Kylie Queen of the World

by Julie Aspinall

  Kylie fought back. She emphasised the fact that she was now entirely at ease with her past. ‘So many people have stories that relate to my career,’ she said. ‘I heard about an obsessed fan who’d got a cardboard cut-out of me and his girlfriend asked him to turn it around when they made love. You hear them just sitting in cabs talking to the driver or just talking to people in the street. They just spill out and then the tellers are kind of embarrassed. I just say, “Okay, it’s funny.”’

  And still the records did badly. Finally, by August 1998 everyone, Kylie included, had had enough. ‘Kylie and deConstruction recently reached an amicable agreement not to do another album together,’ read a statement released by the record company. ‘She has been freed from any further contractual obligations.’ In actual fact there was nothing amicable about it: the album had sold only 43,000, not even in the same league as her first album, Kylie, which had sold two million copies a decade earlier. Things were getting difficult behind the scenes: there were reports that in June record company bosses had told her, ‘If sales don’t take off, we’ll dump you.’

  And when the moment came, her new colleagues weren’t much more positive off the record. ‘Kylie has tried nearly every kind of music style and image change, so there really wasn’t anywhere else for her to go,’ said a deConstruction insider. ‘The company felt they had stuck with her for a long time but ultimately she wasn’t going to recapture her earlier success.’

  It was a tremendous slap in the face for Kylie. As it happened, the ‘Kylie dumped’ headlines were not telling the whole story, given that she was by this time absolutely desperate to leave deConstruction, but it was a public humiliation none the less. It was deConstruction that scored a coup in getting Kylie, not the other way round, and now it was as if she was being publicly branded a has-been. It was a very uncomfortable moment in what had been an incredibly successful career.

  ‘I was losing them money and I wasn’t having any joy,’ she says in retrospect. ‘I wasn’t at the meeting [where it was decided the label would drop her] but they wanted to let me go and I would have asked to go. It was blatantly obvious that it wasn’t working. It wasn’t like one dumped the other and the other wanted it to stay the same. I actually thought it was the best thing.’ She was asked if she had bad days – and, indeed, if she could have retired. ‘Like, “I have no qualifications, what am I going to do?”’ she asked rhetorically. ‘No, I didn’t wallow in depression … I don’t think I could retire and have the life that I’m accustomed to. Not that I have fabulous Elton John expenses, but things like getting on a plane and getting a first-class ticket …’

  At least one fellow musician managed to find a bit of humour in the situation, as well as offering some unqualified support for the diminutive pop star. ‘Kylie, love her to bits,’ said James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers, with whom Kylie had appeared on stage in Shepherd’s Bush. ‘I’m her number one fan. She’s so tiny and gorgeous. I could eat her. She got dropped by her label after working with me, which I’m eternally sorry for.’

  And so, just like the rest of us, Kylie needed to work out how to earn money and needed to rewrite her plans. She chose the most sensible course of action available: she had a fundamental rethink about what she wanted to do next and what had gone wrong in recent years. ‘I don’t think it was a mistake,’ says Kylie now with commendable honesty. ‘I think it was … I wanted more help than I had then.

  ‘In retrospect, looking back at a lot of the lyrics, it’s quite obvious now that I was saying, “Erm, hello? Yes, I am drowning, not waving, can I have a bit of help here?” It was a period where things weren’t gelling together for lots of reasons. But I don’t think it was a mistake and I don’t regret it because I learned a lot during that period.’ She certainly did. She learned that disco is her natural home, that men prefer her in hot pants to tracksuits – and, above all, that when you have had a severe setback, it is crucial to get on your feet and start all over again.

  ‘So many people said to me, “Don’t give yourself a hard time,”’ she recalled later. ‘It wasn’t successful, not a commercial success, but they really liked it and they thought it showed a side of me that won’t come across in an interview, or a TV show, or a video. That it’s probably more enlightening than anybody realised at the time. It was an experience … it was a long one. It took two years to make that album and then it just seemed like there was bad luck around it.’ It’s worth noting here that Kylie puts a great deal of emphasis on luck: unlike less modest stars, she has always emphasised that luck played a big part in her career. She also recognises that on the whole, she has had a lot of it.

