FEATURE:
Put Yourself in My Place
Kylie Minogue at Thirty
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MANY might consider…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kylie Minogue in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: RANKIN
Kylie Minogue’s golden period to be from 2000’s Light Years onwards. Following that with 2001’s Fever. There are a run of three albums where we saw transition and evolution from her earliest Pop days. Maybe trying to evolve and throw off tags and perceptions. Move her on. Kylie Minogue’s first three albums, I feel, are more about commercial Pop and hits. Getting that instant and catchy sound out to radio stations and in the charts. 1991’s Let’s Get to It was a more advanced and mature sound. Skip to 1997’s Impossible Princess and a sense of evolution and mixing in Electronic and Dance sounds. Maybe reacting to the music that was around in 1997. Minogue always moving with the times. 1994’s Kylie Minogue arrived in a year where we saw the advent and growth of Britpop. Some brilliant Pop and classic albums. Deconstruction released the album in the United Kingdom on 19th September, 1994. After leaving Pete Waterman Entertainment, Kylie Minogue was eager to move on and prove herself as a serious artist. She signed with the independent record label Deconstruction in 1993. Bringing together a wide-ranging collective of collaborators, Minogue worked on a number of different sounds and ideas. In terms of the music, Kylie Minogue is a Pop album mixing elements of Dance and R&B. Even if many of the reviews were mixed, Kylie Minogue peaked in the top five in the United Kingdom and Australia. Maybe critics feeling that Minogue was stepping into areas that were not for her. This once young artist being produced by a Pop factory now being ‘grown up’ or stepping out of her comfort zone. Kylie Minogue is a brilliant album containing some incredible songs. I will talk more about my favourite, Confide in Me, later.
I want to start out with an interview archived by Medium. Initially published in M8 Magazine in October 1994, this was a period when Minogue was releasing music that was more daring and independent than many fans were used to. The media still trying to work out who she was. I don’t think many took her eponymous album as seriously as they should have done. Thirty years after its release and Kylie Minogue stands the test of time. It is an underrated jewel in her crown:
“Today, Kylie Minogue is sitting anxiously in the opulent (if slightly 80s) surroundings of Blakes Hotel in west London awaiting your reporter. Since touching down on Monday, she’s appeared on Top of the Pops, co-presented MTV and done a good few other promotional chores. Tonight she’s finally let off the leash to go clubbing at the Leisure Lounge. But right now she’s waiting around. Yes, despite years of juvenile longing and two months of your actual planning, Martin’s late for Kylie. Due to bomb alerts on the tube and an over-zealous cab driver who insists on showing me where Chelsea play (“Yes, I’m interested, really, but I am in a bit of a rush …”). Kylie doesn’t seem to mind, though. She greets me by name, insists that I move a little closer and proceeds to compare trainers² – a true professional. So, is it hard for you to maintain all this bubbliness then, our Kylie?
‘1987, ’88, ’89, it’s a blur. I truly can’t remember it. I was on automatic. I got tired of being on the treadmill. I was always thinking that next step ahead’
“I think that it was training years ago, from when I was in a series where as soon as the red light goes on – you’ve got to do it, which has given me good discipline for work,” she says. “I don’t like to turn up late, I don’t like to mess people around. I do the job, it’s a team effort. I give it my best and get out of there. I might be feeling really lousy but as soon as it comes on it’s [toothy grin] and soon as it comes off it’s ‘God, I hate this!””
All the signs then of that classic Gemini split personality in Ms Minogue. But does this mean that Kylie saves up all her smiles for onstage and gets depressed as soon as she’s left to think about life for too long (shades of Kenneth Williams³ here). Well yeah, kind of. “I just keep going and going,” she says. “And then it just gets to a point when that’s it. I can’t talk. I just want to go home. Having time on my hands is deadly for me. I need to be occupied, otherwise I dwell on things and make them worse, like sticking them in the oven and watching them rise and rise.
