IT’S ALL ME, SAYS KYLIE MINOGUE TO WIND BACK WEDNESDAY. BUT WHO IS “ME”?
- 5 hours ago
- 8 min read
As we are being treated to one of those enjoyable but carefully cultivated/controlled biographical series right now from Netflix on Ms Kylie Minogue, Wind Back Wednesday pulls into the station with one prepared earlier.
This carefully cultivated (I was there on the promoter’s coin after all) but not wholly controlled moment with Australia’s biggest, longest-lasting and least disliked pop star happened in the far far north – yes, further north than Cape York – in the year of Our Kyles 2011. You may see some themes from past and future emerge. And if not, you might feel the cold. Because it was bloody cold.
Except in the glow of star radiance. Of course.
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HELSINKI HAS WARMED UP SLIGHTLY to -12° this afternoon and through the thick glass of the hotel window you can see the occasional rugged up, furry and hooded local pushing against the wind. The harbour is frozen, boats stuck in thick ice and cars slide out of corners, skidding on dirty snow and ice in a manner likely to chill a visiting Australian like Kylie Minogue much more than the Arctic winds.
Why Helsinki? While it may be little known or noticed in Australia, Minogue sells out in Scandinavia (a few days earlier she’d begun her world tour in Denmark) and is big in the Baltics, they adore her in Europe and the love is unadulterated in the UK. The only hold-out is the USA, of which more later, but even there she’s still managed to sell more than a million, won a Grammy for a hit in what you could call the Kylie core – the dance rooms and gay clubs – and snuck into the mainstream via the likes of the Macy's Parade in New York.
Accompanying the music is now the obligatory celebrity attachment of perfumes and fashion lines and, having abandoned a movie career which never really took off, the highly paid private shows for the seriously wealthy businessmen and potentates who like to show off. Among those gigs are a reported $2 million for a 40-minute show before Deutsche Bank executives last year, a $400,000-per-song ten song show on a Dubai beach in 2008 and a Christmas Day event in Russia seven years ago where for a lazy $1 million she sang her hits for oil oligarchs.
So money doesn’t worry the fine boned, tiny (despite high black heels) Minogue, her hair tumbling down the back of a flimsy black top in the only suggestion of anything loosely arranged around her. Travel never has worried her either and the cold, like a day of interviews, is endured and controlled as it always has been.
But something has momentarily perturbed her: the question of has she ever lost herself in the ever expanding extravaganzas of her live shows. Has she ever found herself looking at the show rather than being in it?
There’s a slight creasing of that brow and then a confession: yes, once or twice in the past but these days she insists that designer Willie Baker, who has conceived her shows for some years as well as mounting extravaganzas for the likes of U2, allow room "where I can just do something different every night".
But even this “personal” show, a fabulous blend of fantasy, dance and technologically complex waterworks which is the best and most satisfying production she’s ever mounted is in keeping with the form, so synchronised and dependent on precise timing that there isn't a lot of space for her just to be her. Spontaneity is not the natural bedfellow of a big scale pop show so could the famously disciplined Minogue ever really cast off the plans and go native?
"I can do," she says slowly, pondering in a way which suggest even she's not convinced. "What we've done is there are certain moments – there’s really only two moments – where I can do that, have a chat and my MD waits for my signal. So as long as I've got a little bit of that then I'm okay. It's like in a greater sense if I feel trapped then it doesn't work.
"It's crucial that I'm not swamped by the show because [the audience] come to see me plus the show."
But who is this “me”? When she turns 43 later this month the former suburban girl from Melbourne, daughter of an accountant and a former dancer, will be wealthy, famous, instantly recognisable and yet so little known. Despite a career which has lasted three decades so far, a number of celebrated lovers, remaining a perennial favourite in the tabloid magazines with some or other young chap on her arm and a concert tour this year on the theme of Aphrodite which, she says, represents the joyous nature of her life at the moment, we are no closer to understanding the drive, the desires or the motivations of Kylie Minogue. And that is no accident.
It may well be true that the unexamined life is not worth living, though that philosophy didn't end up all that well for Socrates. It is also true that since Dylan and the Beatles, we expect our musicians to do their examination publicly and in detail, preferably in lyrics but also in interviews. What is far less certain is whether Minogue is one for self-examination, rigorous or otherwise. What we can say with some certainty however, is that if she has been peering into her navel, Minogue has never been one for discussing those insights or writing about them.
This was as true when she recovered from cancer in 2007 as it had been a decade earlier when the album Impossible Princess (incidentally her lowest selling album in the UK) mixed indie rock songwriters with the first Minogue-penned lyrics which hinted at, but never amounted to, confession. The interviews she did at the time - polite, friendly and short – extracted no more information.
