The Australian pop great picks out her favourite songs of a three-decade career, from escaping the creative boredom of the Kylie & Jason years to the dancefloor classics of her new album, Golden
Better the Devil You Know (1990)
You can look at Kylie Minogue’s career in terms of statistics – seven UK No 1 singles, 34 Top 10 singles, 118 weeks in the Top 10, plus five No 1 albums and seven more in the Top 10 – and those figures are impressive. But they don’t truly measure the love that people hold for a singer who has been part of the fabric of pop for 30 years. To launch her latest album, Golden, she played a handful of tiny club shows, including one at the Cafe de Paris in London. She says she was terrified. “I thought: ‘People only know one song …’” She need not have been: there was an air of hysteria from her fans at seeing her return in such intimate surroundings. Frankly, she could have read a phone book while someone dug up the stage with a pneumatic drill and people would still have swooned. She laughs at this, adding: “With a banjo!”
Maybe the moment where Kylie – Jenner notwithstanding, it somehow feels wrong to use her surname – transmuted from aspirant pop star to someone people really invested in was Better the Devil You Know, a sudden leap from her previous singles with the Stock Aitken and Waterman writing and production team.
I was bored – I wanted to understand the process and the craft more
Kylie on the SAW years
“It was the first time Pete Waterman had said: ‘All right, kiddo, what are you listening to? What kind of record do you want to make?’ And I was really into Cathy Dennis and D-Mob’s C’Mon On and Get My Love …” Kylie starts singing the hook that crops up in both songs. “It really does mark a turning point for me, sonically and visually. I still don’t know that I had a clue what I was doing, but I was doing something that was different for me.”
And is it true that Waterman wrote Better the Devil You Know as a warning to her to stick with nice Jason Donovan instead of getting involved with Michael Hutchence? Kylie laughs. “It could have been. They never really told me that much about the writing process. In the early days it was: ‘There’s the waiting room, do you want a cup of tea? We’ll let you know when we’re ready.’ That bothered me a bit later, being bored in the waiting room; I wanted to understand the process and the craft more and be involved.”
Confide in Me (1994)
In 1993, Kylie made a definitive break with the past, signing to Deconstruction, with Confide in Me becoming her debut single for the label. “All I had known for five years was PWL,” she says of Waterman’s company, “so this was certainly different. And I was aware that it was being perceived as a bit of a radical move, which I loved.” Confide in Me was a bold statement: a stripped-back single, coloured with sitar and strings, sounding unlike anything she had done before. “It was the first time I had sung like that,” she says, referring to her breathy, seductive vocal, “because PWL songs all had a particular sound.” (Specifically: bellow-it-out-as-quickly-as-possible.)
Just as important as the change in music was the fact that Kylie was now working with people who would help her move in different directions – Deconstruction was where she met the Brothers in Rhythm production team of Dave Seaman and Steve Anderson (Anderson has been musical director for her live shows ever since). She had no doubts about the change, although she accepts that “me feeling like I could do it is different to the public reacting in a positive way. But I think it’s indicative of various steps I’ve taken throughout my career where I’ve made instinctive moves and hoped for the best.”
Where the Wild Roses Grow (with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 1996)
Which brings us to Kylie’s most hope-for-the-best move of all, the point at which two entirely unrelated sets of fans said of their favourite artist: “They’re working with who?” Kylie laughs, again, hard. “I KNOW!” She had first heard of Nick Cave a few years earlier, when she was dating Hutchence. “Michael said to me: ‘My friend Nick wants to do a song with you,’” she recalls. “I didn’t know who Nick Cave was. And I just said: ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ like your nan would say: ‘Oh that’s nice, dear, do you want a cup of tea?’”
