Kate Miller-Heidke says her singing is like ‘a yodelling ambulance or Enya on meth’

On stage at the Woodford Folk Festival, it is clear singer Kate Miller-Heidke and her husband Keir Nuttall share a self-deprecating sense of humour.

Despite the 37 degree heat, she looks as cool as a cucumber in a watermelon coloured outfit, while Nuttall, feeling the heat, starts unbuttoning his shirt like a striptease and does some self-parodying guitar antics, to cool down.

They invite young performers up on to the stage to sing and play the piano for her song about schoolyard bullying and regret, Caught In The Crowd, and the audience laughs at her jokes about the high register of her classically trained voice.

“My friend Benjamin Law says I sound like a yodelling ambulance. I’ve read online people say I sound like Enya on crystal meth.” Even their seven-year-old son Ernie, who joins them onstage to dance at one point, reports that her singing “makes his ears cry.”

So it is no surprise the couple responsible for the 2017 hit musical Muriel’s Wedding, have created what they call another “screwball comedy” musical, BANANALAND. It premiered at the Brisbane Festival in 2023, and is playing now at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatre as a centrepiece of the programming for Sydney Festival 2024.

Backstage over a beer and some deep-fried festival food, Miller-Heidke proves she is no diva. After she’s done a “warm down” of her voice, made a quick change into a summer dress, we dine with a real Queensland rainforest backdrop, mozzies and all.

The humidity is stifling; sweat is pouring off us both. But the Brisbane-raised performer in unfazed: she’s come to this Queensland folk festival almost every year since 1996.

Tucking into a Nourish Bowl, and Tempura Mushrooms from Byron Bay-based stallholders the FunGuys, we laugh that for Victorians like herself (she and family now live in Melbourne) mushrooms have had some bad press of late. It’s too hot to eat, so we nibble, drink and chat.

“Woodford has remained this beautiful constant in my life, even though it changes, the essence of the spirit of this place has stayed the same since I first came. And it’s just a place where I feel that I belong and just feel really nourished. It’s a sort of utopia.”

“The weather can be extreme though, the heat, the mud and I’ve been rained out camping here too, but I’ve started to look at it like that’s part of the Woodford experience. It’s a little bit of adversity that bonds people.”

Miller-Heidke has never shied from singing about her own adversity, which bonds her with audiences across Australia. She sings and writes about mortality and the fleeting nature of life in her most popular single, The Last Day on Earth from 2009, which reached number three on the ARIA Singles Chart after being used in promos for TV soap Neighbours. She’s spoken openly in heartfelt songs about traumas too, from post-natal depression (Zero Gravity which she performed in Tel Aviv for 2019 Eurovision) to being a survivor of sexual abuse by her great-grandfather (You can’t hurt me anymore, from her most recent album Child In Reverse).

She wrote that song in honour of not just her own experience, but also those survivors of sexual assault, abuse and harassment, including musician Jaguar Jonze, with whom she had a conversation on the topic the morning she penned it.

“That was really cathartic for me just to put that out there because I think it released the weight of this heavy secret. And to completely just blow up that secrecy, to have it out there for everyone to see, my family, my fans, everyone … It was like reclaiming it. Like making lemonade out of lemons and I still love that song, and I know a lot of survivors of sexual assault talk to me often about that one too.”

‘I’ve written songs about personal things that have happened to me and friends of mine … but they usually forgive me, eventually.’

Kate Miller-Heidke

Miller-Heidke, while ethereal and fun on stage, is suddenly deadly serious.

“I’ll just do anything for a good song. I’m a bit mercenary about it, I have no boundaries sometimes. I’ve written songs about personal things that have happened to me and friends of mine as well. They’re like ‘Oh, my god, I told you that in secret’. But they usually forgive me, eventually,” she says.

Music, she says, has been pivotal in helping her overcome life’s challenges. She was born in Gladstone, and after her school principal father and dancing and languages teaching mother divorced, she and her brother spent time between both parents’ homes.

“I wouldn’t say my childhood was easy. I wouldn’t want to live it again the way it was … I just finished telling a psychologist about it.

“I think I was a very eccentric child, a bit socially backward, a sort of mixture of painfully awkward and introverted and also a terrible show-off who loved to sing. I didn’t know where I fit in for a long time, and then I discovered amateur musical theatre. I found my people. When I met the theatre kids I realised, ‘Oh, I’m not such a freak after all’.”

She took violin and piano lessons and joined the children’s chorus of professional productions of Brisbane shows like Oliver. But it was that trip with her mother and stepfather to Woodford in 1996 that changed her life. It opened her eyes to the world of folk music. The next year she brought her guitar, wrote her name on the chalkboard to play at some venues and performed in public for the first time.

