Kate Miller-Heidke

Kate Miller-Heidke completed formal training as a soprano lead in opera and stood ready to pursue a professional path through Gilbert & Sullivan parts until pop music drew her attention instead. She has since established herself as a piano-accompanied singer-songwriter whose style recalls Kate Bush, marked by theatrical presentation, a fusion of folk and pop, and occasional comic opera flourishes embedded in her material. During childhood she routinely charged relatives five cents to witness her domestic performances. The route from those beginnings to her later status as a favorite on alternative radio and among younger listeners included stints at the Best & Less retail chain, from which she was dismissed for “general incompetence,” along with the completion of multiple music degrees.

In 2000 she united with other Brisbane musicians to create the band Elsewhere, which issued only one EP under its own name. She maintained separate solo appearances in which she wove opera elements into covers drawn from unrelated genres, several of which surfaced on the limited 2005 release Comikaze. Elsewhere disbanded in 2004. In the years that followed she sustained solo work while taking part in the annual Women in Voice series; her EP Telegram appeared in 2004, and she received the Helpmann Award for Best Performance in an Australian Contemporary Concert for her contribution to the 2005 installment of that showcase. Her operatic stage debut came as Flora in Turn of the Screw at roughly the same moment “Space They Cannot Touch,” a track from Telegram, became the most-requested song on national station JJJ. The EP required six pressings before she issued her next recording, Circular Breathing, in 2006. After signing with Sony-BMG Australia she delivered her debut full-length album, Little Eve, in 2007.