Kate Ceberano’s Australian Made Tour: Celebration of 40 years since iconic gigs so popular, it gets an encore

From the side of stadium stages in the summer of 1986, Kate Ceberano watched the members of INXS, Jimmy Barnes, Divinyls, Models, The Saints, Mental As Anything and The Triffids saunter, strut, swagger and entrance tens of thousands with electric energy.

Concert promoters had made the mistake of claiming only international acts could fill big venues and the best of Australian rock stars had decided to prove them wrong with the Australian Made tour — and fans turned out in their droves, in the heat, all over the country, to help them do it.

Ceberano, then just 20, was part of the line-up with the band she’d been in since she was 15, I’m Talking, and remembers being “perpetually terrified” as she moved among some of the most talented, most volatile people in the industry.

But she also found connection, and stories, memories and lessons that would last her a lifetime.

With INXS’s charismatic singer Michael Hutchence, she formed a bond between songwriters, built on talking about books and poetry.

With Andrew McArthur “Greedy” Smith, the affable singer-songwriter for Mental As Anything, an understanding that came from being “two little sparks from the same engine”.

With the fierce, enigmatic Chrissy Amphlett, the force of nature fronting Divinyls — “she was like a razor’s edge,” Ceberano remembers — the confirmation of her instinct that she must remain always herself, and never imitate.

So when Ceberano’s husband and manager, producer Lee Rogers, reminded her last year that the 40th anniversary of the tour was approaching, it created a quandary for the celebrated Australian singer.

So much time had passed. Since those days in 1986, Ceberano has put out 31 albums, including 11 that made the top 10 across five decades, been nominated for 22 ARIAs and had her debut solo single, Brave, go three times platinum. She had done more than 6000 live shows, been the first woman inducted into the Australian Songwriters’ Hall Of Fame and spent a record-breaking run playing Mary Magdalene opposite John Farnham, in an acclaimed production of Jesus Christ Superstar. There was so much water under the bridge.

But Ceberano had also outlived many of her contemporaries, which begged the question: how best to remember these legends of music, and this heady time in Australian music?

Ceberano and Rogers decided to answer that question with a tour last year. It was a tightly-wound affair; five musicians and crew stuffed into two cars, touring the country. But the audiences, Ceberano remembers, “went off their nuts”. Almost every show sold out and the live album hit No.7 on the ARIA album charts.

The “unexpected runaway success” made an encore irresistible — “we made promises at the door that there would be another one,” she says — and so this year, Ceberano is, once again, taking the show on the road to perform iconic songs including Burn For You, I Touch Myself, You Got Nothing I Want, I Hear Motion and If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too? as well as her own songs Brave, Pash and Bedroom Eyes.

“I’ve got to be honest and say that I am a little allergic to doing covers,” Ceberano says. “I don’t love the feeling that I am either not going to do the job for the original artist, or I’m not going to represent myself best.

“I’m always asking those questions, is this good for them and is it good for me? Are we good for each other? I’m OK to do it in jazz gigs, the full jazz song book, sure, but Australian rock?

“But as I said to (Rogers), it’s sad that all my friends are no longer with me. Chrissy is gone. James (Freud, of Models) is gone. Greedy is gone. Michael is gone. So rather than just thinking of it as a commercial exercise, I went into it completely as a personal exercise and a love letter to my friends . . .

“I wanted to find them again and sing them back to life, you know?”

For last year’s tour, Ceberano assembled “a punchy little trio, like The Police” with no big band or flashy light shows to lean on. She booked multi-instrumentalists Darren “Harts” Hart and Kathleen Halloran and during a rehearsal, asked her lighting and sound technicians for their verdict.

“I knew that they were like, ‘Oh, this could be really embarrassing for the boss’,” she laughs. “But the minute I knew we had something was when they did that thing where they looked at each other and it’s like, ‘OK, we’ve got a gig’.”

The reaction from the audience confirmed that, and then some.

