Kylie Minogue

By Cameron Adams

The Australian Music Vault is proud to honour 2021 Music Victoria Hall of Fame inductee, Kylie Minogue.

When Kylie Minogue reached the ‘spring clean’ stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, she unearthed an artefact that would change the history of Australian music.

It was a cassette of three songs that, in 1985, a 17-year-old Minogue had professionally recorded using earnings from her work on TV drama The Henderson Kids. They were covers of songs by Patti LaBelle, Quincy Jones and her disco inspiration Donna Summer.

“It was a demo tape more for acting,” Minogue explains. “If a production needed someone who could sing, I could hand that over. I guess I wanted to show I could reach a few notes. I could have chosen easier songs!”

By April 1986, Minogue had landed that elusive acting role – playing tomboy mechanic Charlene Mitchell in soap opera Neighbours – but singing would remain an off-screen occupation. A floor manager on Neighbours, Greg Petherick had met the Minogue family through his work on Young Talent Time (YTT) – Kylie’s sister Dannii was a cast member. Before Neighbours, Kylie was introduced as “Dannii’s sister” in YTT special appearances. Petherick, also a musician, had organised a Thursday night jam session at a South Melbourne pub for the Neighbours cast including Guy Pearce, Alan Dale and Paul Keane.

Recalling from her YTT appearances that Minogue could sing, Petherick offered the young performer her first appearance on a record and in a music video for the 1985 charity single ‘A World Without Hearing’, raising money for deafness awareness. “I knew she could hold a tune, but she hadn’t really been given a shot as a singer,” Petherick says.

Soon Minogue, along with her TV (and then real-life) boyfriend Jason Donovan, turned up to the Thursday night singalongs. She asked Petherick for a song to “muck around with”. He rifled through his parents’ record collection and thought Little Eva’s 1962 hit ‘The Loco-Motion’ could work. It did, then a lightbulb went off – what if Minogue’s TV appeal could be translated to the pop charts?

In 1986, Minogue recorded a demo version of ‘The Loco-Motion’ at Richmond’s Sing Sing Studios with a studio band that included members of the newly formed Boom Crash Opera. Petherick and Sing Sing owner Kal Dahlstrom began shopping the demo around to record labels, including Sony and Mushroom, who all passed, claiming a singing soap star would never work.

Yet as Minogue’s popularity on Neighbours grew, Mushroom’s Amanda Pelman – who worked with bands including Kids in the Kitchen, Uncanny X Men and Machinations – revisited the demo. “The demo was terrible, but you weren’t listening to it for the production value,” Pelman recalls. “I really liked the idea of working with people who were already established on television. Sadly at that time the only example of that was Mark Holden.” (In 1976, Holden was scoring hits at the same time as appearing on TV drama The Young Doctors.)

Meanwhile, in a Neighbours storyline, Jason Donovan and Guy Pearce’s characters visited Molly Meldrum’s house to pitch the music icon a song. In the script, Meldrum passed on their music, but saw star potential in Charlene. “It was art imitating life,” Meldrum says. He worded up Pelman and Mushroom boss Michael Gudinski on Minogue’s charisma and drive – by this time Charlene was on the cover of TV Week.

On a visit to London in early 1987, Gudinski noticed the freshly-exported Neighbours creating a buzz among teenagers on UK TV. He called back to Melbourne and insisted the label sign Minogue immediately. “Kylie wasn’t known, Charlene was known,” Gudinski noted. Mushroom was known as predominantly a rock music label at the time. Within years, Minogue’s success was bankrolling the company.

“A lot of people thought I was steering things in the wrong direction with someone like Kylie Minogue,” Gudinski said of the signing. “A few people said it might have been the death of Mushroom. That sounds a bit dramatic. But looking back it really was the birth of a new Mushroom.”

