Kylie Queen of the World

by Julie Aspinall

  ‘I have reached the stage in my life where I am a girl-woman,’ declared Kylie (she was actually 23 at the time). ‘I felt like Brigitte Bardot while the photos were being taken. I had such fun jumping up and down on the bed, humming to Marilyn Monroe, who was singing in the background. I think being a girl-woman is very appealing and has a lot of sexuality.’ And did she think she was sexy? ‘I wouldn’t describe myself as sexy,’ she replied, consigning herself to a minority of one. ‘Sexy is raunchy. I think people can see there is a sexuality about me but it doesn’t mean I’m trying to be sexy.’

  What it might have meant was that Kylie was beginning to realise that if she wanted to stay on top of the pop world, she would have to become as chameleon a performer as that other petite blonde who has not only defied but outlasted all her critics: Madonna. Kylie had already had one sensational image change, courtesy of Michael Hutchence, which had done her no harm at all and clearly made her aware of the fact that there is mileage in surprising people by the way you look. Today it was pink ostrich feathers, and tomorrow – who knows? ‘I rapidly get bored with the way I look and I reckon if I am, everyone else must be,’ she said at the time. ‘I love changing myself.

  ‘The nice girl image got me started and successful, but it would be a lie to pretend to be that now. I decided to get rid of that image 18 months ago, but when I started to make changes, people said, “What are you doing?” and “Where’s your frilly frock?” I was surprised at how shocked they were. People have been saying about me, “She’s grown up” and sounding surprised, as if they thought that wasn’t going to happen.’ She was also developing an acute sense of style that was to stand her in very good stead in the years to come. ‘Most of my clothes are second hand,’ she said (the famous gold hot pants included). ‘I like a bargain and it also makes sure I have something no one else has.’

  It is telling that even back then, Kylie was very aware of the comparison with Madonna, and not just in a musical sense. ‘Madonna has been a great inspiration not only with my work but because she is also a great business woman,’ she admitted. ‘But I don’t want to be a new Madonna and I have tried not to model myself on her. I want to develop my own style. But I do like the way she changes her image. And if she can do it, so can I.’

  It was not just in music and image that Kylie was taking on a new view of the world. AM, Kylie’s attitude to life generally had changed and she was beginning to emerge as a very much more sophisticated version of her former self. For starters, she stopped being a vegetarian – ‘I’m much healthier now’ – and although not a smoker herself, refused to start acting the puritan. ‘It’s wrong to say I have banned smoking on my tours,’ she protested. ‘I don’t mind other people smoking around me at all.’

  Kylie was also beginning to develop a sense of herself as an artist in a way she hadn’t previously, when she allowed everyone around her to make decisions for her. ‘I know the bottom line is to sell records and there is a certain amount of packaging,’ she said. ‘I also know record companies want you to adapt yourself to suit the audience, but I am changing my audience to suit me. I see myself as two people: one is Kylie Minogue Enterprises Ltd and the other is me. I know my image is my lifestyle, but it’s also my life.

  ‘I now consider myself an artist. I want to express how I feel and look how I want to look, rather than what other people want me to be like. When I was in Neighbours, I tried to please everyone else, but now I do things my way or not at all. I’m taken a lot more seriously now and have become a lot more confident, but hopefully I won’t turn into a monster. My confidence has come with age. I love the way I say that as if I am 35! I now smile at my naivety. It will never happen again.’

  Kylie’s attitude to the rest of her life was changing, as well. Michael had taught her how to have fun and now she intended to do just that. ‘I have worked flat out for years but after I toured Australia and Japan this February and March, I said that if I didn’t have a break, I wouldn’t do anything. It’s something I’d never have said a few years ago.’ Kylie nipped off to Paris for a while, where she took stock of her life. ‘I’m always assessing myself,’ she revealed. ‘No one could be more critical of me than I am. But I don’t like looking back. I get embarrassed and sometimes think, Why didn’t someone stop me from doing that? I like to look forward.

