Kate Ceberano first turned Australian audiences on their collective ear as a member of I’m Talking. With a slew of hits singles such as ‘Trust Me’, ‘Do You Wanna Be?’ and ‘Lead The way’, the band were unlike anything homegrown that we’d ever seen on Countdown before. In an age of pub rock, I’m Talking had an alternate international finesse. Ceberano caught the ear of everyone from Malcolm McLaren to Stock Aitken and Waterman. Rejecting their advances she forged her own career as a solo artist and songwriter. Recently her Anthology took her back into the Top 10. Rolling Stone featured her in their Living Legends series and the artist, who never really went away, is back. Sean Sennett caught up with Kate to discuss everything from I’m Talking to now.

The first time I became aware of you was seeing you on Countdown as the front woman with I’m Talking. Obviously, you were known in Melbourne but Countdown took you to a national audience. At the time the band felt cutting edge?

Yeah, they were. That was a part of the punk culture that started in Melbourne. There was this sort of climate in Melbourne at the time, it was very experimental. (The founders of I’m Talking) were part of the experimental instrumental group called Essendon Airport. That was the nucleus of what I’m Talking about. It was always their aspiration … they invited me to become a front singer. As part of my audition, I remember singing ‘Love Don’t Live Here Anymore’.

I think I also did ‘Ring My Bell’. The contest was to make this heightened niche disco New York style outfit that could perform live. It was a complete antithesis to everything that was happening at the time. In that way, I think it was quite punk because it wasn’t paying any attention to pub rock at all. We were putting ourselves at quite a deal of risk to be on the bill often with people like the Divinyls or the Angels. It was kind of incongruous.

You arrived with a real sense of style as well, the outfits you wore; was that a reflection of your personal taste at the time?

I guess, and also the fact that Melbourne to me was the epicentre of high fashion. Martin Grant and all of the artisans that were coming out of that scene. Some went on to becoming world famous. Martin’s doing very well. He lives in Paris now, and his most recent claim to fame is having done all the new Qantas outfits.

Other people like Polly Borland, a photographer, was into creative design. There was this place in the city which was like an old Victorian chambers which was full of craft people, people doing millinery, some doing design and jewellery. I’d just go in and hang with these people.

Just like in London where someone like Adam Ant and those cats came out of that art college in London. This was sort of the same kind of collective. I did end up wearing their clothes. For instance, I’m Talking first single ‘Trust Me’, I was decked out in Christopher Graf. It was quite indicative of Melbourne.

You’ve mentioned  you were a kid  in the audience at the occasional filming of Countdown. And then you crossed over to the other side. Was that quite surreal at the time? 

I’m still a big believer that if you can imagine it  so hard, click your heels three times and you’ll get there. I was intoxicated by Countdown because a lot of the British and New York acts that I loved, everyone that had come over from America and England were presented there, Molly would just be sort of borderline hysterical. For teenagers it was the place to be, it was like up there with Beatle-mania or something.

You really didn’t have to know the bands to know you loved them. They were there, and that was pretty much all you needed to know. I was in the audience for many different styles, from John Paul Young crossing over to Haysi Fantayzee to the Cure and Iggy Pop. We were really privy to some great music.

Have you ever spotted yourselves in the crowd during the reruns? 

In the last Molly special, when they did a Countdown story, I had mentioned a feeling I’d had once when I was wishing the camera would pick me up in the audience. I wasn’t even looking at the front of the stage. I was the only person in the audience looking up at the camera, and I was willing the camera to see me. They found the fucking footage and played it on television, of me, dancing and looking up into the camera like not even interested in what was going on. It was more ‘just come on, find me in a crowd’ (laughs).

Were you always a natural singer?

It was something that wasn’t noticed by myself. People around me who would say you have a good voice. I’d say yeah, whatever. I sort of see my daughter with the same desultory kind of yeah, whatever, flicking off a compliment. When in actual fact, she’s a beautiful singer. There’s a tone that’s distinct to her. I think I must have had a distinctive tone because people would say you should do singing. Actually, I wanted to be an actress, truth be known. I wanted to be like some cute new wave actress, like Jean Seberg or something like that.

I guess you got to do some of that with some of your videos, because they’re very cinematic. 

I sing like a person who’s in a film. I always imagine myself playing different roles. I think a lot of acting is employed in my kind of singing.

How did people like Malcolm McLaren and Stock Aitken Waterman become aware of you? You were in a sphere where you noticed all over the world by the time I’m Talking split. 

I’m Talking had attracted a lot of attention and Madonna had just hit. A lot of the labels were looking for these kind of ingenues. In fact, her lawyer flew on behalf of Bob Krasnow (the famed US record company man) to Melbourne to poach the band. But the band were dead keen on working with the former Island Records director who went to London Records in England, because of who had been on their catalogue.

Bob Krasnow was determined to sign the new Madonna of Australia, which is what he’d heard, there was this teenager who was ripping up the charts. But I think we’re looking at people who were looking for a novelty. Stock Aitken Waterman or Malcolm McLaren, it was their job to harvest out of this raw talent, some entity they could expand on, and throw inspiration and money at it and put fire on this spark and hopefully turn it into a bonfire.

I felt like I got quite a lot of attention at that age, which is very exciting. I turned 17 and felt like the world was suddenly a very small place, after having been in North Baldwin … It was amazing.

Obviously Brave was a massive record for you. What was it like to have pretty much everybody in Australia turn out and buy it?

