Kylie Queen of the World

by Julie Aspinall

  As we noted before, the book never appeared – and it is entirely possible that Kylie decided not to go ahead when she saw the reaction to Sex. Madonna really had gone too far, by posing for pictures that left absolutely nothing to the imagination, leaving her public with absolutely nothing to wish for. Absolute derision followed and Madonna bowed out of the limelight for a time after that until all the fuss died down.

  Kylie’s looks continued to evolve. Now there was something else occupying the nation’s thoughts: blessed with a naturally large mouth, Kylie’s lips nonetheless seemed even bigger than ever. Had she had a lip job? ‘Absolutely NOT,’ snapped … Kylie herself, actually. Clearly getting rather fed up with all the speculation about her appearance, she angrily announced that she was wearing make-up. She was also beginning to get a bit sick of the accusation that she was copying Madonna. ‘I’m fed up with people saying I’m ripping her off,’ she fumed. ‘She’s always learned from others. Everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Greta Garbo.’

  For many years Kylie tried to escape her soap sudsy past, but right from the beginning it was a doomed hope, as Kylie was to learn. Towards the end of the year plans were mooted to scrap Neighbours: its two most famous ex-stars were called in to take up the programme’s cause. ‘Neighbours was the start of my career and I feel very strongly about it,’ said a good-natured Kylie. And a spokesman for Jason chipped in, ‘He will certainly not want to see the end of Neighbours on British television.’ The programme lived to see another day.

  Kylie also had another shot at film stardom, with the movie Street Fighter, in which she starred with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Unfortunately, it fared no better than The Delinquents. ‘There’s little to get excited about in this laughably bad film adventure,’ said one critic, and few would disagree.

  She might have been quiet musically, but Kylie’s love life was arousing quite as much interest as ever. It was at around this time that rumours arose linking her with Prince, soon to become The Artist Formerly Known As, one of the few pop stars in the world who could make Kylie look tall. In an interview she gave to The Face, Kylie describes how the two diminutive icons met and became friends. The two shared the same security people and so it was that she was taken backstage to meet him at a concert. Then she went to see him in his studio where ‘there were a few jokes flying around.’

  ‘Where do you want your mike set up!’ he cried. ‘Where are your lyrics! Come on!’ Kylie gave him the lyrics to a song she’d written called ‘Baby Doll’: ‘Sugar and spice and all things nice/Come and show me paradise/Let me be your baby doll.’ (And they said Kylie was just a pretty face.) Prince took the lyrics, finished the song and sang it back to the petite chanteuse.

  And so, asked The Face, how much did he know about you? ‘I don’t think he knew much, or at least he didn’t let on. But he did mention one quote which I said some time back, about him being “Sex on a stick.” Which is funny now that I know him.’

  Next up, Kylie went to visit Prince in Paisley Park, his complex which includes both his house and a recording studio. ‘I went to Minneapolis for a while and hung out there,’ she related. ‘In the studio. I’m sure my story could match many other girls’ stories. To a point, I must add,’ she added primly. ‘The point before anything really interesting starts to happen.’ When pressed on whether the pixie popster had amorous designs on her, Kylie diplomatically responded ‘Not exactly’, though she couldn’t help but acknowledge that he is ‘Famous for being fresh! But who wants to be on that list!’ Clearly, though she respected the multi-talented Prince’s musical savvy, she was not about to become another notch on the Paisley Park bedpost.

  A trip to Prince’s house had followed. And did he make a move on our heroine there? Well, not exactly:‘We had a game of table tennis.’ And he absolutely wiped the floor with her. Then, for good measure, he thrashed her at pool too. She added that although she couldn’t remember the final scores, ‘I do remember doing a glorious flying leap, trying to do an almost impossible return and landing in the shagpile … that is my fondest memory of Prince.’