Everything I did with him was just so tender and epic and close
Kylie Minogue on Nick Cave
By 1996, though, the pair were sharing an Australian label. Cave was working on his album Murder Ballads and Kylie was asked if she would like to contribute. A CD of the track – featuring Blixa Bargeld singing her lines – was sent to her parents’ house, where she was staying, and a game of phone tag ensued. Cave was also at his parents’, so the prince of darkness and the queen of sunshine were busy leaving messages with each other’s mums. “The first time I met Nick was at the recording studio in Melbourne,” she says. “I speed-read a biography to understand him a little bit. And there was some interesting stuff in there. But everything I did with him was just so tender and epic and close. He’s so amazing and loving, and it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever done.”
You might have thought that the dalliance with Cave would have contributed to Kylie’s decision to “go indie”, recording with the Manic Street Preachers on 1997’s Impossible Princess album, but she says not. “Nick didn’t like my indie jaunt. He said: ‘Why aren’t you doing pop songs?’ So, he’s responsible for my realisation that I wanted to get back to pop. He’s definitely infiltrated my life in beautiful and profound ways.”
Spinning Around (2000)
And so we enter Kylie’s imperial phase (“Oooh, ‘imperial’!” she says, laughing), though it did not come easily. In fact, she had recorded Spinning Around and no one at Parlophone, her third UK label, thought it sounded like a hit, Kylie included. But A&R executive Jamie Nelson, who had found the song as a demo in New York, was sure there was a smash in there somewhere.
“He was like a dog with a bone and kept chipping away and having different mixes done,” she says. “He didn’t give up and he was right not to.” What was crucial in the end, she says, was the whole package: song, video, promotion. The video, in particular, with its focus on Kylie’s bottom, became something of a tabloid obsession. Did that not get tiresome? “Well, I knew what I was wearing. But I didn’t know there was that closeup shot. I did it, it looked good, there’s no need to do it again.”
Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2001)
Even before she had finished hearing Can’t Get You Out of My Head for the first time, Kylie knew she needed to record it. “I was thrown into a panic, going: ‘Have we got it? Are you sure we’ve got it? Please tell me we’ve got this song.’” Of course, she did get it – and a No 1 in every European country except Finland, as well as in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, plus a Top 10 placing in the US. At this point, Kylie was one of the biggest pop stars in the world. “It was weird,” she says. “When you have an amazing time like that, you’re so busy you can’t get out of it. You’re in a bubble and you work, work, work, but things are going so well that hard work doesn’t seem so hard. If you’re trying to push a record up the hill – I also know that feeling – it does feels hard. You’re doing the same amount of work, but it feels harder.”
The actual business of being famous, she says, is harder now, because everyone has a camera everywhere, not just the paparazzi. “There’s no rhyme or reason,” she says of the hassles of being Kylie in public. “I’m going: ‘What’s the story? There’s no story, why are you here?’ It almost makes the old days feel romantic, when a paparazzo would have to make the decision: ‘Do I click that off? I’ve only got two rolls of film in my bag.’ But, at the time, I’d be running down the street to get away from them.”
Slow (2003)
In which the often maximalist Kylie embraced minimal techno, with a ghostly, stripped-down recording that, as well as being a huge hit, became a critical smash and a club success, topping the US Billboard dance chart. Back then, she was still making the effort to stay up with club trends (“I feel like I’m the last person to know anything these days”), although the Body Language album ended up a mish-mash of styles. “I’m not sure as a body of work it stands up, but Slow stands up and it was a no-brainer for the first single.”
She suspected that something so stripped back might be more selective in its appeal than Spinning Around or Can’t Get You Out of My Head, but “its reach was much further than any of us could have anticipated. I’ve done corporate shows where I’ve not planned an encore, so I’m going: ‘Are there any songs you’d like to hear again?’ And a lot of times Slow is the song that’s called out, which I still find surprising. It’s actually had longevity of sorts, which is amazing for a song that is so sparse and electro-cool.”
No More Rain (2007)
Kylie’s 10th album, X, had been prefigured by a breast cancer diagnosis. There were some people, she says, who were expecting X to be her dark-night-of-the-soul record, and they “were disappointed that it wasn’t about that experience. But I’d just gone through it all and I don’t think I had enough distance to really wallow in it and be back in that space.” No More Rain, however – a song of redemption, of the “sun coming up on another day” – did seem to symbolise her survival.
