Kylie Queen of the World

by Julie Aspinall

  Ironically, given that it was Kylie who was finally to end the relationship, Jason was adopting an increasingly cavalier attitude towards his girlfriend of three years’ standing. There were reports that he had been flirting with other women behind Kylie’s back. More ironically still, the fact that Jason had followed Kylie and had now also become a pop star made matters still worse. By 1990, the presence of each was required in different parts of the world, making their enforced absences from one another even longer. And still Jason didn’t seem to see the danger of such an arrangement. ‘Kylie was all for me having a singing career,’ he said brightly at the time. But friends of the couple were more cautious. Jason was set to spend much of the year in London, while Kylie divided her time between Australia and the United States.

  ‘It’s going to be hard when they are on opposite sides of the world,’ warned a friend. ‘They are used to being apart for weeks but this will be a real test of their love. Kylie may follow Jason to London but that seems unlikely now. Besides, even if she does, promoting their careers all around the world will keep them apart. They are both very ambitious and getting to the top means almost everything. Kylie will be spending a lot of time in America. That is where Stock, Aitken and Waterman want her to be a big star. They are both attractive. They would have no trouble finding other partners. Jason has already seen other girls behind Kylie’s back. I can’t see him living like a monk.’ In fact, it was Kylie who eventually found another partner first – someone as different from the squeaky-clean Jason Donovan as it was possible to be.

  Jason’s career has not always run smoothly since then. Now settled in London – like Kylie – he went on to have a string of hits but then made the unwise decision to sue the magazine The Face, which falsely alleged that he was gay. Jason won the case but lost an enormous amount of goodwill in the industry and has spent years fighting back since then.

  After starring in the beginning of the 1990s in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, he has had a lower profile than Kylie, although he is happily living with production assistant Angela Balloch and their two children. Rather poignantly, he gave an interview some years ago in which he confessed, ‘I wonder if there is anything more for me.’ In 1998, Kylie was asked how she felt about such a comment. ‘As a friend of Jason’s, as long as he’s happy and healthy – I sound like my mother – then that’s brilliant. I’m not sure where he wants to go, what his direction is. For every end there’s a beginning and it might be the end of one thing, of making pop records or being in Joseph, but he has the potential to do so many other things.’ Did she feel sorry for him? ‘No, I wouldn’t feel sorry for him, because that would be negating what I’ve just said,’ she replied. ‘I think it’s just change. I don’t know. I just believe he will find a place where he wants to be.’

  As for Jason, he does seem to have a more settled life these days than he did during his difficult patch in the mid-1990s. And of his relationship with Kylie? His verdict is simple. ‘She is definitely one of the great love affairs of my life.’

  4

  She Should Be So Lucky

  As chance would have it, Kylie’s childhood ambition in life was not to be an actress, but a pop star. Now, in addition to her work on television, she had a burgeoning singing career, which had come about almost by chance. In 1986 Kylie, along with the rest of the cast from Neighbours, had been asked to sing at an Aussie Rules football club benefit. She contributed a duet with the Australian actor Jon Waters: together the two of them warbled a rendition of ‘I Got You Babe’. No one could believe it. This chirpy Aussie sparrow turned out to have the voice of a fully grown Aussie songbird: the girl with the tiny frame was pelting out the number in a manner that wouldn’t have been out of place on Broadway.

  As luck would have it Mike Duffy, a producer with songwriters Stock, Aitken and Waterman, was visiting Australia and Kylie was asked to go and see him. Intensely nervous, given that disastrous demo she had recorded a few years earlier, Kylie none the less plucked up the courage and went to discuss working on a project together. The result was her first single, ‘The Locomotion’, a cover version of the 1962 hit. Everyone was staggered: the tiny little actress had one belter of a voice, to say nothing of a presence that lit up the whole video as she pranced and skipped across it. The song reached number one in her home country and by the end of 1987, was Australia’s best-selling single of the year. Carol, Kylie’s mother, was as delighted as everyone else, and amazed at the numerous talents her children were now displaying. ‘I have no idea where they get their singing from,’ she said. ‘I can’t sing a note. I couldn’t even sing in church.’

