Nathan Cavaleri: New Blues with a Story

Nathan Cavaleri steps onstage, easily picks up his guitar and starts playing. What the audience doesn’t know yet is that the simple, famous action of ‘Cavaleri picks up guitar’ has been fraught. On Friday night I went to The Brunswick Ballroom to see Nathan Cavaleri: New Blues with a Story. It’s a music show coinciding with his recent album release, peppered with anecdotes and musings from his past. Nathan’s story is an intense one; we see a grown man on stage and yet the figure of the child remains. The vulnerability of the seven-year-old is there too.

When a human that young is touched by The Muses with the spark of creative genius, those who bear witness are truly amazed. Children are naturally ostentatious, inherently creative and very emotionally attuned. They are primed for and receptive to creativity, it is somewhat their natural state. Some children are met with parents/carers who recognize this capacity and can support it. Others might be unseen in their expression of vitality. Nathan was definitely seen, seen again and seen some more. Not only was he touched by The Muses of creativity but was gripped by the hand of celebrity.

Nathan Cavaleri is an Australian artist whose rise to fame started at the age of seven, he wowed the nation on Hey Hey It’s Saturday. He was also a cancer patient who overcame leukemia, playing his guitar the whole way through. As a child undergoing chemotherapy, he performed huge gigs on stage with the likes of Diesel and Jimmy Barnes. Australian and international audiences simply loved him, he was a cute kid, who played some mean guitar. He appeared in an American film A Camp Nowhere (1994) and an Australian film, Paws (1997) - where he had the lead role and a teenage Heath Ledger had a bit part. His kid next door quality made almost everything he touched just totally wholesome. He was an Australian child star, dynamite musician and grew up squarely in the public eye.

Nathan begins a song with the words ‘I had demons sleeping in my bed, they woke up and filled my head’. It is instantly unnerving. This lyrical metaphor is enough. The shadow of his story is introduced to us and it is compelling. There is a part of us that doesn’t want to know it, and another part says, ‘Alright, give it to us’. In Growing Pains, An Australian Story episode about Nathan, his struggles are mentioned but the episode is short and wrapped up a bit too neatly for me. It seems to return Nathan to his sunny disposition, the one that Australia has loved so much, the one that makes for good TV. However, his live shows have the capacity to hold deeper space and to linger in the darkness.

Throughout New Blues with a Story he weaves short recollections and some funny memories of life on tour. He reflects on his teenage years with an aptly protective mama and precious moments with his own young children. It is the intersections where the past meets the present that become really interesting. Where the adult faces the child. He sings a song about ‘the fog’ that his adult self has had to navigate. The audience understands that he is referring to his overwhelming experiences with depression and anxiety of performing on stage. He tells us that the fog came in and he stopped playing music. It is an upsetting part of his story - he abandoned his guitar. Or, did his guitar abandon him?

Nathan’s story touches on many themes of the now. Child-stars waking up to the impact of early stardom is in vogue, mental health is being spotlighted and there are wider conversations about how gender fits into that. But one theme in particular really lands with me. It seems that like many intensely creative, fit-to-burst with creativity human-artists, he hit a massive burnout. Depression, stage fright and performance anxiety are not to be taken lightly. Those things woke up in Nathan, they kept him so awake that insomnia took over him. The audience can only imagine the deep soul split that he would have been holding.

Yet Nathan’s struggles are not an anomaly, they emerge in a cultural context and are happening to artists at all levels of experience. I am left wondering; how does this culture support or constrain the capacity of artists who are bloody good at their jobs? As an artist-performer myself I am really interested in the mental health of performing artists, the conditions in which we can thrive, simply survive or for lack of a better word die. Being an artist is intense, how do we and this society bear that intensity?

Nathan shares that he is premiering a new in-theatre music and storytelling show across 2026-27 which promises to be personal. New Blues with a Story feels like a precursor to this, his sheer musical prowess provides a solid base for him to dip his toes into what he can reveal to us. I am curious about his future show and I hope it digs below the surface. Importantly, Nathan Cavaleri’s music and storytelling urges us to not take him, or the role of the performing artist for granted, he reminds us that each step towards the stage is a vulnerable one.

Review by Kimberley Twiner