With trips to Europe, south-east Asia, America and even South Africa planned in promotion of her latest record, it sounds like, despite all the attention, this pop lark could be quite a lonely business for her. “I do get a bit lonely, yeah, just for a relationship with someone,” she admits. “But I’m very happy with my work and I’m so busy that I don’t have time to be thinking about it really. I’m not going to waste my time chasing someone around. I’ll just wait. I believe in fate. I could be in the most wonderful relationship and still have moments of feeling lonely. It’s all relative.”
Small wonder then that she’s champing at the bit and raring to go raging (as they say in Neighbours). Still, one good reason for this temporarily tepid patch in Kylie’s love life of late is the particularly purple patch which her recording career has been going through. The last 12 months have seen her collaborating with the Pet Shop Boys, Saint Etienne and M People, piecing together an album for the ultra-cred DeConstruction Records, the first that she can genuinely say that she’s proud of. But long before she got the trendy seal of approval from the likes of M8, Pete Waterman predicted that Kylie Minogue would be a genuine star with universal appeal; so why did it take her so long to escape his (distinctly paternalistic) tutelage and start to chase these goals of her own?
“I was always thinking that one step ahead,” she stresses. “I just wasn’t thinking a long way ahead. I was so preoccupied by what was happening right then that ’87, ’88, ’89 – it’s a blur. I truly can’t remember it. I was on automatic. There wasn’t space in my mind, I wasn’t capable of projecting too far into the future, but I could see that next step that I wanted to take. Then, as time progressed and I got more of an understanding of the business, I got tired of being on the treadmill.”
The catalyst for making a break? Would you believe pangs of shame at the naivete of her back catalogue? Kylie is surprisingly open in admitting that some of her older numbers simply aren’t much cop!
‘I started to feel embarrassed that I couldn’t call myself an artist. People would ask about my songs and I’d go, er … next question’
“I started to feel embarrassed that I couldn’t call myself an artist,” she smiles. “You know, I kind of was, but people would ask me about songs on my album and I’d bluff my way through a lot of it. I’d be like ‘Oh yeah, that song, er, it’s about [fakes a cough]. Next question!’, because they didn’t mean that much to me. So that’s why I took the image and twisted it, shook it up, did whatever I could with it, just as a protest to try and break through and show who I was.”
Despite the fact that her latest effort, ‘Kylie Minogue’ (hmmm, the album titles haven’t progressed much have they, readers?) has taken 12 months to come to fruition, she’s equally unpretentious in describing it, indeed pleasantly self deprecating throughout our chat. She tells me that M People’s reworking of the soul stomper Time Is on Our Side which closes the record, always brings to mind the red-rinse and Bacofoil of the cabaret circuit. And she even shares slight misgivings about her current look.
“You know, in five years’ time I might look back at this time and say: What were you doing in a white John Travolta disco suit with your hair in bad dreads? What were you thinking about, woman?⁴’ Some things have worked, some things have backfired, but I don’t care. They’ve brought me to where I am now.”
And where she is now of course, is poised for yet greater worldwide stardom. Madonna sized? Who can tell? Her records are better, her movies will be bigger and she has that same ambitious streak, with a sense of humour to boot, something which the Material Girl hasn’t put on display for some time. Like it or not, Kylie’s now in the kind of league where Prince can claim to have shagged her (he didn’t, she says, but they did quite a lot of psyching each other out – maybe it’s still going on) and artists on both sides of the Atlantic will drop everything to work with her. She may be more frank than the really big stars would dare to be, but she’s moving ever faster away from Scott and Charlene, Especially For You, Stock Aitken and Waterman. Still asking ‘Why Kylie?’. Then meet the new Miss M.
“If you put yourself in this position, it’s like being in front of a firing squad,” she says. “Why do it? If you make music and that’s what you love and you just put it out, that’s one thing, you don’t need to prove anything to anyone. But when you’re in the charts, you’re doing interviews and dealing with people who are flicking through magazines looking for people they can give a hard time to. When that comes at you fast and furious, you get done, you get had. But being in front of the firing squad, let me tell you, I am excellent at dodging bullets …”.