  ‘When I was doing Neighbours,’ she reflected, ‘I didn’t know how to enjoy myself and relax. I worked all the time and I had to learn how to be sociable. When I was 19 and meeting someone socially, I would shake hands as if I were at a business meeting. Now I think it is just as important to make time to enjoy myself as it is to be good at my job because they complement each other. It was wonderful to slow down, sit in cafes, see friends and do a lot of nothing. Now I know I have to look after myself and be true to myself because in turn I am much better for everyone else. I’m a much happier person than I used to be.’

  There may have been another reason for that. Kylie had just filmed the video ‘What Do I Have To Do?’ and had been spotted kissing 25-year-old South African model Zane O’Donnell, who had appeared in the shoot. Were they an item? ‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘he was just in my video.’

  For now, that was. It was four months after the split and Kylie was waking up again. She had made headlines with Michael and now she began to do exactly the same with Zane – who rapidly did become her boyfriend – not least because of his complicated past. For a start, Zane O’Donell has a son, then aged five, by his ex-wife, Lauren, a year his junior.

  Zane, like Michael, was a man with an eye for women. When he first started dating Kylie, he was still seeing the German model Daria Lingenberg, which led to various warnings about Kylie’s new man. The first to speak up, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Zane’s ex-wife Lauren: ‘The only way Kylie will stop him going off with other women is to castrate him,’ she stated. ‘She’d better beware. Zane broke my heart because he can’t resist beautiful women. We got married when I was 18 and lived in New York, In Milan and in London. We both enjoyed the bright lights, but he made me very unhappy. He was always off with other girls.

  ‘I didn’t know it at first, then I found out about one girl. When I confronted him, he denied it. I gave him a chance but then I found out there had been lots of other girls all the time.’ He broke my heart but it is for the best because I’ve a more stable relationship now. I’m getting married in November and my boyfriend has promised he will treat my son as his own.’

  The next to speak up was German model Daria Lingenberg. Zane, it appeared, had been living with her for 10 months and had forgotten to mention the fact that he was going out with Kylie to his erstwhile girlfriend. ‘I know he and Kylie are friends, but he is going out with me,’ she said. ‘We have been together for nearly a year.’

  Zane’s mother Sandra, who was based in Cape Town, added to the confusion. ‘I hardly know who Kylie Minogue is, but I knew that he had been seeing her, because he made a video with her,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised, because the last I heard he was living in Paris with Daria. Then he suddenly moved to London. Now we know why. Girls won’t leave him alone and it causes pressure on relationships. All the girls are so mad about him. He really loved his wife but she got tired of women chasing him.’

  ‘I’m having a great time,’ said Kylie, who was clearly determined to put a brave face on her hurt over losing Michael. ‘I guess it’s true that I’ve discovered sex. I’ve learned to relax.’ And as for any other girlfriends, Kylie soon saw off the competition. ‘Kylie knows everything and they sorted it all out between them,’ said a friend at the time. ‘She’s been seeing more and more of Zane and he took her out for her birthday last week. She’s really happy.’

  The relationship was to last for a year, but finally fell apart after a series of rows prompted by Zane’s roving eye. The last straw was, ironically, a video shoot during the course of which Zane was seen getting amorous with Brigitte Slama, a French dancer. Kylie had had enough and ended it. ‘Kylie’s very ups
et,’ said a friend. ‘She thought Zane might be Mr Right but his eye for the ladies got too much for her.’ Well, maybe. But, it’s more likely that Kylie had already met her Mr Right and, as it later emerged, was far from getting over him. ‘It’s much better to end a stagnant relationship than hang on,’ was Kylie’s own take on it. Perhaps prompted by the harm he had caused by his errant ways, Zane later became a born-again Christian.

  Kylie hung on to some of the other habits she had cultivated during her time with Michael, most notably taking ecstasy. This was the early Nineties, after all, when the vast majority of twenty-somethings throughout Britain were working by day, clubbing by night and – to use the vernacular – getting off their heads in the process. Kylie was no different from anyone else and indulged herself with gusto, as she later admitted to an American magazine. ‘I had my phase,’ she said. ‘When I was going out a lot, it was a great time in my life. We really got in to the dance culture. But we’ve become such prudes. Anyway, you’re only meant to do ecstasy for a certain phase in your life. I enjoy work and know my day’s going to be that much harder if I’ve wrecked myself the night before.’