  But by now Kylie really was pushing herself: some reports claim that she was close to a nervous breakdown as she pursued both careers in tandem, taking almost no time at all off to relax. ‘I was so sick I had to have a day off,’ she explained later. ‘It gave me a few minutes to think, What am I doing? What am I doing here? I would rather have a little shop which is what I have always dreamed of and having a little holiday house and getting married and having kids. That would be easy. Why can’t I just do that? There was so much pressure by so many different people and I just had to say, “Whoa! Stop!” I had everything but I had nothing.’

  The trouble was, of course, that she didn’t really just want to have a little shop; she wanted a big, international, successful career. And so Kylie didn’t stop for long. After the success of ‘The Locomotion’, another record was on the cards and this time, on Duffy’s recommendation, it was decided that Stock, Aitken and Waterman themselves should be involved. Kylie flew in to London in 1987 to meet the trio. Never having seen Neighbours and having entirely forgotten his promise to meet her, Pete Waterman was surprised to receive a call from Mike Stock informing him that there was ‘a small Antipodean in reception expecting to do something with us now.’ ‘She should be so lucky,’ retorted Waterman. By all accounts, Stock liked the idea of that, picked up a pen and wrote a song. A superstar was born.

  Pete Waterman and Mike Stock remember the initial meeting, in which Kylie looked absolutely nothing like a superstar. ‘She looked tired out,’ said Pete in 1989. ‘I suppose it was like looking at your youngest daughter. There was this quiet, rather shy and slim little girl, who had flown halfway round the world to see us. To be honest, we were rather brusque and off-hand with her.’ They certainly didn’t see her potential and it was to be some time before they realised quite what a winner they had on their hands.

  Kylie had waited several days to see them, though, and, with the determination that has been such a help throughout her career, point blank refused to go away until they had agreed to write her a song. So they did. Mike weaved his magic: ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ took 20 minutes to write, 30 minutes to record and, as they tell it, they put her in a taxi and sent her back to Australia. ‘When she left the studio,’ said Mike, ‘we honestly thought that we’d never see her again. We could see that she was a good singer, had a quick ear and could pick up songs easily, but that was really about all. We knew nothing about Neighbours. We just bashed the song out and sent her on her way.’

  The producers were so unimpressed with their new discovery that they didn’t even listen to the tape they’d recorded with Kylie until the following week. ‘I can remember being at our Christmas party and hearing this record which was so good I went over to ask the disc jockey who it was,’ said Pete in an interview a couple of years after that small Antipodean became famous, ‘and it turned out to be Kylie. We completely underestimated her popularity. She’s a star. Kylie has the potential to become an enormous celebrity.

  ‘She’s a millionairess already, but the sky’s the limit for what she could achieve,’ he continued. ‘She could be the biggest female singer of all time if she wants to. She has a very special talent. She just comes alive the moment she’s put in front of a microphone. I’ve seen her look ill with exhaustion after flying in from Australia, step on stage and be electric. It’s the sign of true star quality. She’s a v
ery quiet, normal girl but the moment she has to perform, wham! She comes alive. It’s really quite dazzling, because when you meet her she’s really not very impressive.’ What Pete really meant was that Kylie can be very quiet. But like so many stars, she has something like an internal switch: put her in performing mode and she will turn in to a megastar, beloved by camera and audience alike.

  There was a very short blip, however: the trio tried and failed to get a record company to take Kylie on board, and so Pete set up his own label, PWL, and released the disc. ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ was an enormous success, reaching not only the top of the charts in Australia and Britain but also in numerous other countries such as Hong Kong and Finland, previously Neighbours-free zones. It sold 700,000 copies and made the 20-year-old Kylie the youngest female artist to have a British number one. And this was just the start. Out of her next 10 singles, she had three number ones, five number twos and two number fours. Her first album, Kylie, went on to sell 14 million copies. ‘I don’t know if any pop star will ever be as popular as Kylie was back then,’ reflected Pete Waterman later. ‘She just transformed from this innocent non-worldly wise little girl in to a star. She was a tiny, 18-year-old girl, had a huge workload and was exhausted half the time, but as soon as she had to work her whole personality would transform.’