I am going to get to a feature about the album published in 2019. It is important to recognise how important Kylie Minogue was in the career of one of music’s greatest talents. How 1994 was a pivotal and crucial year. I want to move to a review from 1994 and what was being said about an album that is genuinely brilliant. Even if there are one or two lesser numbers, one cannot deny the quality on offer. How Kylie Minogue took a leap and was brave moving on from her older sound and trying something fresh and interesting:
“Kylie Minogue SO HERE it is, the one that's supposed to transform Kylie once and for all from pop kitten to credible artiste. This Herculean goal has actually been realised with a great deal of aplomb. Although seven producers were involved, instead of sounding a mess it's absolutely cohesive, excellent dance-pop. For anyone who remembers her shrill disco ditties, the imaginatively titled "Kylie Minogue" will come as no less than a revelation.
Her voice has been coaxed from a squeak to a more resonant entity, but its frailty imparts a most appealing vulnerability. The songs have been hand-tooled to accommo-. date Kylie's newly enlarged range of soaring top notes and post-coital whispers and sighs. Or perhaps it's 'Kylie who adapts herself to the elegant arrangements, complete with sitars and subtle backing vocals. Trainspotters will have hours of fun trying to distinguish the songs produced by Mercury Music Prize winners People from those by clubland heroes Brothers In Rhythm and Pete Farley.
But they're all high-gloss confections on a par with the best of Madonna. The current single, Confide In Me, has a classical violin overture that unfolds into a snakecharming Eastern melody. Kylie sounds delightfully woebegone. She snaps into sophisticated Euro-diva mode for the languid, chime-tinkling Surrender and by the time we get to the basspopping funker If I Was Your Lover, she's murmuring, "If I was your lover, I'd hold you in my arms and And what is left to our imagination, as is much else on this album. The best moments are uncomplicated "handbaghouse" opuses like Falling and Where Is The Feeling? Kylie confidently hits her stride, a Pet Shop Girl minus the cloying archness”.
Before wrapping up, there is a feature from Albumism that I want to bring in. Marking twenty-five years of the album, it is good that time has been set aside to go deeper with it. Not that many people gave as much time to Kylie Minogue as they should have done. I was ten when it came out and didn’t hear it in full until many years later. The more I listen to it now, the more I get from it. One of Minogue’s best albums I feel:
“The soft sales and mild reviews that met Kylie Minogue’s fourth album Let’s Get to It upon its landfall in late 1991 signposted that it was time for a change. The singer had done all she could at PWL Records and it was time to move on.
A customary singles package assembled and released in 1992 detailed Minogue’s first four years with the British songwriting/production troika Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman. This story began in 1987 when the antipodean actress translated her television star power from the beloved daytime soap Neighbours into a lucrative recording career with a cover of Little Eva’s chestnut “The Loco-Motion.” Later, following the Stock-Aitken-Waterman synth-pop schematic on her first two offerings Kylie (1988) and Enjoy Yourself (1989) via Waterman’s own PWL imprint—in Australia she was signed to Mushroom Records—Minogue became a commercial sensation.
By the time construction was to start on her fourth LP, Aitken had defected from the trio’s ranks which left Minogue, Stock and Waterman to put the project together. Out of those adverse drafting conditions Minogue still managed to shake out a fair curtain call for her PWL tenure with Let’s Get to It. The album’s last single “Finer Feelings” pointed to Minogue’s future as she intersected with two promising writer-producers, Dave Seaman and Steve Anderson, known collectively as Brothers in Rhythm. Seaman and Anderson oversaw the lush radio edit for “Finer Feelings” and when the reviews for it came back strong, Minogue was emboldened to forego renewing her contract with PWL. In Australia, her contract with Mushroom continued to stand.