  Meantime, Kylie wasn’t neglecting her career. While in the States, she also did a tour of the movie studios in LA. ‘I met casting agents and heads of studios,’ she said. ‘But their world is usually so small. It’s not even America, just Hollywood, and they don’t know who I am. I talk to them and I’m just another blonde bimbo coming in, and as they’re talking about their new golf club set I’m thinking, I could be doing a European tour!’ Her choice of leading man, she confided, would be Al Pacino or Sean Connery. ‘I do have a thing for the older man…’ As we know, she eventually ended up with a very different package altogether, in the form of Jean-Claude Van Damme.

  Meanwhile, new avenues were opening up for Kylie all the time. She was informed about a short story by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. Called Where The Debris Meets The Sea and included in his collection The Acid House, the story concerns four women – Madonna, Victoria Principal, Kim Bassinger and Kylie Minogue – who sit around in a house in Santa Monica fantasising about unattainable manual workers from Leith. The same subject matter had been covered before – and a good deal better – when Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sat around in the guise of two pub bores talking about the famous women they’ve had to fight off – ‘there was a tap on the window. It was bloody Greta Garbo, hanging on the window sill in a see-through nightie. I had to smash her down with a broomstick’ – and this particular tale reeks of so much male fantasy you can practically smell the testosterone rising from the pages. But true to form, Kylie was as nice as she could be about the story.

  ‘I still don’t really know what to make of it,’ she admitted. ‘It’s basically his … sexual fantasies. I don’t know if he’s got the women – I don’t think we were dissimilar to the Fat Slags [Viz’s famous characters] in it. With good intentions.’ She was too right there: Irvine, in one of the most blatant cases of wishful thinking ever committed to paper has ‘Kylie’ fantasising about visiting a Scottish nightclub called Clan: ‘Imagine the cock in thair. Comin out the fuckin waws.’ In your dreams, Irvine mate, but that’s the price of stardom, having Scottish authors lusting after you in their prose, just as Kylie later had to put up with Frank Skinner drooling over her gold hot pants. Reading between the lines – hers, not Irvine’s – she didn’t really seem to be that impressed.

  The Face bumped into Kylie again a few weeks later. In the intervening time, she had been to the Monte Carlo World Music Awards – and amongst those present were Prince, Michael Hutchence and Helena Christensen. First, Prince. Kylie revealed that she and Prince had slowdanced to one of his own songs, ‘The Most Beautiful Girl In The World’. And Prince played the gentleman too. Well, almost … Kylie admitted that he had got a bit fresh, but added that, ‘I think he’s always a bit on the fresh side. He just is.’

  ‘You should hear the music they play at that club,’ she confided to the style magazine. ‘Believe me, I dropped to my knees and thanked the Lord when Prince and his crew arrived, because they put on some decent music.’ (Albeit, Prince’s own stuff.)

  And now on to Hutchence. There was a separate report at the time that Michael was utterly furious with Prince because the latter had tried to flirt with Helena two years earlier and had thus boycotted his party. Helena had been at Les Bains Douche nightclub with a friend, when Prince arrived and invited the two of them back to his hotel. They declined, but Michael went ballistic. ‘Michael has never forgotten that night,’ admitted a friend. ‘He was livid with Prince for trying to flirt with Helena under his nose. Prince tried very hard to get Helena and her friend back to his place – I guess he thought they could have had a great party. Since then he has avoided Prince. When he was invited to Prince’s show, Michael’s answer was unprintable.’ Kylie, however, was one of the revellers at the bash.

  Diplomatic as ever, Kylie told The Face that her time in Monte Carlo had been ‘a most eventful few days’, what with the presence of a very famous ex-boyfriend around.
The interviewer pressed her on the point, asking whether the rumours were true that she had altered her seat allocations on the plane so that she and Hutchence would not be sitting together. ‘Not exactly,’ she replied, before laughing and adding, ‘Dot, dot, dot.’

  Poor Kylie. That interview was given in the middle of 1994, three and a half years after the break up with Michael and, as it turned out, only a few months before Michael was to leave Helena for Paula Yates. But Kylie was clearly nowhere near over Michael, no matter how many men she’d cavorted with in between. Rock’s wild man still had her in his power as he does, to a certain extent, to this very day.

