Kate Miller-Heidke Doesn't Want To Be Defined By Eurovision

More than 100 million people tuned into last year’s Eurovision Song Contest – a daunting figure for Queensland-born powerhouse and Australia’s 2019 entry Kate Miller-Heidke. “It makes me feel slightly ill,” Miller-Heidke laughs. “I just have to focus on my own performance and try to shut everything else out.”

The singer was selected to represent Australia after being crowned the champion of Eurovision - Australia Decides, beating out artists like Courtney Act and Sheppard when she won over the public and a panel of judges with her song Zero Gravity and its accompanying production, which has been altered quite a bit already in preparation for her time in Tel Aviv this May.

READ MORE: 'It's Difficult' - Kate Miller-Heidke Defends Decision To Perform At Tel Aviv Eurovision

“We've sort of streamlined it and there is this striking simplicity and elegance about it now,” she explains. “That's the idea anyway, but there's also a technical aspect to it, which requires a fair bit of rehearsal.

“I'm not going over thinking about winning or getting a high place or anything like that that's out of my control. I just want to go over there and do a performance that I'm proud of; this is beyond anything I've ever experienced and beyond anything I'll ever get to do again. So I just wanna milk it.”

Although an important chapter in her career (“It's going to be a life highlight”), to describe it as the most important would be reductive. “I would not like to be defined just by Eurovision,” Miller-Heidke stresses. “I mean, certainly in terms of audience, it's massive, but the reason that I feel confident and good about it is I've had a lot of experience leading up to this point and done a lot of different challenging things.”

Zero Gravity and its accompanying stage production bring together different elements from her eclectic career to date, with a strong focus on theatrical and operatic themes. “That is what I love about your Eurovision – they embrace theatricality and I love the more sort of bonkers, extreme end of Eurovision. This song was written to be experienced with a visual component on the Eurovision stage.

“It's not a song that was written for the radio or any other stage really except the Eurovision stage. I'm sure I'll end up singing it a lot outside of that stage. But it's where the song was designed to be.

“This poor old bloke got fired for playing it on a Christian community radio station in WA [laughs]… I don’t know if that's a good sign. It's creating a strong reaction in people.”

The song itself is about a deeply personal time in Miller-Heidke’s life, with the singer touching on her battle with postnatal depression. “Music has always been a kind of therapy for me. And singing is like a beautiful physical thing,” she says. “But I mean that song was written when I was in the clear and tries to capture that feeling of coming out into the clear, and that feeling of a weight being lifted off. The song couldn't have been written if I hadn't found my way out of that fog.

“Any song that does have a personal meaning, you do feel vulnerable when you share it for the first time, but the reaction seems so positive and people in my online community have been sharing their own stories and I've found all that very amazing. In my experience, the most powerful songs do contain some kind of true emotion and that's what I wanted to achieve with this song.”

It’s been a hectic couple of years for Miller-Heidke, following her work on Muriel's Wedding and now Eurovision, but after May, she’ll be getting stuck into her own music again. “I'm kind of halfway through writing a new album, so when I get back I'll be focusing on that,” she reveals. And I can't wait 'cause the last few years have been very taken up with Muriel's Wedding The Musical and some other theatre project. But I'm looking forward to writing more stuff for my own voice.”