  In between relaxing, Kylie was beginning to take a much more hands-on approach to her career. In the early days, she was probably wise to let the masters of the art – Stock, Aitken and Waterman – tell her what to do, but she had been singing for a few years now and was beginning to have her own ideas. ‘I was always made to wear primary colours and told to smile, smile, smile,’ she says. ‘I was put on the production line and came out as a prettily gift-wrapped box with probably not a lot in it. I was never consulted on anything. If I was lucky they might show me my new album cover, but they were not particularly interested in my opinion.’

  Given that she wasn’t encouraged to express her thoughts, Kylie did at least have one means of discovering her identity: through her clothes. Her first change of image came when she starred in The Delinquents, and while the film was terrible, the look wasn’t. Kylie was beginning to learn. Next came the Hutchence years, in which she turned in to SexKylie, an image which, through a variety of permutations, exists to this day. Danny Kelly, then editor of Q magazine, noted, ‘It’s standard pop business stuff. You quickly become old hat and to keep your audience interested, you have to come up with something new.’

  The editor of Smash Hits saw a more cunning plan. ‘She was very clever,’ he said. ‘We all get embarrassed about the things we did when we were teenagers and she made sure that people knew that she had changed. She wants to be a megastar. She did not want embarrassing designs for record sleeves holding her back.’

  Kylie herself saw her actions as a way of trying to take more control. ‘I was really trying to put more of myself into my work,’ she says today. ‘Since I couldn’t take control of the music side of things, I managed to get my image in my hands and use that. Looking back, I might have gone a little off the rails, taken things too far, but I had to get it out of my system. I was trying to say, “This is me. Hi! Look, look, I’m here.” ‘I think people liked her and rock journalists certainly thought she was a good thing,’ says Danny Kelly. ‘But it has to be said that it was probably a hormonal thing – rock journalists are all men.’

  Casting around AM for another new image, Kylie decided to reinvent herself in the look of Madonna. Going on tour, Kylie wore a black body-piece and Madonna-style headset – not, it must be said, to universal acclaim. It was all very well reinventing yourself as many times as Madonna, but when you reinvent yourself as Madonna …

  There was, however, one part of society that absolutely loved it, and that was the gay community. It was at about this time that Kylie really began to establish a fan base in gay clubs – after all, she’d been dumped by the love of her life and your average superstar has to suffer some kind of tragedy to become a gay icon – and they loved the new SexKylie. The compliment was returned in spades. ‘I love performing to them,’ says Kylie. ‘They love my music and I love the fact that they do. They’re a great audience but it can be such a struggle. They are so excitable but they have the vocal capacities of full-grown men. It can get so loud I can hardly hear myself sing.’

  To show her appreciation of this particular element of her fan base, in 1991, Kylie appeared at Sydney’s gay Mardi Gras (in previous years, it had been dominated by Kylie look-alikes). ‘I felt I owed it to them because they supported me years before anybody else did,’ she says. Her arrival was kept a secret and the audience only realised what was about to happen when 20 male dancers in hot pants bearing Kylie’s initials leapt on stage. ‘I was dressed in a baby doll dress and there were pyrotechnics all around me,’ she says. ‘It was hysteria.’

  By 1992, Kylie’s experimentation with different looks led to bizarre rumours growing up about her. First she appeared in a push-up top: ‘Kylie has NOT had a breast implant,’ snapped her agent Sue Foster. ‘She doesn’t believe in them. It’s just the tops that she’s wearing, they’re more uplifting. Or maybe she’s still developing, she’s only 24.’ Next she wore a figure-hugging dress. ‘Kylie is NOT pregnant,’ insisted Sue Foster. ‘It would be impossible. She’s not even had a boyfriend for months.’

  And Kylie herself, now single again, was beginning to wonder if she would ever meet the right man. ‘It isn’t easy for me,’ she said. ‘Some guys who come up to me are real jerks, treating me as if we’re friends when I don’t know them. The sweet ones just nod and steer clear. I bet one of those guys is the one for me.’