  By her own admission, Kylie has been in love since then, and currently seems to be happy in her romantic life, but Michael was and always will be the love of her life. And back then, in the early 1990s, the pain was clearly extremely raw. It was to be a long while before Kylie could even think about having another serious relationship again.

  8

  Indie Princess

  Having left PWL, Kylie was on the hunt for a new record label. In retrospect the label she eventually chose to sign up with looks like a bizarre decision for a populist little singer from Australia but, as Kylie was after the credibility vote, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. In April 1993, she linked up with deConstruction, an indie dance label, with a view to becoming hip and groovy rather than mainstream and clichéd (and popular). The new partners raved about one another. Kylie gushed, ‘deConstruction have a brilliant reputation to uphold, so I’m kind of relying on their reputation rather than my own … There were two options. Either we could make another pop record or we could throw me into the field and try just anything. We chose the latter.’

  The duo behind deConstruction were equally optimistic. ‘Kylie is regarded as a trashy disco singer,’ said Pete Hatfield, co-founder of the label. ‘We regard her as a potential radical dance diva.’ ‘We just think she’s a complete star,’ added his partner Keith Blackhurst. ‘She’s almost like a diva. We just thought the opportunity to work with Kylie, who’d obviously grown up, was an opportunity to have a star, in the true sense of the word, working with us and our team of creative people.’

  Initially, Kylie was euphoric about her new life. ‘I secretly love worry, I bring it on myself,’ she subsequently admitted. ‘Three months after I left PWL, I panicked. I kept thinking I was washed up, people were going to forget me.’ But it had been time for a change. ‘It was like finishing a marathon,’ she says. ‘I’d done five albums with them and I truly felt that our working relationship had gone as far as it possibly could.’

  Kylie was touchingly delighted to be associated with so many hip and groovy artists, such as M People, Black Box, N-Jois and K-Klass – the only problem being that she had no idea who many of them were. M People was the exception: ‘My heart starts to wobble when I hear them somewhere in the world,’ she revealed at the time, ‘and I think: Stablemates! and I get proud.’

  But she was touchingly delighted by the reaction she was getting from her new friends in the industry. ‘It baffles me how it happened but somehow people have been able to see through,’ she said at the time. ‘These people who have taken an interest in my career have been able to see that there are more … possibilities. And to have someone’s belief is wonderful. You can bloom with that.’

  One person felt rather more dubious about Kylie’s change of direction: Pete Waterman. ‘Towards the end of the time she was working with us,’ he wrote in I Wish I Was Me, ‘she was discovering a whole load of new ambitions, setting her sights at becoming the new Prince or Madonna. What I found amazing was that she was outselling Madonna four to one, but still wanted to be her. Everyone wanted to be Kylie Minogue except Kylie Minogue, who wanted to be Madonna. On top of that, I think Kylie was getting embarrassed by her past because it was part of her growing up. She had to reject her past so she could find her own identity. I was fine about that, but it just meant that if she wanted to do something else, she’d have to do it with someone else.’

  So she did. But Kylie soon found out that her new life was to be very different from the happy days at PWL. The deConstruction label was delighted with its new acquisition, but no one seemed to know exactly what to do with her. She started meeting people in the industry, including Primal Scream, The Beloved, St Etienne, Keith Allen and others too numerous to mention. ‘When she first came into the studio, her voice was the sound of PWL,’ says Steve Anderson, half of the team Brothers in Rhythm, who went on to produce Kylie’s debut album with deConstruction. ‘It had that nasal quality to it, the horrible Kylie Minogue quality that graced so many records. Throughout the course of recording the album, she gained confidence in her vocals and surprised herself with what she was able to do.’