The original Sing Sing demo of ‘The Loco-Motion’ was funk/rock with a horn section. Mushroom had already entered a partnership with British engineer Mike Duffy, who moved to Australia to produce acts like Choirboys, while still keeping his links to burgeoning UK production team Stock Aitken Waterman. Their brief to Duffy was to make ‘The Loco-Motion’ like another Stock Aitken Waterman hi-energy ’60s cover: Bananarama’s ‘Venus’ (which Duffy had engineered). Gudinski gave the engineer a $10,000 budget and a producer role.

“She’d come into the studio, even though she was busy with Neighbours at the time,” Duffy recalls. “She was the consummate professional.”

With a video filmed at Essendon Airport ($3,000 of the $10,000 budget was from a deodorant sponsorship – an early example of product placement) the single, now called ‘Locomotion’, was released on July 20, 1987.

It was a timely release. Minogue appeared on the penultimate episode of Countdown with Meldrum to debut the ‘Locomotion’ video. And the single debuted at No. 10 on July 27, just after Scott and Charlene’s nation-stopping wedding had aired on Neighbours. By August 10, ‘Loco-motion’ was No. 1. It would stay there for eight weeks and become one of the highest-selling Australian songs of the 1980s.

Looking for a follow-up, Mushroom sent Minogue to London to work with Stock Aitken Waterman. Famously, the trio forgot about the arrangement, so ended up speed-writing a song in 40 minutes while the Australian waited in reception. She finished her vocals in an hour before boarding a plane back to Melbourne to return to the Neighbours set.

The song was called ‘I Should Be So Lucky’.

With Neighbours episodes airing on a six-month delay in the UK, Stock Aitken Waterman began to realise what they were sitting on. Accompanied by a bubbly video filmed at the old Channel 7 studios in South Melbourne, ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ was released on December 29, 1987 in the UK. It soared to No. 1 in the UK and, upon release in February 1988 in Australia, became her second chart topper at home. ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ would go Top 30 in the US, while a Stock Aitken Waterman version of what was once again christened ‘The Loco-Motion’ became a US No. 3 hit.

Minogue’s career had gone global in an instant. A tall-poppy style backlash may have grown in Australia after ‘Got to Be Certain’ became the first song to ever debut at No.1 on the ARIA chart, yet she silently answered the critics by simply continuing to be successful.

Minogue is now the highest-selling Australian female recording artist of all time, with over 80 million records sold globally. She has had 10 No. 1 singles in Australia, with 7 singles reaching No. 1 on the UK chart and 11 making No. 2. 34 of her singles have made the UK Top 10, 23 achieving the same feat in Australia. No other Australian female artist has as many No. 1 albums on the ARIA chart as Minogue’s tally of eight.

When her 2020 album Disco topped the UK chart, Minogue became the first woman to score five British No. 1 albums in five consecutive decades – starting with her debut Kylie in 1988. Minogue will soon cross the magic mark of 100 singles released since 1987. Despite being written off as a puppet at the start of her career, by the time of her third album, 1990’s Rhythm of Love, Minogue demanded more creative input with Stock Aitken Waterman and insisted on external, US production.

The singer spent the ’90s exploring how far she could push her pop music, pinballing from a murder ballad with Nick Cave to collaborating with credible dance act Brothers in Rhythm, Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers and Japanese DJ Towa Tei on ‘German Bold Italic’, a wildly experimental song in which she sang from the viewpoint of a font.

The ’90s was also the decade she reinvented herself as a live performer, beginning with 1998’s Intimate and Live tour, off the back of the Impossible Princess album – a fan favourite on which Minogue found her voice, for the first time writing or co-writing every track. From this point on, most albums would be followed by global arena tours with Minogue establishing herself as one of the industry’s most reliable live pop performers. In 2000, after signing to Parlophone, her commercial success was rebooted with the disco-fuelled Light Years album, launching with the No. 1 hit ‘Spinning Around’.