The first post-cancer album, X, was even less forthcoming than Impossible Princess. Anyone poring over the lyrics for that record would not have known that Minogue recently had experienced life-threatening illness, debilitating recovery, a severely interrupted career and endless platitudes from prime ministers, premiers and unctuous magazine editors. Mariah Carey does not do stairs, Kylie Minogue does not do disclosure.
At this stage in her life and her career, are there any goals still unfulfilled?
"I don't know what the big goal is anymore. I still have things I would like to do. I'm sick of hearing myself say it so I'm loath to say it again, but it's a stage musical using a template like a Mamma Mia, so I'm not in it. [Also] I would like to be in the film musical – I wish I'd been Ann-Margaret in the 50s, or Rita Hayworth or someone like that.
“I am kind of living out those fantasies with this show because it's very Ziegfeld Follies, Busby Berkeley and there is a dance break which is an homage to Rita Hayworth in Dance Of The Seven Veils. These are not new references from me, they're been hanging around for a long time in my book of lists [of things to do]."
What's stopping her from doing them?
"I keep recording albums and promoting albums and then going on tour,” she laughs. “I keep saying, after this it's time to focus."
Is one of the unfulfilled goals turning America into as successful a market as Europe, the UK and Australia? As a Grammy winner she is not a nobody – “but I'm not a somebody," she interjects – so is this something that nags at her?
"No, it doesn't nag at me. I'm constantly surprised that any American does know who I am; It's just not been on my radar," she says. "I'm so happy that I toured there last year, just to finally do it. The response was incredible, but it was full of absolutely loyal fans who had been waiting and waiting and waiting so I didn't have to sell my message. I was preaching to the converted. "
So is she like Robbie Williams, declaring I don't care, I'm not interested. After all, she’s not exactly going poor or without attention.
"I am half and half. Of course I like a challenge and when I see what I've done in other parts of the world it would be great to achieve the same in America. But I finally realised that's why they say ‘break America’ and ‘crack America’, it obviously is difficult and it's not for everyone. I'm obviously in that group of people that haven't crossed over and I'm okay with that."
And she is not a 20-year-old with nothing on her hands but ambition and no concern about spending the next 6 to 12 months or 5 to 10 years building up an American career. Would she even have the energy or the drive to dedicate so much of a life to this possibly unobtainable prize?
"I don't know that I do have the energy to do that and that's probably one of the many reasons why it hasn't worked for me there. Or hasn't worked as well for me there," Minogue says. "I remember years ago saying to Terry [Blamey, her long time manager], I don't really want to spend six months telling people how to pronounce my name. I'd rather spend six months building on what I already have.”
Minogue looks off, thoughtful. “Maybe it would have been different if it was 20 years ago. I'm kind of fatalistic about it."
MINI MINOGUE MOMENT #1
Kylie Minogue’s audience has changed radically in the past decade. At the turn of the century it was the stalwarts of women now in their 30s and 40s who grew up with her, and gay men who sang her songs like anthems. Then came the straight men reluctantly attending with their girlfriends and wives and hoping no one noticed. But now straight men are at least a fifth of the room at any show and they’re singing too. Sure, a good number of them were turned by the gold hot pants but they don't feel embarrassed to be there any more.
Minogue smiles: "It's taken some people years to come out of that Kylie closet."
MINI MINOGUE MOMENT #2
Compare this show with Kylie Minogue’s first proper live tour a decade ago - “with two dancers,” she wails comically - and it is like comparing backyard cricket and the IPL final. Is she competing against herself or against Beyonce and Usher?
"Both. For the audience, they see other shows and it's got to be on a world-class level. And for me, I want to do something that I feel is at the top of my game as well. The last 10 years or so as my tours have got bigger and bigger. I say, and I think, I believe, that bigger isn't necessarily better. And I also get really nervous when the spin is [mimics loud spruiker] ‘It’s bigger than she’s ever done in her life’.
“That's not really the point. The point is, is it better? Is it a new experience? Are people going to come away feeling satisfied and wanting a little bit more? Will they come to the next concert?
MINI MINOGUE MOMENT #3
As someone who relies on different co-writers, sometimes big name co-writers, but is ultimately the boss, how does Kylie Minogue handle the competing egos?
There’s a long pause. "Well if they've got too much of a strong identity, as in they are too self-absorbed, it's not going to work, because I'm not like that. I wouldn't enjoy the experience," she says.
Do they have to come in understanding that it's not exactly an equal relationship?
"I think it is an equal relationship. I don't think I am more [important] than they are. I suppose logically and realistically I am, but that's not how I work. And if it doesn't work, well I won't be so keen to go back in the studio with them again. But having said that, I think just about everyone I've worked with, we get the business, we understand: we are here to do a job, we want to have a hit record and no one's got any time so we get on with it."
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