  Kylie also had a shocking experience when she was filming her video for ‘Finer Feelings’ in Paris: a man tried to commit suicide in front of her. She screamed as she saw a man throw himself in to the River Seine, before shouting to her crew to rescue him. ‘It was horrifying,’ she said. ‘I was almost frozen with fear. One person dived in the water and the others rushed to get the police. The guy was saved from drowning and taken to hospital suffering from severe shock. It took us a long time before we could continue filming. That moment will stay with me forever.’

  AM, life continued to move on. Kylie’s younger brother Brendan attempted to launch a singing career in Sydney with the backing of both sisters, while Kylie was briefly reunited with Jason when both agreed to take part in the Rhythm of Life fashion show at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel in aid of the Rainforest Foundation. This was to turn into something of an annus horribilus for Jason too, incidentally: it was the year that he went on to sue the magazine The Face for saying he was gay and while he won the case, he lost an enormous amount of friendship in the show biz community. Kylie, however, stuck up for her ex. ‘I can categorically state that Jason is heterosexual,’ said Kylie who, after all, should know. ‘I think he’s suing The Face because he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life saying, “It’s not true.” I don’t know what I would have done but I do think it’s unfair that he’s had such a bad run over that.’

  The demands of show business were taking their toll. Normally an absolute trouper, Kylie was now talking about a very different life. ‘I often consider giving it all up,’ she said wistfully. ‘I’d like to study at university or maybe back-pack across Thailand. I went on holiday to Arizona recently and it blew my mind. I wasn’t hassled – people just left me alone. There are times when I hate what I do and everything surrounding what I do. I don’t like fame and recognition, the loss of a personal, private life. Sometimes I just want to be a normal girl.’ There were rumours she was moving to Paris, rumours that were fuelled when she dressed as Brigitte Bardot in a new video.

  Fat chance. Kylie continued to arouse interest everywhere she went and with everything she did. She was the subject of an attack by Viz magazine for reasons that have never been entirely clear and the subject of gossip when she filmed the video for ‘What Kind of Fool’ with model Rob English. ‘Rob and Kylie are NOT an item,’ snapped Sue Foster. ‘They’re just good friends.’

  That single, followed by a greatest hits album, was to be her last with PWL. Even then, though, when Kylie was still
with Stock, Aitken and Waterman, her music was beginning to evolve, another good reason for changing her look. ‘The music was changing, better,’ says Kylie, ‘but the image was the only thing I truly had in my grasp. So it was like, “Right! Now I’m going to be Miss Vixen.” I was going to rebel and do everything I hadn’t been allowed to do before. But it was time for the music to catch up.’

  Kylie was finally allowed to try her hand at a little song writing on her fourth album, Let’s Go To It – ‘Every little step forward to me was like a gold medal,’ she says – but increasingly she was beginning to feel the need for a change. She decided to leave PWL. There was nothing to stop her: she had signed up for five albums, including a greatest hits, and with these out of the way she could go anywhere she wanted. PWL tried to tell her to stay, pointing out what they had achieved together. And they had a point: ‘Everything we’d done together had been successful,’ agrees Kylie.

  ‘PWL had the attitude that they were the best. And in one sense, they made me.’ And so she embarked on a tour to find a new label, with every record company worth its salt trying to persuade her to come on board: ‘Many lunches and dinners,’ she says. Her public profile fell slightly – ‘I prefer it this way,’ she said firmly, ‘instead of people leering out of car windows and yelling obscenities at you.’ But you know what they say: the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. And anyway, Kylie was giving everyone plenty to talk about.

  It was towards the end of 1992 that she first began to discuss doing a book (another book eventually appeared in 1999) full of pictures of herself, complete with no clothing. Madonna’s book Sex had come out in the same year and Kylie was immediately accused of copying the idea. ‘My book will be very sophisticated and the nude shots have all been done in a very subtle way,’ she retorted. ‘They are very discreet. I don’t feel I’m imitating Madonna. I had the idea for doing naked pictures a long time ago. Besides, they won’t dominate the book. There will be lots of pictures of me wearing some wonderful outfits. The pictures everyone sees of me usually show the cute Kylie, but these are different.’