Breaking all the rules of pop music, Minogue would release her highest-selling single, ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’, 14 years into her career. It was originally written for S Club 7, yet Minogue’s finely honed ear for pop knew within 30 seconds that ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ was a song she needed to record. She pleaded with her record label to secure what is now her signature tune, and regarded as a prime example of the perfect pop song, despite not really having a chorus. The song launched her biggest album, Fever, which went on to sell more than six million copies and reached No. 3 on the US charts.

Minogue’s impressive work ethic, honed during her Neighbours years, undoubtedly carried over into her music career. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2005 during her Showgirl tour of the UK, Minogue flew home to Melbourne for treatment – putting the tour and a prestigious headline slot at Glastonbury, on hold. After her recovery, doctors acknowledged the “Kylie effect” for an increase in women getting tested for breast cancer, as well as insisting on a second opinion. Minogue was initially misdiagnosed.

Minogue resumed the Showgirl tour in Australia in November 2006. In Sydney, she was joined by U2 frontman Bono to perform the duet ‘Kids’ (originally a hit with Robbie Williams), and by sister Dannii in Melbourne.

“I look at that now and I’m honestly taken aback,” Minogue said in 2016, ahead of the launch of the Kylie on Stage exhibition at Arts Centre Melbourne. “It was so fast – months and months of those 18 months were in treatment.”

Costumes had to be adjusted for the tour, with an interval added to give Minogue recovery time between sets.

“I was concerned about the weight of the corset and being able to support it. I was quite insecure about my body, which had changed. For a few years after that I really felt like I wasn’t in my own body – with the medication I was on, there was this other layer,” she says.

“We had to make a number of adjustments. I had different shoes to feel more sturdy... I was pretty soon to be back onstage. But I think it was good for me.”

As the 2000s rolled on, a string of collaborations continued to illustrate her boundary-free view of music: Robbie Williams, Coldplay, Iggy Pop, Enrique Iglesias, Tove Lo, Giorgio Moroder, Laura Pausini, Shaggy, Jake Shears, Nile Rodgers, Dua Lipa, Years and Years, and yes, even The Wiggles.

In 2012, as a celebration of her 25th anniversary in music, Minogue rewarded fans with an “Anti-Tour”, playing only B-sides, deep cuts and unreleased songs with a live band, but none of her trademark production, stage sets or costume changes.

2018 brought a homecoming, as Minogue returned to Mushroom Records and christened the deal with No. 1 album Golden. A year later, she belatedly and triumphantly took to the stage at Glastonbury, performing in the “Legends” slot. She was joined by guests Nick Cave and Coldplay’s Chris Martin for what is said to be the most attended set in the British festival’s long and storied history.

Minogue is one of the founding patrons of the Australian Music Vault, donating many of her most iconic outfits, from Charlene’s overalls to those ‘Spinning Around’ gold hotpants. Her career is a masterclass that has inspired countless performers and inspired loyalty in millions of fans. She’s navigated the unavoidable highs and lows every musician fortunate enough to forge a 30-year-plus career must experience, taking musical risks while managing the pressures that come with being an A-list global star.

Like most female pop stars, her success was often dismissed as a fluke or being surrounded by the right people, as if Minogue didn’t know exactly what she was doing. Luck and marketing don’t explain a career that spans five decades, with no sign of slowing down.

Minogue, who is now working on a musical based on her music, has long learned to embrace all aspects of her career, good and bad, as the troughs have helped her navigate and appreciate the peaks.

“If I look back over my career, sometimes it’s the mistakes that make all the difference. They allow you to really look at where you’re going.”

Cameron Adams is a music journalist and podcast scriptwriter who has interviewed Kylie Minogue multiple times. His favourite Kylie song is ‘Love At First Sight’.

The Music Victoria Awards is an annual celebration of Victorian music featuring industry and publically voted categories. Kylie Minogue and the late Pierre Baroni will be inducted into this year’s Music Victoria Hall of Fame with the event being held on 9 December 2021 at the Melbourne Recital Centre. The event will also be live streamed on YouTube and broadcast on Channel 31.

You can find out more about the awards here.