  ‘It was due for release,’ she went on, ‘then it wasn’t released, then it came out with a different title, which was the same title of an old record … it left me having to do a lot of work by myself, and I didn’t really know where I was going or what I was doing. But I think that brought out something different and interesting because it hadn’t been heard before.’

  At least Australia still loved its most famous daughter. In 1998, the Australian government gave her an achievement award for her contribution to Australia’s export industry, while a picture of her signed in pink lipstick hangs as one of the centrepieces at Australia’s National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. That is not the only Kylie-related exhibit in Australia’s museums, incidentally – the wedding dress she wore as Charlene Robinson is on permanent display at the Melbourne Museum. Having come to something of a crisis point in her career, Kylie did what daughters the world over do when they’re having a miserable time – she went home.

  Home in this case meant a tour of Australia, following a tour of Britain, and it was exactly what Kylie needed. Titled ‘Intimate and Live’, the tour was a sell-out in both Britain and Australia, but it was while performing in the second of those two countries that Kylie really began to find her musical feet again as she revisited many of her old hits, even including ‘Locomotion’. She camped it up, she went back to glitz and the fans loved her for it. ‘I made a conscious decision just to be myself,’ she said. ‘That’s why some of it couldn’t be camper. Showy. Pretty much the way I am.’ She was delighted when fans approached her and told her they used to wear Kylie earrings. ‘It was amazing meeting a lot of people who said, “I’ve grown up with you”’, she enthused. ‘That’s beautiful. I don’t mean to sound cosmic, but I love the fact I’ve had a moment with all these people.’

  The Herald Sun, Australia’s biggest selling daily newspaper, reflected the mood of the crowd at each of the 24 dates:

  For a concert where she could do no wrong, Kylie Minogue did everything right at the Palais theatre last night. The ‘seven-minute crowd’ she called the audience of more than 2,000 fans, referring to how long it took to sell the tickets. She may not have had to prove herself but she put on an event and not a gig. Opening with the intense ‘Too Far’, Minogue instantly vindicated her choice of bands (John Farnham Band) with imported percussionist and guitarist, easily replicating the musical boundary-pushing on her albums. Minogue used the concert, her first in seven years, to re-write her past. Her Stock/Aitken/Waterman songs were reinvented, a gospel rock ‘What Do I Have To Do’, a Las Vegas cabaret for ‘…Lucky’. From rock grooves some kind of bliss through to a seriously camp cover of ‘Dancing Queen’, Minogue left no musical stone unturned. The recent hit ‘Did It Again’ thrilled the crowd, as did the hard-edged ‘Limbo.’ The encore featured her classic ‘Confide In Me’, with the show closing with a re-worked version of ‘Better The Devil You Know’. Minogue thanked the crowd for her homecoming before leaving the stage. A Star Is Reborn.

  It was a bonus that Impossible Princess had actually sold well in Australia – it was released on time, kept its original title and eventually became a platinum seller there – but Kylie had realised that what her audience wanted from her was pop. ‘When I was doing the concerts in Australia, I made the decision, way back then, to get back in to pop,’ says Kylie. ‘I guess I was t
esting it out. I’d just do what I do but if it came across as daggy, then I’d just go for it. Everything I’ve done has always been pop. It’s just been in different guises. It has changed according to where I was in my life.’

  Kylie had finally realised where her strengths lay: in glamour and froth. ‘I never thought I’d fucked it up completely,’ she says today. ‘But I wasn’t following my instinct. I wasn’t being as true to myself as I should be. I lost my way.’

  While in Australia, Kylie made the film Sample People, which was yet another to forget about afterwards – ‘although visually Sample People remains a pleasure, the plot, story and lack of character development let it down,’ wrote one critic. Perhaps the best way to explain what was wrong with the film is to quote Australian Cosmopolitan: ‘The film’s a kind of Aussie Pulp Fiction. Kylie plays a drug snorting gangster’s moll and Ben’s [Mendelsohn, her co-star, whom she had first met in The Henderson Kids] a bitchy bisexual.’ It was, according to the same magazine, ‘Kylie’s attempt to establish herself as a happening, indie movie star.’