That was really weird. I think that was largely because of Nick Launay, to be honest. It was out of necessity that the song  was born and out of a lot of confusion. We’d had an A&R guy working with me from London who had been formerly with the Rolling Stones. He looked like a cartoon character from, Mad. He had three hairs on the top of his head and this strong cockney accent.

He was disappointed because there was no direction when we were in London. I was insisting I didn’t want to do that kind of more commercial ready-made experience (SAW etc). I wanted to write my own work. So I was in the studio demonstrating that out of three chords I could make a song in the hopes that would be enough. It took Nick Launay, who really was in every sense of the word a producer, we don’t have a lot of them anymore that are like this.  Rick Rubin and Danger Mouse are like that, where a person has all the collective parts to make his vision become fulfilled.

Nick understood we’d come from a sort of alternative background.. He took these fragments of ideas I was playing with and then he drove this thing. He herded the whole concept into one solid point of view.

By the time it was released, every song had that sort of similar history within it. It was touched by Nick and Mark Forrester who was very influential at the time. Then it went quadruple platinum, which was like absolutely riveting.

You are a great songwriter (Kate was recently inducted into the Australian Songwriters Hall of Fame). People have said in the past, particularly in the early days, when you were doing alternate pop and then jazz that your releases were hard to put a ‘label’ on. You refused to let yourself be pinned down. Is that because of your DNA as a songwriter, forcing you in those different directions?

Yeah. I think if you’re going to eventually be a musician and an artist in your own right, you need to be able to pen your own thoughts. Otherwise you’re just simply another person’s storyteller, and I just couldn’t see there’d be any long-term merit in that. It came I suppose from “I’m Talking,” in fact, probably the ideology they had, which was to create original work. And stand behind your work, I mean, even if it had popularity or not.

I loved that purity about that. Even through the ’90s when I didn’t feel terribly relevant because it was all Nirvana and Sonic Youth, what I did have that was mine was the knowledge that in time I would have something that would be available, current, and contemporary, and relevant. It just needed to wait it out.

I’m currently reading Philip Norman’s biography of Paul McCartney, and it suggests that when you’re on a roll, you’ve got to go hard, and you have to be so prolific that you build up speed, and you really become a force unto yourself. I have had moments like that in my career, where I was really going hard and wasn’t really concerned as to whether or not I was going to make a good or bad effect. I simply was doing it.

How do you look at that catalogue of yours, which is incredibly impressive, and choose 50 songs for an anthology?

I left it to my husband [laughs].

You’ve got the energy of a 25-year-old woman who’s an album or two deep. You’ve got so much enthusiasm for it. How do you keep that up?

I think it’s probably because I’m learning more about music now. There’s a facility part of me that’s open to discovering things – it’s terribly exciting. Even last night I did a gig with Paul Grabowsky, who is rather like performing with a maestro of the highest order. It’s like working with Beethoven. Any one of Beethoven’s piano concertos he can perform. Yet, when you’re doing songs, like we’re doing Burt Bacharach or Leonard Cohen and a variety of other songs together, and they have no reference to his training. I’ve got to hear these other ways of singing and performing these songs, a more mature way … it’s more than ‘me’ because of him.

I seek to be more than me. It’s only by my collaborations I find that when I’ve got confidence from a champion somewhere, a writer, producer or this pianist, suddenly I see and hear myself doing things like “fuck, that’s wonderful”. I guess it’s the same way Cilla Black must have felt when she was performing Alfie. I think that because of the range that [Bacharach] was offering her in that session, she became more than herself.

George Martin, when he offered himself to the Beatles, they became more than themselves. Even Johnny Cash, describing working with Rubin, he became more … it was as if Rubin had seen something in him that he hadn’t even seen in himself. I do love that exchange. It’s amazing.

There’s a great story about when Bacharach was doing the track with Cilla Black. And they did 40 takes of “Alfie” and she’s absolutely exhausted. And George Martin said on the intercom, “Burt, what exactly are you looking for?” And he said, “George, I’m just looking for that little bit of magic.” And George Martin said, “I think it’s on take 12.”

I’ve been that person who’s been in a session and someone was looking for an elusive something. I’ve been martyred to a cause like that. I’ve had to walk away. I’ve seen some actors sometimes, it happens in films too, when a director has gotten a bit psychotic about something they’ve needed. They’ve gone over and over again, and eventually the person is too exhausted to deliver. I’ve been in that situation.

But I performed “Alfie” last night and it’s a really technically fucking hard song. And Burt in my opinion was trying to do something classical within a popular song in the same way that I reckon Paul wrote on “Blackbird” or something, where he had a little Mozart piece or a stolen moment from some classic piece.

I think Burt Bacharach felt he had a lot to prove, and so he wrote this classical piece. It’s a minefield and a mind fuck. Really in it and during it I’m sweating like a pig, but I fucking love it.

I imagine like most artists you probably don’t dwell on your back catalogue that much. Would that be fair to say?

I never listen to it at all. Actually, recently I’ve been listening to it because I find now after working with other artists I’m trying to program shows or create new ways to discuss my music. The way music has become now is that we’re always invited as veteran musicians to try to place ourselves in the story of ‘the story’.

Do you become just lost in a song when you’re performing live? 

What I find is I’m in every single razor-sharp second that passes. I very rarely relax within a song, and get totally in reverie, unless it’s something like an ethnic song. When it’s one with lyrics that I care about and about something melodically that requires a lot of finesse, then it’s almost as if every moment is compartmentalised into these razor-sharp moments, and each one counts.

Kate Ceberano’s Anthology is out now. Kate Ceberano and Paul Grabowsky perform Love Songs at the Powerhouse (New Farm) on October 01, 2016. Photo credit: Justine Walpole.