Doing No More Rain I’d just stand with the mic and enjoy the shower of emotion. It's about coming out of the other side
Kylie Minogue
“I performed it on the X tour, and it might have been my favourite moment every show, because there was no choreography, there was no nothing,” she says. “I’d just stand there with the microphone and just enjoy the shower of emotion I felt. It was about coming out of the other side.”
But mortality and age are two things that pop struggles with, especially pop of the Kylie sort, in which glamour and sequins and disco lights make a promise of eternal youth. How does a pop star make that promise as the years advance? “You spend longer in hair and makeup,” she laughs. “I think I’ve found my groove. I’m more accepting of myself.”
Dancing (2018)
Kylie’s latest album, Golden, is a reaffirmation of identity: in her personal life, following her split from her fiance Joshua Sasse in 2017; musically, with her relocation to Nashville to record the album with softer country tinges instead of hard dancefloor trim; and psychologically, with its addressing of age.
“That’s why there’s the word ‘golden’ on the album,” she says. “I wanted to address it, hence the line in Golden: ‘We’re not young, we’re not old, we’re golden.’”
Nevertheless, she still wanted something for the dancefloor. Dancing provides that and, in a roundabout way, a summary of her career. “To me, it’s like a neat triptych of three stages of life,” she says. “I went to Nashville, arrived on a Sunday, and started work. I put my hands together and looked out at the sky and said: ‘Please, God, just give me one song. Two or three would be just great, but I really need one song!’ Next day I met Steve McEwan, and he said: ‘I don’t want to get you straight in, let’s just have a chat and suss each other out, and he played me just on acoustic guitar the idea of Dancing, and then we fleshed it out through the week. It’s two minutes and 58, and there’s no messing about.”
That seems apposite: three minutes with no messing about has long been the platonic ideal of the pop single and ideal pop singles are what have defined Kylie’s career. After all, you don’t get those 118 weeks in the Top 10 without getting somewhere near perfection.
(Source: The Guardian)
Better the Devil You Know (1990)
You can look at Kylie Minogue’s career in terms of statistics – seven UK No 1 singles, 34 Top 10 singles, 118 weeks in the Top 10, plus five No 1 albums and seven more in the Top 10 – and those figures are impressive. But they don’t truly measure the love that people hold for a singer who has been part of the fabric of pop for 30 years. To launch her latest album, Golden, she played a handful of tiny club shows, including one at the Cafe de Paris in London. She says she was terrified. “I thought: ‘People only know one song …’” She need not have been: there was an air of hysteria from her fans at seeing her return in such intimate surroundings. Frankly, she could have read a phone book while someone dug up the stage with a pneumatic drill and people would still have swooned. She laughs at this, adding: “With a banjo!”
Maybe the moment where Kylie – Jenner notwithstanding, it somehow feels wrong to use her surname – transmuted from aspirant pop star to someone people really invested in was Better the Devil You Know, a sudden leap from her previous singles with the Stock Aitken and Waterman writing and production team.
I was bored – I wanted to understand the process and the craft more
Kylie on the SAW years
“It was the first time Pete Waterman had said: ‘All right, kiddo, what are you listening to? What kind of record do you want to make?’ And I was really into Cathy Dennis and D-Mob’s C’Mon On and Get My Love …” Kylie starts singing the hook that crops up in both songs. “It really does mark a turning point for me, sonically and visually. I still don’t know that I had a clue what I was doing, but I was doing something that was different for me.”
And is it true that Waterman wrote Better the Devil You Know as a warning to her to stick with nice Jason Donovan instead of getting involved with Michael Hutchence? Kylie laughs. “It could have been. They never really told me that much about the writing process. In the early days it was: ‘There’s the waiting room, do you want a cup of tea? We’ll let you know when we’re ready.’ That bothered me a bit later, being bored in the waiting room; I wanted to understand the process and the craft more and be involved.”