  The film went the way of all of Kylie’s other indie attempts, but otherwise all was well. She was in Australia, with her people. And she was with a record company who appreciated her, too: Mushroom Records, the label she has been with in Australia throughout her entire career. Towards the end of the year, Kylie played at the Concert Of The Century at Melbourne Cricket ground to celebrate Mushroom’s twenty-fifth anniversary: the crowds went wild and Kylie cheered up. She was ready to take on the world again.

  10

  The Divine Miss M

  Back in Britain, the first real sign of a reawakening of interest in Kylie was a coffee-table book, packed choc-full of pictures of the petite diva herself. Kylie had been considering doing a book from as early as 1992, but when it finally appeared, it was different both from Madonna’s Sex, a volume of extreme exhibitionism, and Kylie’s own initial idea. There are a couple of nude photographs to delight Kylie-watchers, but on the whole, the book is really a scrapbook of Kylie’s career to date.

  These are pictures of Kylie stemming right back to the earliest days, tracking her career from TV tomboy to sex kitten, with the pages devoted to Kylie lookalikes, paintings of Kylie, Kylie’s face drawn on a man’s leg, Kylie and Michael, photographs by Stephane, an abstract painting by Jason Donovan, magazine covers, record covers and so on. Kylie was at last coming to terms with her sugar sweet past. She was also, not a moment too soon, growing out of her IndieKylie phase. ComebackKylie was on her way.

  ‘It was born out of a moment of boredom,’ says the woman herself. ‘I was sat in my kitchen with a friend, having just finished the best tour I’ve ever done and I was in need of a project to get me through the lull.’ The lull, of course, was Kylie’s period between record labels, a period that was clearly being put to extremely creative use.

  The book, called Kylie, is a collaboration between Kylie and her long-term stylist Will Baker in which she adopts all sorts of different persona – as indeed she has done throughout her career – and it is finished off with comments on Kylie by people ranging from Nick Cave to Julie Burchill. Nick Cave, incidentally, spends most of his entry ruminating on the words to ‘Better The Devil You Know’. The first picture in the book is a little bit startling: Kylie having not so much a bad hair day as a bad all over day, right down to a smudge of lipstick on her lips. Her complexion is waxen, her eyes rigid and she just doesn’t come across as bouncy little Kylie we all know and love. It is only when you look again that you realise this is actually a photograph of a waxwork of Kylie, rather than the woman herself.

  ‘I made a bit of a blunder there,’ admits Kylie chirpily. ‘I just assumed people would go, “Oh, the waxwork”, but they don’t … It’s funny when I’m with them because they just don’t know what to say. I have to pounce on them and go, “Er … that’s wax, darling!”’

  There are a couple of pictures of a completely naked Kylie, one rather enchanting one taken in her dressing room after a concert. ‘The reason I included that shot was because I remember the moment it was taken and I was so happy,’ she says. ‘But it’s not there to shock, it’s tasteful. Sure, nobody’s ever seen my nipple before, but it means nothing to me. It’s a nipple. Big deal.’

  Kylie was aware that the book could be judged as vanity publishing but was keen also to portray her new project as an assessment of her career to date. ‘There is a certain amount of vanity involved,’ she admits, ‘but, as I say in the book, something of celebrity is self-centredness, the rest is insecurity.’ And does she like the pictures of herself? ‘Generally yes, but I keep it all in perspective,’ she says.

  ‘I know that anyone could look good if they had the same amount of help that I have. I’ve got the luxury of being able to change on a whim. I’m like the eight-year-old with the dress-up box. But I still get away with it! I change characters when I do a photo shoot. It’s kind of avoiding being me – which I’ve become very good at. It’s hard for me to explain, but rather than being captured, I become a new character or I choose a facet of me and let [it] take over.’

  Given the number of different poses she strikes and the compilation of images from her past, the book can also be seen as some sort of search for the real Kylie Minogue. Is she IndieKylie, SexKylie, Charlene, ComebackKylie, SophisticatKylie – just what really constitutes the identity of the sweet little songstress from Oz? ‘I tried to understand it with the book that I did,’ she admitted a year after it had come out, ‘but I think it confused me even more.’