“I played my very first-ever shows here, and I think it’s where I learnt how to be a performer.”

It is also special because it is the place where her bandmate, husband and co-creator Nuttall, asked her to marry him. “He proposed to me wearing a head torch in a caravan,” she explains.

“I’d love to get buried here. I reckon Bill Hauritz [Woodford founder] should consider this as a fundraising option, and create a little cemetery here, where maybe you pay something like $10,000 to be buried here. Like at MONA in Hobart. I love just to come as a punter here and as an avid audience member I slip in and out of the venues and stumble on some gems.”

She’s come so often to camp and sing at the festival former PM Bob Hawke made famous, she’s known as its unofficial “matron saint”.

Her career has been varied: from starring in TV dramas, performing in The Masked Singer – disguised as a queen – in 2020 putting her operatic vocal range to full use, singing at the 2023 AFL grand final, scored an opera, The Rabbits for Opera Australia, based on the John Marsden/Shaun Tan book. But the highlight so far has been the success of Muriel’s Wedding the musical.

“It’s such a buzz to get to sit in the audience after a few champagnes and getting to watch what we’ve done without any pressure of performing myself. The opening night of Muriel’s Wedding at that point was the biggest thrill I’d ever experienced. Partly because it wasn’t me on stage.”

Yes, she still gets nervous every performance, despite decades of experience. She’d be worried if she wasn’t she says.

This year promises to be a busy one for her and Nuttall.

They plan to go to the UK where Muriel’s Wedding, which won five Helpmann Awards, including Best Original Score, is slated to open on the West End after a regional tour in Britain. Her band embarks on their “Catching Diamonds” national tour on January 19, ahead of her sixth studio album due later this year. She’ll also take part in an Australia Day performance at the Sydney Opera House, with her friend and former neighbour, didgeridoo player William Barton, whose partner violinist, Veronique Serret, plays with her often, including at Woodford.

BANANALAND, the project that’s brought them to the Sydney Festival, was a project they began during COVID lockdown, with Nuttall writing the script and Miller-Heidke writing the music particularly with the voice of Max McKenna in mind.

McKenna, then known as Maggie, starred in Muriel’s Wedding and has what Miller-Heidke describes as one of her “favourite voices on the planet.”

It is directed by Simon Phillips, who also directed Muriel’s Wedding on stage.

BANANALAND follows the story of angry punk rockers Kitty Litter and their unexpected rise to fame when one of the band’s protest anthems becomes a hit with the unlikeliest of listenerships – kids. A narrative similar to that of the Wiggles, some of whom started in the band the Cockroaches.

“The main protagonist, Ruby Semblances, is in a band who are on a mission to save the world. She’s got a bit too much Rock Eisteddfod in her background. And she takes it very seriously. She almost has a messiah complex. She’s a magnetic presence and the rest of the band take their lead from her, and they have very strong messages which are quite didactic.

“We began it so long ago it started off with Joh Bjelke-Petersen in mind. Now it’s about Clive Palmer’s incursion into federal politics,” says Miller-Heidke, who, like Nuttall, is a Queenslander who grew up with Bjelke-Petersen and Palmer often discussed.

“The kids mistake the political anthem for a song about a magical land where everybody gets a free banana and it starts climbing the charts to become a hit with the very young set,” she says.

Things go bad, there’s hints of violence, a giant inflatable penis, and Miller-Heidke warns the show really is not intended for children.

“Keir created the story, the characters and the whole script, and it’s very, very rare to get an original show put up like this. It costs millions of dollars. It’s very risky. Musicals usually take about 10 years to develop, and we’re just so lucky that Brisbane, now Sydney Festival got on board to support it.

“Because it’s a comedy it lives or dies by the laughs and by the time we got to opening night in Brisbane I was like, is this even funny? I don’t know any more. And then when the audience started to laugh, and then when that laughter kept building and building and there was this sort of runaway train of laughter I was like, ‘Oh, thanks’. That sort of exhilaration is really cool.”

Miller-Heidke says she is keen to keep pursuing different professional opportunities as they come up.

“I know that ageism and sexism is real in the music business. I’m 42 and in radio at age 30, for a woman, you pretty much get put out to pasture. So despite all that, I do feel proud of having built this patchwork career.”

Interview over, she heads back to her tent for a change into more casual shorts and T-shirt, and slips off into the night to become a “punter”. True to her word, as an avid audience member she shows up with Nuttall at a show by one of her long-time favourite folk singers, Penelope Swales. Caught in the crowd, just like her song.

BANANALAND is on at the Riverside Theatre until January 14, part of Sydney Festival 2024.

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