  SexKylie might have been a raunchy little rock chick, but still she seemed rather too salubrious for some of the company she was keeping. Bobby Gillespie, lead singer with Primal Scream, once distinguished himself by asking her how she felt about people masturbating over her. They chatted about working together before, according to Kylie, Bobby offered her ‘all these delights being passed around: Jack Daniel’s … etc.’ Kylie had an orange juice. Then she met a couple of other members of the band. ‘We were going to do a song from their album,’ she says, ‘but in a different way. I can’t even think what it was, now.’

  Meetings with many more people followed: a new album was underway, although it was to be a long time before it saw the light of day after innumerable meetings, collaborations, cancellations and all kind of non PWL-style palaver. ‘They’re never going to let me stop,’ said Kylie at the time. ‘I’m on a treadmill. This thing not being quite there is dangling the carrot right in front of me. I want it to be finished so I can know what I’m talking about.’

  She set about reshaping herself in a new image, not so much SexKylie as IndieKylie and was thus thoroughly irritated when Jason Donovan chose this moment to speak more openly about their relationship than he ever had done before. Radio 1 DJ Steve Wright asked him, on air, a very direct question: ‘Did you sleep with Kylie?’ Jason decided to tell all. ‘You want to know the truth?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I did. We had a relationship for four years. We never turned round and blatantly said we were going out. But it was the whole bits and pieces, that’s the diplomatic answer.’

  Despite the fact that their relationship had been known about since 1988, that ‘bits and pieces’ comment was the first time Jason had ever admitted that theirs had been more than just a holding-hands relationship. It caused an absolute furore, was widely repeated elsewhere and made it into various ‘Quotes of the week’ sections. Kylie was livid. ‘She can’t believe Jason would just blurt this out in a radio interview with millions of listeners tuning in,’ snapped a friend. ‘They did go out a long time ago, but after they split up they had a pact between them that they would never discuss their relationship in public. So you can imagine how she felt when she was told Jason had admitted actually sleeping with her to Steve Wright. She’s gone up the wall.’ Actually, given that the relationship had been known about for some time, and since Kylie was trying to establish a new image for herself, it’s far more likely that she was annoyed by being reminded of her Neighbours past.

  A hint of what was to come in the Noughties appeared in the form of Robbie Williams, then part of teen sensation Take That. Kylie turned up to an aftershow party when the winsome fivesome had done a concert at Wembley, and impressed young Robbie no end: ‘She’s gorgeous and frail,’ he burbled. ‘You feel like you want to protect her and keep her under your wing. Unfortunately none of us are allowed girlfriends at the moment so we can only remain the best of friends.’

  Evan Dando, lead singer of the Lemonheads, was rather luckier than Robbie. Evan and Kylie met at a nightclub in Melbourne and friends watched open-mouthed at what happened next. ‘Kylie just looked at him across the room,’ said one. ‘You could feel the sexual energy crackling. They kissed openly in the nightclub, then she held on to his hand and l
ed him into a cloakroom. It was a good hour before they emerged. Kylie’s hair was all over the place. Both of them had beaming smiles.’ ‘We hung out for a couple of nights,’ said Kylie lightly, ‘so at least there’s a reason for stories that we’re boyfriend and girlfriend. Which we’re not.’

  It was a step forward, though, for there had been no one serious for Kylie since she’d split up with Zane. And finally, in September 1994, came the release of her new album, entitled Kylie Minogue. Kylie signified her more serious intentions by appearing in a pair of spectacles on the cover and the debut was a respectable performance: the preceding single ‘Confide In Me’ got to number two and the album reached number four, so there were, for the time being, satisfied faces all round.

  Various singles from the album followed, of which the most notable was probably ‘Put Yourself In My Place’, not so much because of the music (it is about a woman who has never been able to get over her ex-lover, incidentally) but because of its accompanying video. ‘The inspiration for it is Barbarella. I’m a massive fan of that film,’ Kylie revealed at the time. For the uninitiated, Barbarella is a classic of its time, a 1960s film starring Jane Fonda as an extremely amorous astronautette who cavorts around space in possibly the least practical spacesuit ever envisaged, having … adventures. It has another link to the music world, incidentally, in that it features a character called Duran Duran, from which the 1980s group took its name.