Over the years, there have been many Kylie Minogues. We’ve had Pop Kylie, Indie Kylie, B-Side Kylie, Country Kylie, Disco Kylie – different versions of the same superstar, each with her own sound and wardrobe. Just as iconic as orange halterneck-and-white hot pants Kylie is Kylie, tear-sodden and ethereal, tangled up in a haunting ballad with Australia’s enfant terrible Nick Cave.
And yet, there is a sense that every last one of these iterations has contained a bit of the real Kylie – who that is, is less clear. Because well, what do we really know about this luminous antipodean? There are the broad strokes – she is famously friendly and has a gregarious laugh – and the statistics: seven UK No 1 singles, 34 Top 10 singles, 118 weeks in the Top 10, five No 1 albums and seven more in the Top 10. Not to mention the freight train of high-impact hits. But at 57 years old, Kylie possesses the kind of nebulous mystique that brooding rock gods strive for.
A new three-part documentary, out Wednesday on Netflix, goes some way in lifting the lid. “They’re convincing me to let you in,” says a very young, fresh-faced Kylie from a recording booth in its opening scene. Starting off with her supersonic switch-up from Aussie soap star to international pop star, KYLIE paints a picture of an artist who glides, with great effort, out of any box she finds herself in. She speaks about the pushback she faced when she dared to voice any creative input into the songs she was singing, and the derision that her indie U-turn was met with by the press. More revealing still are vignettes of her personal life, namely her unlikely relationships with the darker side of Australian music: the late INXS frontman Michael Hutchinson and Nick Cave.
From finding creative fulfilment against the odds to old jealousies and romantic escapades, here are the major talking points of the first two episodes of KYLIE…
“I Should Be So Lucky” was written in two hours, and named after her mad-dash to the airport
Variations of this anecdote have made the rounds over the years, but it makes sense that the documentary opens with the story behind the song that made Kylie a pop star. At 19 years old, she landed in London bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to record her first song – a song that was yet to be written by a team who didn’t know who Kylie was despite the juggernaut success of Neighbours this side of the Indian Ocean. “We were too busy. We didn’t watch television,” says Pete Waterman of the writing-producing trio Stock Aitken Waterman. As such, they left Kylie in the waiting room for so long that in the end they only had two hours to write and record her debut before she was due back on a plane to Sydney. “They’d forgotten I was there,” says Kylie. As for the song’s title, that too was influenced by the mad rush around the recording. “She only had 30 minutes to get to the airport so somebody said, ‘You should be so lucky. I said, ‘That’s it!’” recalls Waterman.
Kylie is still searching for a love affair like the one she shared with Michael Hutchence
A decent chunk of the documentary’s first two episodes are dedicated to Kylie’s relationship with fellow Australian import, INXS frontman and sex god Michael Hutchence, whom she left her Neighbours co-star Jason Donavan for. Their love affair had all the markings of a doomed endeavour – girl-next-door pop star on the rise, established bad boy and casanova on the scene – but what unfolded was remarkably sweet. “I’d never felt that I had blinkers on, but he took them off,” says Kylie, alongside footage of the pair joyous and in one another’s arms on a boat in Hong Kong.
Before he split up with Kylie, Hutchence, no doubt, was a lifeline to the singer in those early years of tabloid frenzy, and a guiding force in her music in that he encouraged her to take control of it for herself. “I’ve probably been looking for something like that ever since and haven’t got it,” she says now. His funeral in Sydney, after he died by suicide, was the first she ever attended. “This is going to sound crazy but I felt him saying it’s OK, it will be OK,” she says. “I always feel he’s with me.”
Jason Donavan was envious of Kylie’s budding music career
For a long time, Kylie was known as one half of Kylie-and-Jason, the good-looking and in love duo at the heart of Neighbours, so it makes sense that her counterpart Jason Donavan felt a little abandoned when she left Ramsay Street for pop stardom. When the tabloids started turning on her, anointing her with the unenviable nickname “the singing budgie”, Donavan recalls saying to her: “‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t have gone down that route,’ because that’s sort of how my attitude was. Because her music career at that point had really taken off and it… it didn’t piss me off, but it was like… we’d been this partnership in this show… And also I had my own ego at that point: ‘Why isn’t this happening to me?!’” Not long after, though, Donovan was tapped to record his own debut single “Nothing Can Divide Us”.
Nick Cave was terrified of Kylie’s fans
Looking at Cave or listening to his music, you wouldn’t think much would scare this force of darkness, but everyone has their kryptonite and at a 1995 recording of Top of the Pops, Cave came face to face with his. “I have never experienced anything like Kylie Minogue’s audience,” he says, reflecting on his and Kylie’s duet performance of “Where the Wild Roses Grow”. “They were terrifying. Just these sort of monstrous, awful teenage girls. They did not like me and they did not like me to go near their princess.” According to the provocateur, who had struck up a close and fruitful friendship with the pop star, the young girls looked up at him from the crowd and ran their fingers across their throats, turning off the menace and smiling gleefully just in time for the cameras to land on them. “These little girls were going, ‘You f***ing old bastard… what are you doing, you horrible old c***?’ Evil, evil people,” he concludes, evidently still haunted by the memory.
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“We went a bit far” – Kylie admits which show of hers crossed the line
It is a right of passage for pop stars to break bad at some point in their careers, but on reflection Kylie thinks that she pushed the envelope a little too far in her sex kitten rebrand. Newly empowered and in control, Kylie said farewell to her squeaky clean image and hello to fishnet tights. “As soon as I had my image in my little grasp, by God I would turn into a lunatic,” she laughs. To that end, Kylie debuted her new look and sound in Belfast for the first stop on her 1991 Let’s Get To It tour. Suffice to say, all the spanking, hip-thursting, and gyrating didn’t go down too well. “Erotic Kylie Upsets Irish Mums,” read one headline at the time. “Yeah we went a bit far, I’m not going to lie. We went a bit far,” she says. “That was tricky, to defend those decisions…”
Improbably, it was Nick Cave who encouraged Indie Kylie to go back to her pop roots
Cave is the first to admit that the immediate affinity he felt with Kylie did not exactly mean he listened to her music – “there was something about her that I liked but I didn’t sit around listening to her records or anything” – but it was him who encouraged her to tap back into her original upbeat sound amid the recording of her more experimental Impossible Princess. Cave invited Kylie to read at the 1996 Poetry Olympics where she famously read aloud a spoken word version of “I Should Be So Lucky”. It was like “being face-to-face with my old self,” she says. “The one I was trying to turn my back on.”
Cave went one step further, telling cameras: “I don’t know if I said this outright, but I’m like, ‘What the f*** are you doing?’ Indie? No one willingly wants to be indie. They may say they do. But that’s not what Kylie is. Kylie is this force that is there to affect thousands and thousands and thousands of people. It’s all outward. It’s all giving. You have an enormous positive influence […] the great beauty of pop music is that it is a joy machine.” As Kylie puts it, “You’ve got the coolest guy on the planet saying, ‘Where’s the pop tunes?’ Right, let’s get the jet packs on and let’s get back to the dancefloor.”
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