in the back of your mind.
"My husband Lee and I came across a couple of Oscar Wilde quotes - 'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars' and 'Be yourself; everyone is already taken' - they really resonated with us," she says.
![Winning Best Female Artist on Countdown in 1986. Picture supplied Winning Best Female Artist on Countdown in 1986. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/MUwv8t3Wj4u7LSUBpSbqhh/df813def-de9e-49bd-9d78-a12f559b6986.jpeg/r0_0_1883_2699_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"There have been times where I've tried to be different things, different people, wished I was someone else, but these days I'm quite happy with who I am."
It's interesting, then, that she acknowledges My Life is a Symphony is something of a "portal to my youth", an opportunity to look back with a lifetime of experience and knowledge.
It's no so much that she's dwelling on the past, even wanting to go back there, but instead paying homage to the artist she was through the artist she is now.
![At the St Kilda Festival in 1998. Picture supplied At the St Kilda Festival in 1998. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/MUwv8t3Wj4u7LSUBpSbqhh/be013bb1-778b-4b37-a536-d5756b84a8b9_rotated_270.JPG/r0_0_2448_3264_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
She would never have stood in front of a full symphony orchestra back then.
"It's like being offered a pair of wings and taking flight," she says.
She'd been working with her good friend Roscoe James Irwin, a singer-songwriter and musical director at the James Morrison Jazz Academy in Mount Gambier.
"We started discussing music - he's quite a bit younger than me, he didn't know much about my early career," she says.
![At 56, Kate Ceberano is past worrying what others think of her. Picture by Justine Walpole At 56, Kate Ceberano is past worrying what others think of her. Picture by Justine Walpole](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/MUwv8t3Wj4u7LSUBpSbqhh/59538718-33cb-4b51-a2dc-bd769afb9419.jpg/r0_362_4400_2836_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"I played him some of my early compositions from the albums, they weren't all the hits, and we started changing them up a bit and he said he'd love to work on some arrangements.
"One thing led to another and we contacted the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and here we are."
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I suggest to her that I'm keen to experience the portal, by starting with the original songs and then listening to the new versions.
"As a songwriter I love it that you're thinking like that," she says.
"When I wrote the songs, a lot of them were buried on albums, I wasn't able to market them properly, they didn't get enough support, a few of them were neglected.
"But putting them on this new album, I'm investing in myself as an artist and saying, well actually these songs have something to say about my life."
Brave, from her hit 1989 debut solo album, takes on new meaning with its lyrics:
I look for tomorrow, I remember yesterday
When I was scared of the darkness
And saying things I shouldn't say
But now my life has changed
Just look what I've become
And so I sit back and I hold tight
My life has just begun
For the album, she returned to the studio where she originally recorded it 30 years ago. Her daughter Gypsy sang back-up vocals.
Pash, from the 1997 album of the same name, peaked at number 10 on the ARIA singles chart in March 1998. A '60s-influenced pop tune that, here, has been turned into something almost cinematic, rising and falling in waves.
![Singing with I'm Talking at the Australian Made concert in 1987. Picture supplied Singing with I'm Talking at the Australian Made concert in 1987. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/MUwv8t3Wj4u7LSUBpSbqhh/6b4252b0-5e89-44a0-94a2-424b52e0219a.png/r0_0_1546_1985_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Cherry Blossom Lipstick is from an album dedicated to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard (2003's The Girl Can Help It), but here it sounds like a song that could be used as the opening theme for a Bond movie, full of drama and emotion.
The transformations might indeed change the way you think about the songs, about Ceberano herself. She wants us to feel exactly that way.
"I think you need to go in with an idea that you're going to be changed, I think people are investing in those kind of experiences these days, they need something bigger than their expectations. I know I feel that way."
Which is why she explores other art forms apart from music. She paints guitars, writes short stories and poems, works with textiles, embroidering beautiful quilts.
Her book, Unsung: A compendium of creativity (Simon and Schuster, $55) emerged from the barriers that she encountered during the Covid pandemic, which served as a catalyst for her to seek out an alternative channel for her restless creative spirit.
Though she had commenced recording My Life is a Symphony with the MSO, she was at an artistic impasse when the pandemic put an indefinite hold on the album recording.
Instead she started to paint, embellishing guitars and canvases; she hand-embroidered quilts to keep her loved ones warm; she wrote songs, alongside stories and poems.
"I realise I'm in a very fortunate position where I can do things that support my music, I can sell things that patronise my music so I don't have to do the things I had to do to make a quid.
"But it would be great if patrons would support the arts like they used to, our culture needs to celebrate and support Australian music and let musicians simply get on with making music."
Not that she wants to get political ahead of her September 15 performance at the Canberra Theatre, but she realises decisions are made in the nation's capital.
"I love Canberra, it's such a vivid city so full of culture and education, the home of great art and policy-makers," she says.
"It would be great if some of those policy makers in Canberra would come to the show and see how supporting music, supporting the arts, can change people's lives."
- November 20: At 6pm in an ANU/Canberra Times meet the author event, musician Kate Ceberano will be in conversation with The Canberra Times' Karen Hardy on her memoir, Unsung. Kambri Cultural Centre, ANU. Registrations at anu.edu.au/events.
This article was first published in August 2023 and has been updated.