Kate Ceberano To Kick Off The Australian Made Tour Next Month…

With forty years on the road, countless untold stories and one of the most powerful voices in Australian music, Kate Ceberano is set to embark on another epic tour across regional Australia in June, July and August 2025. The Australian Made Tour will highlight the biggest hits of Kate’s platinum catalogue – alongside some of Australia’s most iconic anthems: a heartfelt tribute to the songs and artists that have helped shape and inspire her extraordinary career. From her own band I’m Talking to Divinyls, Models, INXS, Mentals, Jimmy Barnes, Sia, Icehouse, Silverchair, John Farnham, Australian Crawl, Bernard Fanning, Jimmy Little, The Church, Renee Geyer, Paul Kelly and more, Kate is preparing to bring her own magnetic spin to the great Australian songbook. The Australian Made Tour will be both a personal reflection and a gesture of shared national nostalgia, an invitation to feel the pulse of Australian music history through the eyes of one of its most enduring and celebrated voices.

The tour’s title invokes a full-circle moment for Kate. She was just twenty when she stepped onto the stage with I’m Talking as part of the legendary original Australian Made tour of 1986/87, sharing the bill with INXS, Jimmy Barnes, Models and Divinyls during a defining era in Australian music. Now, nearly four decades later, Kate will offer a storytelling experience rich with unfiltered backstage tales, rock ’n’ roll mythology and the kind of raw, untamed energy that defined Australian music before social media stripped it of its mystery. Expect stories of stolen kisses and wild nights, of moments captured only in memory, not on a phone screen. Kate will be joined on all twenty-two stops by two powerhouse musicians: guitarist/ producer Harts and, on her first national tour of her own work, the prodigiously talented Kathleen Halloran. The handpicked line-up promises to shift seamlessly between eras and influences like a radio dial spinning through time. Kate talks to Hi Fi Way about this tour.

Another massive tour, are you looking forward Australian Made Tour?
I am, for an artist who was born and made from Australian audiences, through all the tours and all the stories combined, this one makes the most sense to me. Sometimes you go out there and reach for a different title or spin, but this tour just happened to align with the right time and place in the history of starting as an artist.

Hitting some of those regional areas must be a bit of a buzz, getting to places that don’t always have touring acts coming through?
Yeah, the success of my early years in music came from relentless touring everywhere. There was almost no division between town and country, you just played whatever gig would have you, doing hundreds of them year in and year out. This tour is based on a pivotal moment in Australian music history. The title comes from a concert series that started in the eighties, reacting to promoters who believed you couldn’t sell a full outdoor concert or festival with just Australian acts. My manager at the time, Ken West, who later built the Big Day Out festival, didn’t accept that and staged the tour anyway. It was a huge moment for Australian music, making us take ourselves seriously as musicians. That’s what I want to carry forward, something people in both the city and the country really appreciate.

For this particular tour, what are some of the songs that inspired the set list? Or, are there particular artists that shaped it?
The eighties had natural diversity in music, something that feels more forced in contemporary music today. Back then, it wasn’t about meeting quotas, it was about musicians crossing genres and standing alongside each other. You had bands like The Saints, who were essentially a punk band, alongside INXS, who were shaping the international sound of Australia. Jimmy Barnes was the voice of the working-class man. I get to perform songs written for me by Paul Kelly, which sit perfectly alongside the work of artists like Silverchair and Megan Washington. My set list is mostly built from people I’ve had real experiences with, people I’ve toured with and shared stories with. Every song has a personal connection.

Have some of these songs really tested you vocally in terms of learning how to sing and perform them?
Yeah, Sia’s Chandelier is intense. Sia used to jump on my stage as a kid, every time I came to Adelaide, her father would call up and ask if she could join in. She was about twelve at the time. Later, she became this massive global star, as she should. It’s one of those reminders that music is timeless. Artists inspire each other, and age doesn’t matter. If a song truly moves you, it’s incredible to pay tribute to it in performance. Singing Chandelier is less of a vocal challenge and more about honoring such a contemporary artist.

You mentioned the stories behind the songs, have you discovered any that surprised or amazed you, particularly in relation to the context of a song?
Yeah, Chrissy Amphlett grew up in the seventies, just as I did, but the world was very different before social media. Things happened in people’s homes and lives without documentation, there were no witnesses, no testimony, no defense. Take Boys in Town, it’s a massive rock anthem, but beneath it is an underlying darkness about how women were treated, spoken about, and regarded. You start thinking about yourself when placed in that situation. There’s a subtext to the song that’s much deeper than just its iconic rock energy.

This tour has so many dates, is it something that will go beyond the initial run? It is great that Adelaide is on the tour.
I was just there last year, I toured with John Stevens, a superstar, and we sold out shows across the country. It was amazing for John and me to return to our roots. He covers a lot of INXS and Noiseworks, and I’ve got my own hits, so it was a great mix. I perform in South Australia nearly every year, but for this tour, I wanted to strip things back and give regional areas the chance to fully experience it. A lot of places missed out on live music during COVID, so I wanted to saturate all the states that hadn’t seen much touring post-pandemic. We’ve started placing city dates too, but the regions deserve their moment first.

Are there, are there plans for, for new music at some stage?
Yeah, it’s funny. I’m relentlessly creative, like you can tell by my conversation. I’m very demonstrative. I just sort of speak my mind. I work like that as well in my life. If I’m curious about something, I’ll just go at it and make time in a day because I’m so busy with creativity and other things. Another album has already been written. I’ve actually already recorded most of it, but there’s a time and a place for everything isn’t there? I think you need to be in accord with your audience, and I think for artists to simply just throw things out willy-nilly without actually understanding what their audience wants, and also having that dialogue, that conversation with an audience is a bit, in my opinion, is just indulgent. I’m more of the person who’s like, yeah, how’s this making you feel? And then I respond accordingly because an artist I feel needs to have that conversation to know which direction you’re going in.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Kate Ceberano on the following dates, tickets here…

New dates added…