Written by Jill Fraser
At 42, songstress, Kate Ceberano's passion to create art has not diminished.
Brand building gets the thumbs down from singing sensation, Kate Ceberano, who has consistently defied critics and advisors and gone her own way regarding her body image and belief system.
Refusing to succumb to pressure to become yet another rake thin pop singer, the celebrated performer says that ultimately the two worst pieces of advice she has ever received was “to give up Scientology and ditch my Mum as my manager” in order to avoid bad PR.
The warning was resolutely ignored by Ceberano. Yet ironically she remains standing as the number of celebrity casualties who are buckling under the stress of their success and the excesses that all too often accompany it, continues to grow.
By her own admission Ceberano has had more than her share of career highs and lows and she gives credit to the Church of Scientology for her ability to cop the lows on the chin and keep bouncing back with a “passion to create art and beauty”.
Her widely disparaged religion, which is renowned for its secrecy and high profile followers including Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Jenna Elfman and Kirstie Alley, has been a constant source of inspiration in her volatile career. “Life is a series of collisions,” she says. “I have been signed and dropped and signed and dropped and signed and dropped yet I continue to endure, and the thing that sustains me is Scientology because it’s taught me to confront the impact instead of trying to avoid it or convert it into something else.” When it comes to understanding how to work the entertainment industry as opposed to passively waiting in the wings, Ceberano is a grand master.
Driven and determined her goal has always been “to bust apart fixed conditions” and she confesses that the industry view that mature singers should step aside and let young, up-and-coming singers have a go horrifies her. “To a living artist this is death talk,” she exclaims.
At 42, the exotic looking, Melbourne-born performer is a bona fide veteran of the stage. She began at age 15 as a lead singer with funk bank, I’m Talking and by 19 had won Best Female Vocalist at the Countdown Awards and Best Female Singer at the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) Awards. Known for her passionate, powerful, soulful vocals, singer-songwriter Ceberano, who last year won season six of Channel 7’s Dancing With The Stars, has released six platinum and four gold albums, sold over 1.5 million albums in Australia alone, acted in acclaimed feature films and hosted her own television show.
Her focus is on communication and somewhere down the track she made a pact with herself to “keep it all real”, a conviction that underpins everything she does. Having a body shape, which she is convinced “pushes people’s buttons because it’s not the stereotypical one”, did not deter her from being fearless on Dancing With the Stars and allow partner, John-Paul Collins, to turn her completely upside down during a dance routine with her knickers high in the air. “People at home who have shapes similar to mine saw me doing all these incredible things on national television and thanked me,” she giggles equating the revealing experience to like “having had sex with the nation”.
Despite her lifelong dedication to Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard’s “business and organisational technology” Ceberano struggles to put the philosophy into a nutshell. “I don’t think that things of great significance can be put into concise, little statements,” she says.
“The subject to me is like a breathing, living organism. I apply everything that I have learnt from it to my life and I see that it works so it is entirely a self-generated interest. I don’t have it super-imposed on me. It is a very active philosophy and requires a lot of application. My life gives me a great place to apply the tools because everything I do is very mercurial.”
The sassy songstress who is never afraid of putting her heart and soul on the line for the sake of entertainment concedes that ridicule and criticism is all part of the business and that once again it was Scientology that taught her how to deal with her feelings in the face of negativity.
“Under normal circumstances, one wants to lick their wounds and take time out to reassess what happened,” she says.
“But returning to what I was saying earlier about life being a series of impacts, I have the tools to go back into the area after the collision and find out what part of it I could be responsible for.
Prior to her recording her current CD, Nine Lime Avenue, a cover album of classic 80s tracks, she underwent throat surgery, which she admits has given the album greater significance.
“Just quietly it was a bit frightening,” she says. “I was assured by the brilliant surgeon and specialist that it would all be fine, but I still had to check out with the biopsy etc”, she says.