Minogue wasn’t without a label in the United Kingdom and the rest of mainland Europe for long. In 1993, she inked a deal with deConstruction Records, a boutique arm of its larger parent company BMG Records. “Kylie is regarded as a trashy disco singer, we regard her as a potential radical dance diva,” deConstruction founder Pete Hadfield remarked upon signing her, as documented within the liner notes of Kylie Minogue’s 2003 remaster. “Any radical dance diva has a home at deConstruction.” Attempting to use dance-pop and R&B tones on Rhythm of Love and Let’s Get to It to divorce herself from the identikit sonics of her first two records had worked all too well. Minogue went from being written off as a manufactured puppet to being viewed as a rote dance act—neither of those perceptions were correct.
With all parties at deConstruction encouraging Minogue to explore the variegated musical options available to her, she did just that. And while dance music certainly wasn’t off the table, she knew it wouldn’t be the only avenue ventured on her fifth album, Kylie Minogue. As early as Rhythm of Love, Minogue had begun scripting her own material, but made the conscious decision to lower her pen on this eponymic effort to open herself up to fielding songs that she thought would suit her best. Only “Automatic Love” bore Minogue’s co-writing stamp on the finished product.
Excluding two renditions of Within a Dream’s “Where Is the Feeling?” and Tobi Legend’s “Time Will Pass You By,” the remaining eight of Kylie Minogue’s 10 sides were original compositions. Behind these selections was an eclectic assemblage of writers and producers, foremost among them Jimmy Harry, the Rapino Brothers, Heller & Farley and Brothers in Rhythm. Minogue, Seaman and Anderson teaming up again confirmed that their interaction on “Finer Feelings” had helped her to reimagine the possibilities as to how she could make music. Now, with the room to create freely, the three of them formed the collaborative core for Kylie Minogue.
Unlike the songs Minogue cut with Stock-Aitken-Waterman that relied primarily on keyboards, programming and guitars, she now had access to some of the best session players and technology in the business. She took full advantage of these tools and had her collaborators utilize them to cast rich, fully realized soundscapes courtesy of a healthy blend of live instrumentation and studio craft. Now, Minogue could go to all of those places she had wanted to go on Rhythm of Love and Let’s Get to It, and beyond.
“Confide in Me,” the salvo of Kylie Minogue, is an orchestral, trip-hop tempest built around an interpolation of Edward Barton’s 1983 indie-pop piece “It’s a Fine Day,” later to be covered by Opus III in 1992. Minogue turns in a knockout performance that finds her using her middle and higher vocal register to indelibly sketch a seductive tale of adult romance and connection. Minogue doesn’t lose this momentum when she immediately pivots into the luxe pop-soul of “Surrender,” where she expounds upon her newfound growth as a singer.
From the hip-hop soul, acid jazz and worldbeat fusion heard on “If I Was Your Lover,” “Where Is the Feeling?” and “Time Will Pass You By” respectively, Minogue approximates a cordial balance between R&B grooves and pop melodies that is second to none. Then there are the straight-ahead floorfillers “Where Has the Love Gone?” and “Falling.” The two suite-like jams are fashioned from the refined brick and mortar aspects of house music and meant for long play consumption either in a discothèque or in the comfort of one’s home.
On the balladic end of Kylie Minogue reside “Put Yourself in My Place,” “Dangerous Game” and “Automatic Love.” These adult contemporary entries are nothing short of palatial and saw Minogue tighten her hold on her own brand of soulful pop. Taken as a complete body of work, Kylie Minogue was a stratospheric leap of progress”.
There are many treats and gems on Kylie Minogue. My favourite is Confide in Me. Stirring, balletic, sexy and cool, it is one of those songs that could have been a James Bond them!. Such a captivating track that showed Minogue had moved quite far from her first few albums. Impossible Princess would push that sense of dare and experimentation even further. On 19th September, Kylie Minogue turns thirty. It should be showed love and respect. Minogue’s fifth studio album will no doubt be celebrated by its creator. It is a wonderful and essential release from…
A Pop icon.