  The project was an ideal diversion from Kylie’s recent problems and also one that suited her personality very well. ‘I have a very low boredom threshold,’ she says. ‘It’s a thread that runs through every aspect of my life and career.’ And this did not just apply to work. ‘When I go out with different men, I take on board certain aspects of their characters. I think we all do that, don’t we?’

  The magazine Loaded felt that Kylie’s move into books was a very good move indeed. It even felt moved to publish a little review, which it put alongside two revealing pictures of Kylie:

  Aussie popster’s saucy book. Have a word – it’s Kylie in a radical departure from Planet Pop. Yep, the diminutive Antipodean saucepot is back after a break from the charts, with her new book, Kylie. Packed with pics not unlike these two, it’s supposed to challenge our view of the UK’s favourite Sheila. Looks like she’s going about it the right way and no mistake. This is a bold move into print, Kyles.

  By this time, even through the bad patch, Kylie had been famous for a very long time and she was clearly beginning to reassess her past and look towards what she would be doing in the future. Unlike so many artists, though, who crave fame and then find it destroys them, Kylie has actually been able to take a step back and ponder what makes an audience so interested in the person up there on stage. ‘The closest I can get to understanding it is if I’m sitting at the dentist and there’s a magazine. I will pick it up and work my way through it and find myself saying, “Are they going out together? Look what she’s wearing!”We all like a bit of gossip. It’s like looking into people’s houses when it’s night-time and you can see inside. I like that. “Ooooh, look how they’ve decorated.”’

  Kylie was also aware of the fact that people liked putting her into specific persona, as witnessed by the pictures in the book. ‘I think everyone’s got a different version either that they want me to be or they imagine me to be,’ she said. ‘But I think there is a very human element to the relationship that my audience and myself have in that I can’t double-cross them. I don’t get away with things when it’s not really me or when I make mistakes they kind of go, “Oh, she’s going through a phase, she’ll come to her senses.”’ The lessons of the recent past were clearly ringing very loudly in her ears.

  Meanwhile, her love life was perking up again. There had been no one serious since she split up with Stephane Sednaoui in 1997, but towards the end of 1998 Kylie followed in the footsteps of many anoth
er pretty girl in London (or so it sometimes seems) and had a fling with Tim Jefferies, the erstwhile companion of Koo Stark, Elle Macpherson and others too numerous to mention. It was only to last for three months, but it contributed to Kylie once again feeling at one with the world.

  ‘Tim’s gorgeous,’ she says. ‘He’s funny and good looking. I’d known him for several years as a friend. In fact, he’s the only friend I’ve ever dated and we’ve stayed friends. But in between the friendships it was definitely a romance. Elton John lent us his villa in the South of France for a romantic weekend. It’s an amazing place with fantastic art – every room’s immaculate. My life’s rarely like that. I don’t hang out with the Euro crowd – in fact, I haven’t really met any of them. My friends are all unknown creative types who are nutters.’

  They weren’t all completely unknown – for example, Nick Cave – but in that way, at least, IndieKylie had been a success. She had found the people she wanted to hang out with. Even now she still spends time with the art crowd and the alternative brigade – one friend is Steve Strange, the Eighties pop star who recently published his autobiography, Blitzed! In the book, he recalls a joint birthday party he shared with Kylie. The guests found the old club/fashion and crossover brigade – George Michael, Zandra Rhodes, Duggie Fields and Andrew Logan – and Strange’s ‘new crowd’ – promoter Lawrence Malice, Lisa B, Robert Hanson, Jason Donovan.

  Back with Tim Jefferies, Kylie was having a great time. In time-honoured fashion, the couple were snapped together on a topless beach while they were on holiday in the South of France and they even managed to remain together for a few months afterwards before the affair fizzled out. Both were pictured with other people; Tim ended up, albeit briefly, with the statuesque German model Claudia Schiffer. His father Richard had this to say about his son’s activities: ‘I would have stuck with Kylie. I think Kylie’s hot and I would like to give her one. But to go from that to this big silly fräulein …’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that little outburst, Tim and his father are estranged.