On the rise and one to watch, Melbourne-born guitarist Kathleen Halloran is bringing her unique brand of musical firepower to the Melbourne Guitar Show next month.
Hosted across the weekend of March 1-2 2025 at the Melbourne Showgrounds, this year’s event is the beating heart of Australia’s guitar community, hosting every flavour of guitar-based musical acts, bands, and performers. With more than sixty exhibitors presenting hundreds of products – from ukeleles, amps, pedals, guitar strings, bass guitars, music books and more – the Melbourne Guitar Show has plenty on offer for music-lovers of every creed and stripe.
Read all the latest features, columns and more here.
Melbourne Guitar Show 2025
- Australia’s largest showcase of guitars, guitar products and guitar-playing
- March 1-2, 2025 at Victoria Pavilion, Melbourne Showgrounds
- Follow them on Facebook and Instagram and grab tickets here
Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.
For Kathleen, the upcoming show is an incredible opportunity for “every kind of guitar nerd you could think of,” she says, to get together and celebrate this wonderful instrument. Having been a number of times previously, both as a punter and a performer, Kathleen is hugely excited for what’s in store this year.
“You really get to be around so many of yourself, like, so many other guitarists when there’s usually only one of you on a gig,” she says. “So to arrive there, and in every corner there’s a guitar hero, a living legend, it’s such a great space for magic to occur. And it always does: in jams, in meetings… Yeah, it’s pretty special.”
Kathleen comes to the Melbourne Guitar Show off the back of her new single, Free with Me. The reception toward the song has been better than anything she could ever have hoped for or imagined, even listing on the Australian Independent Record charts.
She cites her inspirations for the track as being the drive to break through personal barriers and the expectations placed upon emerging artists. “It’s for those who don’t really fit into a box or a label,” she says. “It’s about that inner freedom and getting to know that and loving it, and then coming out, just being yourself.”
Born in the outer western suburb of Hoppers Crossing, the youngest of nine children, none of her siblings followed a musical pathway as Kathleen did.
In light of this, she was blessed with parents who, Kathleen says, “couldn’t be more supportive. They didn’t understand music, but they drove me around wherever I needed to go. Whatever I needed, they found a way to give it to me.”
It was this love and support from the earliest stages of her budding interest in music that protected Kathleen from the possibility she might not make it as an artist. “They really made it work for me,” she says.
Her first encounter with the guitar came about by happenstance, however, thanks to a sibling’s ex-boyfriend who would often leave their guitar lying around the house.
“I instantly fell in love with it,” she recalls of her first experience of holding a guitar, “and that was it. I was about 10-years-old when I started, and then studied it in school, and fell deeper and deeper in love with it from there.”
While Kathleen had always loved music, it was the guitar which first sparked the desire to create music of her own. She soon began playing in school bands, but it was her guitar teacher who put Kathleen in his own cover band on the weekends.
“From about 15 onwards,” she says, “I was basically a working musician. I’ve never really had another job since.”
Since then, Kathleen has come to share the stage with major artists such as Katie Noonan and The Cat Empire’s Felix Riebl. Yet she is quick to underline her biggest influence came from Kate Ceberano.
“I’ve worked with her, in her band, about six years now. It was my first big break as a session musician, my first high-profile gig, and she just believed in me way, way before I believed in myself.”
In the time that they have worked together, Kathleen says the two are best friends and talk to one another almost daily. Kathleen’s own sense of self and confidence has grown enormously under Kate’s guidance and reassurance.
“I was about 20-years-old when I met her – very inexperienced – but she could see that I loved it,” Kathleen reflects, “so she just threw me the keys and said, ‘Let’s go.’”
Beyond her event-opening performance at the Melbourne Guitar Show this March, the coming months hold plenty in store for the plucky guitarist from Hoppers Crossing. With a new single dropping next month, Find Me Again, Kathleen Halloran will be found on festival stages across Australia this year – and shows absolutely no signs of slowing down.
Discover the entire Melbourne Guitar Show program here.
This article was made in partnership with the Melbourne Guitar Show.