Confide in Me (1994)
In 1993, Kylie made a definitive break with the past, signing to Deconstruction, with Confide in Me becoming her debut single for the label. “All I had known for five years was PWL,” she says of Waterman’s company, “so this was certainly different. And I was aware that it was being perceived as a bit of a radical move, which I loved.” Confide in Me was a bold statement: a stripped-back single, coloured with sitar and strings, sounding unlike anything she had done before. “It was the first time I had sung like that,” she says, referring to her breathy, seductive vocal, “because PWL songs all had a particular sound.” (Specifically: bellow-it-out-as-quickly-as-possible.)
Just as important as the change in music was the fact that Kylie was now working with people who would help her move in different directions – Deconstruction was where she met the Brothers in Rhythm production team of Dave Seaman and Steve Anderson (Anderson has been musical director for her live shows ever since). She had no doubts about the change, although she accepts that “me feeling like I could do it is different to the public reacting in a positive way. But I think it’s indicative of various steps I’ve taken throughout my career where I’ve made instinctive moves and hoped for the best.”
Where the Wild Roses Grow (with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 1996)
Which brings us to Kylie’s most hope-for-the-best move of all, the point at which two entirely unrelated sets of fans said of their favourite artist: “They’re working with who?” Kylie laughs, again, hard. “I KNOW!” She had first heard of Nick Cave a few years earlier, when she was dating Hutchence. “Michael said to me: ‘My friend Nick wants to do a song with you,’” she recalls. “I didn’t know who Nick Cave was. And I just said: ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ like your nan would say: ‘Oh that’s nice, dear, do you want a cup of tea?’”
Everything I did with him was just so tender and epic and close
Kylie Minogue on Nick Cave
By 1996, though, the pair were sharing an Australian label. Cave was working on his album Murder Ballads and Kylie was asked if she would like to contribute. A CD of the track – featuring Blixa Bargeld singing her lines – was sent to her parents’ house, where she was staying, and a game of phone tag ensued. Cave was also at his parents’, so the prince of darkness and the queen of sunshine were busy leaving messages with each other’s mums. “The first time I met Nick was at the recording studio in Melbourne,” she says. “I speed-read a biography to understand him a little bit. And there was some interesting stuff in there. But everything I did with him was just so tender and epic and close. He’s so amazing and loving, and it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever done.”
You might have thought that the dalliance with Cave would have contributed to Kylie’s decision to “go indie”, recording with the Manic Street Preachers on 1997’s Impossible Princess album, but she says not. “Nick didn’t like my indie jaunt. He said: ‘Why aren’t you doing pop songs?’ So, he’s responsible for my realisation that I wanted to get back to pop. He’s definitely infiltrated my life in beautiful and profound ways.”
Spinning Around (2000)
And so we enter Kylie’s imperial phase (“Oooh, ‘imperial’!” she says, laughing), though it did not come easily. In fact, she had recorded Spinning Around and no one at Parlophone, her third UK label, thought it sounded like a hit, Kylie included. But A&R executive Jamie Nelson, who had found the song as a demo in New York, was sure there was a smash in there somewhere.
“He was like a dog with a bone and kept chipping away and having different mixes done,” she says. “He didn’t give up and he was right not to.” What was crucial in the end, she says, was the whole package: song, video, promotion. The video, in particular, with its focus on Kylie’s bottom, became something of a tabloid obsession. Did that not get tiresome? “Well, I knew what I was wearing. But I didn’t know there was that closeup shot. I did it, it looked good, there’s no need to do it again.”
Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2001)
Even before she had finished hearing Can’t Get You Out of My Head for the first time, Kylie knew she needed to record it. “I was thrown into a panic, going: ‘Have we got it? Are you sure we’ve got it? Please tell me we’ve got this song.’” Of course, she did get it – and a No 1 in every European country except Finland, as well as in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, plus a Top 10 placing in the US. At this point, Kylie was one of the biggest pop stars in the world. “It was weird,” she says. “When you have an amazing time like that, you’re so busy you can’t get out of it. You’re in a bubble and you work, work, work, but things are going so well that hard work doesn’t seem so hard. If you’re trying to push a record up the hill – I also know that feeling – it does feels hard. You’re doing the same amount of work, but it feels harder.”
