Bio Full Biography »

Kate Miller-Heidke was fully trained as a lead opera vocalist -- soprano -- and was ready to go into a career of Gilbert & Sullivan roles when pop music beckoned. She has since become a piano-playing singer/songwriter in the Kate Bush mold, popular for her theatricality, mixture of folk and pop, and the touches of comic opera she inserts into her songs. As a young girl, Miller-Heidke would charge her family five cents for household performances. It was a long way from there to her position as a darling of alternative radio and young audiences, with stops along the way to work for the Best & Less chain store (she was fired for "general incompetence") and earn multiple degrees in music. In 2000 she joined with a group of fellow Brisbane musicians to form the band Elsewhere, who released a single self-titled EP. Miller-Heidke also performed solo, humorously working opera into her covers of songs in other genres. A rare EP called Comikaze, released in 2005, collected several of these. In 2...