  Then came the next question: Kylie was the ultimate in unthreatening girls next door, but would that sell records over longer term? Would she, at some point, have to grow up? Now in her mid-thirties, Kylie still has the body of a 14-year-old, but for many years now that’s been combined with a sultry, sexy sophistication, making her one of the world’s most desirable women. Back then, though, her idea of sophistication was blowing bubble bath off her nose as she relaxed in the tub (as witnessed in the video for ‘I Should Be So Lucky’). What should be done?

  Stock, Aitken and Waterman deny they did anything to boost Kylie’s popularity by changing her image. ‘We never tell any of our artists how they should look or what to wear,’ said Pete just before the big change did, indeed, come about. ‘We don’t change their names, either. The Americans wanted Kylie to change hers, because they couldn’t pronounce Minogue. We fought that one hard. We really didn’t change her at all. Her appeal is very much as the girl next door. That’s the way people see her as Charlene in Neighbours, and that’s how she is in real life.

  ‘She’s not sexy and sensuous. She’s not busty and teasing. She’s lovable, wholesome and ordinary – she’s definitely not a fantasy figure. She’s the real thing.’ Pete was certainly wrong in part of that assessment – in that Kylie was shortly to become one of the world’s most sought-after fantasy figures – but as far as her staying power was concerned, they were absolutely right. Kylie, after a variety of incarnations, is still here.

  Back then, Kylie even achieved the previously unthinkable: she toppled Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s golden boy, Rick Astley, off the top slot in the charts and became the jewel in the crown of PWL. ‘I think it’s a perfect pop song,’ said Kylie. ‘You can’t help singing it even if you hate it and it’s certainly gone on to prove that.’ Pete, meanwhile, was delighted. ‘This girl is a phenomenon – kids relate to Kylie,’ he said. ‘But it’s strange looking back now to January ’88. In November ’87 Rick Astley was our biggest star and potentially our biggest for the next two years. Kylie Minogue outshone him and that’s a real quirk of fate.’

  Kylie was delighted with her new-found musical success. She had become a famous soap star and was now a famous singer, quite making up for her early teenage years in the shadows – and yet still the shadow of Dannii lingered on, not least because Dannii had also kept busy, branching out from her own career as a soap star and diversifying into other fields. ‘Dannii already had her own clothing range and you could sense that Kylie always felt she had a lot to live up to,’ said Pete. ‘Some of the more outrageous images that Kylie came up with later in her career were, I think, a result of trying to emulate the wild, rebellious personality of her sister.’

  Bodyguard Alf Weaver, now 67, looked after Kylie in the early days for about a year and a half from 1987, when she was with Pete Waterman. ‘She was very easy-going and I really liked working with her – I thought she was terrific,’ he says now. ‘She was very friendly and bubbly and we got on really well. I hadn’t heard much of her singing before but I was with her quite a lot in the studios and you could just tell she was a class act – and I’ve been around a lot of class acts, including Sinatra. As soon as she sang, you could hear the voice. You knew she was something special.’

  She was still a little girl from the suburbs of Melbourne, though, and shy with it. ‘It was never a hardship for Kylie to do interviews,’ says Alf. ‘But sometimes she would get nervous about the fans, so we used to get the kids’ autograph books, take them to Kylie and she would sign them – but she wouldn’t actually come out. She certainly seems a lot more confident now but then I looked after her when she was starting out in her career. I had been to Australia and sometimes we would talk about it – I think she missed home.

  ‘The thing about Kylie was she took it all in her stride – I don’t think she was ever really nervous performing. Peter Waterman treated her very well – whatever she wanted he got her. I think they had a very good relationship. It was a bit of a risk for Peter to take her on. He had great judgement to pick her and start her off. There was the odd occasion when she threw tantrums. It was usually to do with the venue. We did do some ropy clubs. She would take one look at the place and say “What is this?” But they insisted, they said “You’ve got to play these, you’ve got to work your way up.” She wanted to perform in bigger venues – she was very ambitious. I also looked after her sister Dannii for a while – they are very similar – very bubbly and outgoing.’

