After taking our seats in QPAC’s Concert Hall at Kate Miller-Heidke’s sold out Brisbane Festival 2019 show (27 September), I said to my companion that I expected to get chills seeing Kate live.
The diminutive, classically-trained vocal powerhouse did not disappoint, delivering thrills and chills throughout her 90-minute set.
Taking the stage to calls of “welcome home, Kate”, Queensland-born Kate flexed her vocal chords immediately, opening the show with ‘The Devil Wears A Suit’. And so began the ethereal yet commanding journey through the pop/ opera/ folk playground that is Kate’s back catalogue, interspersed with sneak peeks from her upcoming fifth studio album.
My love affair with Kate began back in 2008 upon hearing the three singles released from her second studio album ‘Curiouser’. It is no surprise then that they were my favourite tracks of the night.
Image © Robyn Wood
‘Caught In The Crowd’ is as whimsical and poignant as ever; ‘Can’t Shake It’ had myself and the woman to my right dancing and clapping enthusiastically in our seats; and ‘Last Day On Earth’, succeeded in causing my eyes to well up (again).
A pinch-me moment of the night came after ‘Sarah’, an eerily exquisite song about a young woman who went missing at Livid Festival 1997. At the conclusion of the song, Kate invited Centenary Heights State School student Hayley up on stage for an impromptu performance of the first verse and chorus.
Coming second for her performance of the song at her school’s talent show, Hayley did a stellar job singing the lines accompanied by Kate on piano, receiving heartfelt applause from the audience.
Backing vocalist Jess Hitchcock – opera singer, actor, composer and songwriter in her own right – provided the perfect harmonic backdrop to Kate’s soaring vocal range.
Click here for photos from the show.
The pair’s duets singing ‘The Healing Tree’ written for Hush Foundation and ‘Amazing’ from ‘Muriel’s Wedding The Musical’ were definite highlights, and enough to convince the woman I was talking to in the ladies post show to get tickets to ‘Muriel’.
A skilled narrator through her songwriting, Kate seems just as at ease sharing details of her private life with the audience in between songs, laughing along when she shared that her young son Ernie says her singing “makes his ears cry”.
While discussing her 2019 Eurovision performance, which saw her sway atop a moving pole, Kate was endearingly self-deprecating as she revealed that her father-in-law said she looked like a “singing toilet brush” and that Graham Norton had described her as a “singing windscreen wiper”.
Concluding her official set with ‘Humiliation’, a track interspersed with haunting operatic vocal aerobatics, Kate was rewarded with the first of three rapturous standing ovations.
Image © Robyn Wood
Returning to the stage, Kate treated the audience to an up close and intimate performance of her Eurovision entry ‘Zero Gravity’, proving that aerobatic stunts à la Veruca Salt’s ‘Shutterbug’ music clip aren’t necessary for a spellbinding performance.
After a second standing ovation, Kate wowed the crowd one last time with her cover of Talking Heads’ ‘Psycho Killer’.
Australia’s answer to Tori Amos and Kate Bush, Kate Miller-Heidke is otherworldly when in full vocal flight but refreshingly down to earth. Catch her the first chance you get.