The actual business of being famous, she says, is harder now, because everyone has a camera everywhere, not just the paparazzi. “There’s no rhyme or reason,” she says of the hassles of being Kylie in public. “I’m going: ‘What’s the story? There’s no story, why are you here?’ It almost makes the old days feel romantic, when a paparazzo would have to make the decision: ‘Do I click that off? I’ve only got two rolls of film in my bag.’ But, at the time, I’d be running down the street to get away from them.”
Slow (2003)
In which the often maximalist Kylie embraced minimal techno, with a ghostly, stripped-down recording that, as well as being a huge hit, became a critical smash and a club success, topping the US Billboard dance chart. Back then, she was still making the effort to stay up with club trends (“I feel like I’m the last person to know anything these days”), although the Body Language album ended up a mish-mash of styles. “I’m not sure as a body of work it stands up, but Slow stands up and it was a no-brainer for the first single.”
She suspected that something so stripped back might be more selective in its appeal than Spinning Around or Can’t Get You Out of My Head, but “its reach was much further than any of us could have anticipated. I’ve done corporate shows where I’ve not planned an encore, so I’m going: ‘Are there any songs you’d like to hear again?’ And a lot of times Slow is the song that’s called out, which I still find surprising. It’s actually had longevity of sorts, which is amazing for a song that is so sparse and electro-cool.”
No More Rain (2007)
Kylie’s 10th album, X, had been prefigured by a breast cancer diagnosis. There were some people, she says, who were expecting X to be her dark-night-of-the-soul record, and they “were disappointed that it wasn’t about that experience. But I’d just gone through it all and I don’t think I had enough distance to really wallow in it and be back in that space.” No More Rain, however – a song of redemption, of the “sun coming up on another day” – did seem to symbolise her survival.
Doing No More Rain I’d just stand with the mic and enjoy the shower of emotion. It's about coming out of the other side
Kylie Minogue
“I performed it on the X tour, and it might have been my favourite moment every show, because there was no choreography, there was no nothing,” she says. “I’d just stand there with the microphone and just enjoy the shower of emotion I felt. It was about coming out of the other side.”
But mortality and age are two things that pop struggles with, especially pop of the Kylie sort, in which glamour and sequins and disco lights make a promise of eternal youth. How does a pop star make that promise as the years advance? “You spend longer in hair and makeup,” she laughs. “I think I’ve found my groove. I’m more accepting of myself.”
Dancing (2018)
Kylie’s latest album, Golden, is a reaffirmation of identity: in her personal life, following her split from her fiance Joshua Sasse in 2017; musically, with her relocation to Nashville to record the album with softer country tinges instead of hard dancefloor trim; and psychologically, with its addressing of age.
“That’s why there’s the word ‘golden’ on the album,” she says. “I wanted to address it, hence the line in Golden: ‘We’re not young, we’re not old, we’re golden.’”
Nevertheless, she still wanted something for the dancefloor. Dancing provides that and, in a roundabout way, a summary of her career. “To me, it’s like a neat triptych of three stages of life,” she says. “I went to Nashville, arrived on a Sunday, and started work. I put my hands together and looked out at the sky and said: ‘Please, God, just give me one song. Two or three would be just great, but I really need one song!’ Next day I met Steve McEwan, and he said: ‘I don’t want to get you straight in, let’s just have a chat and suss each other out, and he played me just on acoustic guitar the idea of Dancing, and then we fleshed it out through the week. It’s two minutes and 58, and there’s no messing about.”
That seems apposite: three minutes with no messing about has long been the platonic ideal of the pop single and ideal pop singles are what have defined Kylie’s career. After all, you don’t get those 118 weeks in the Top 10 without getting somewhere near perfection.
(Source: The Guardian)
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