“We loved that they were so enthusiastic,” Ceberano says. “We loved that they bought their memories. They knew we were doing it with our heart on our sleeve, and they all promised to buy tickets as soon as they left the venue for the next one. So we thought, OK, we’ve got no choice.”

For this year’s encore tour, as Hart concentrates on his own new album, Ceberano called on Halloran and blues-rock musician Dusty Lee Stephensen. It allows her to do another of her favourite things: champion under-recognised talent.

“We hear an awful lot about the very top tier Australian artists who are cutting it overseas, because there’s a lot of streaming and a lot of financial backing, and they have all the radio play and record labels,” Ceberano says.

“But independent musicians don’t live in that strata, they don’t often get the kind of support they need, and they can’t finance a tour like this. (Halloran) is one of Australia’s finest female artists, if you ask me; she plays like Jimmy Page and Hendrix. She is Ian Moss’ favourite guitarist. She’s only a young lass with her first album due this year. Dusty is another one of those people who we know, but we don’t know well enough, because they’re brilliant.

“I felt that it was by giving (them) that audience and putting (them) in front of all my people, it was a way of also extending that conversation as well.”

The show, which includes the music of Australian Made but also more recent artists, including Wolfmother and Sia, puts people “into kind of a romantic reverie of who they were, then drags them through to become who they become,” Ceberano says.

“If they’re in the audience and they are near my age, they’ve lived through multiple decades of music,” she says. “I tell them, put your head back and close your eyes. You don’t need to look at me. Just remember who you’ve been and where you were and what you were doing when you’re listening to this, yeah? And honestly, in the darkness of the theatre, I could almost see all their pictures. It was like, this amazing chaos of lives.”

The show also contains Ceberano’s wealth of stories — a kind of document of the era, her memories of “knowing these people that I’ve written with and worked with and slept with,” she says, laughing uproariously.

“I sometimes feel like one of those cliff divers, where I’ve done it enough now that it doesn’t scare me. I’m not scared of the act of, creatively, doing something dangerous,” Ceberano says.

“But if you take me back to Australian Made, I was perpetually terrified of everyone. I was nervous that I would say something wrong, or I would lose face . . .

“It was actually quite an aggressive kind of culture, because rock bands weren’t like they are now. They didn’t have to worry about marketing and being loved by everyone. They were born out of the earth, whatever little patch of dirt they called home. These were people where you would enter their orbit and get spat back out.

“I look at some people who claim to be punks, but really they’re just wearing the outfit. Someone like Chris Bailey (The Saints), knowing him, they came from circumstances where they had to fight their way out . . . He was very committed and he was very scary and dangerous and fantastic and funny and lovable.

“I was a witness and they loved that. I loved to sit in the wings and watch the artists before me and after me. I always did that and I always still do. I study them. I remember Chrissy was just like, ‘get the f... out of my face. What are you, trying to be me? Go be yourself’.

“You learn these really important lessons like that: that it is one thing to imitate others but your life practice should be to discover who you are and then learn how to be really honest about that and stick with it, regardless of if people love or hate you.

“But there are not many people who live as long as Nick Cave and I to live and tell the story.”

As Ceberano, who will turn 60 on the last week of the tour, looks back, she feels disconnected from that young woman standing side of stage, searching for her place, soaking up every moment.

“There have been many mistakes, many failures, many regrets, but they were really cool because they led me to choices that make me more me, and I’m not apologetic now, about those things,” she says.

“I think coming into 60, you have to kill off so much of the things you had retained, thinking you might need them: the coquettishness, the sweetness, being loved, being affable. You let go of all those things that you’ve tethered yourself to so long, and you just become entirely different. I just feel so remote from who I’ve been these days.

“But I did say to somebody the other day, and and I meant it: if I’d asked myself the question, ‘Who do you want to be when you grow up’, I would definitely answer Kate Ceberano.”

Kate Ceberano’s 2026 Australian Made Tour will be at the Astor Theatre on September 4, ManPAC in Mandurah on September 5 and Heart in Margaret River on September 6, see kateceberano.com.