Kate Ceberano

When you said failures before, success and failures, what are the failures?

Herculean failures.

Are they?

Oh, yeah.

Like hands and knees on the ground, braying like a donkey with the sheer agony of like lost opportunities.

Um, God, there's so many I can think of.

Well, I mean, there are the obvious ones which come to mind, which is declining the offer to sing the title track for Strictly Ballroom.

Because I thought that ballroom dancing was pretty daggy.

Oh, really?

But that's also a very unlike you response.

Well, not at the time because ballroom dancing was pretty daggy when I grew up.

Right.

No, well, back then I said no to a lot of things, stockache and mortar man.

Right.

I've said no to, at the time, you know, just...

defending my right to be, you know, a punk at the time.

And actually, you know, Virginia Trioli, who's another great Melbourne girl, one of our kind, she said, you've got to stop apologising for this stuff because actually you were performing the very duty of a punk made in the streets of Melbourne to decline the offer of doing these things, right?

She's like, stop looking at your life like a sliding doors.

She was sort of slapping me on the cheek and saying...

Well, the one thing, the things that really hurt are when you're on the brink of releasing an album you've spent three months making and because of a change of guard in a label, one person left and another comes in and within 24 hours they've cancelled your whole release and you're no longer going to have a career in New York.