  Of course, not everyone took to Kylie’s sugary sweet style: some unkind voices took to calling her ‘The Singing Budgie’, T-shirts bearing the legend ‘I Hate Kylie Minogue’ sprang up and a Melbourne radio station took to playing a song entitled ‘I Should Be So Yucky’. Matters got worse still when Daniel Abineri, a British-born singer and actor, released another spoof, this one entitled ‘I Can See Your Nipples’, a reference to Kylie’s holiday in Bali with Jason. This proved to be an insult too far. ‘This is a cheap, crude attempt to cash in on Kylie’s name,’ snapped a very irritated spokesman for the star. ‘We’ll pull out all the stops to have the disc banned.’ Abineri himself retorted, ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about. It’s just a fun send-up of a very popular young lady. Kylie obviously hasn’t a sense of humour.’

  These days Kylie has a very good sense of humour: she is as self-deprecating as anyone involved in the music business and well understands that her success owes as much to luck as to talent. Back then, though, for all her international standing, and despite the fact that she’d been a couple with Jason for some years, she was in many ways little more than a child and all the teasing – not all of it meant that kindly – was having an adverse effect on her. Noticing this, Kylie’s friends were beginning to develop a sense of humour bypass too.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ snapped Kylie’s fellow Neighbours star Anne Charleston, who played Madge Bishop in the soap. ‘Kylie has been very upset by some of the criticism, although she is now a lot more confident than she was. But the whole cast was very angry about what was being done to her. We are a very close company and all like each other. But it was Kylie they went for in particular. Kylie is now coping a lot better with all this. I wouldn’t say Kylie is tough, but she is not stupid and now knows not to take things to heart.’

  But they didn’t leave her alone; indeed, Jason started coming in for some flak, too. At the beginning of 1989, by the time both had left Neighbours to carve out solo singing careers, they were sneered at by The Bulletin, a mass circulation magazine, which did an annual round up of famous Australians. Kylie was ‘a poor little thing’ and Jason a ‘flaxen haired warbler.’ ‘Jason teamed up with former co-star Kylie Minogue to make a flop
record “Everything For You”’ it sneered – though someone subsequently pointed out that it had actually been called ‘Especially For You’ and that far from being a flop it had reached number one in Britain and sold one million copies worldwide.

  The jibes were becoming increasingly unfair and Dannii stepped in to defend her sister. ‘She [Kylie] has had to toughen up just to survive,’ Dannii commented. ‘She has changed from being an innocent into someone who can cope with show business at its worst. It has forced her to lose some of her innocence, but how else do you get through in this business? Kylie has cried over the things that have been said about her in Australia. She has done so much but Britain seems to respect her much more.

  ‘It’s terrible for Kylie. There are radio stations here that refuse to play her records. It’s such an insult. They claim her records are naff. Yet every time there is a pop poll, Kylie comes out on top. The other night she won an Aria Award in Sydney. It was a great achievement, yet people were scathing. She felt elated and downcast at the same time. I keep telling Kylie it doesn’t matter. “Look at Michael Jackson,” I tell her. “He has had more things said about him than anyone and he’s the greatest star in the world.” If folk want to be bitchy, then let them. The real proof of Kylie’s ability is that people like her music and keep watching her on TV.’

  It was a very supportive move on Dannii’s part and indeed, throughout their lives, when one Minogue sister has been up against it, the other has come to her support. And yet, beneath the surface, the old rivalry with Dannii still bubbled. ‘Kylie idolised Dannii and no matter how big she became she always thought Dannii would be bigger,’ says Pete Waterman. ‘We were offered the chance to sign Dannii but there was no way we could do it. It would have dented Kylie’s confidence. And anyway, Dannii’s not an artist. She’s someone who’s good at getting publicity.’