FEATURE:
Groovelines
Kylie Minogue – Spinning Around
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IT has been a while…
since I did a Groovelines feature. This is where I explore a classic song. The reason I am spotlighting Kylie Minogue’s Spinning Around is because it turns twenty-five later in the year. Minogue is currently on tour and is in the U.S. very soon. From all accounts, Kylie Minogue’s Tension Tour is getting huge reviews. There will be a lot of eyes on her. I wonder whether Minogue will be asked to headline Glastonbury this year. She has appeared at Glastonbury but never on the Pyramid Stage as a headliner. I hope she is booked soon enough. The past couple of years have seen her hit a new career peak. 2023’s TENSION got a lot of five-star reviews. Many see her work now as the best she has ever released. Many might argue it was her first two albums of the twenty-first century. After the mixed reviews for 1997’s Impossible Princess, few expected what Kylie Minogue delivered in 2000 with Light Years and 2001’s Fever. Two of her greatest albums, it was a renaissance and reinvention that showed you could never write her off. On 19th June, the first single from Light Years was released. Spinning Around was a number one in the U.K. and Minogue’s native Australia. The single was a revelation! I wonder if there are any plans for a twenty-fifth anniversary special. Something to mark one of the most important releases of her career. Before getting to some features about Spinning Around, I want to get to some information from Wikipedia regarding the legacy of Spinning Around:
“Following its release, the music video became popular for the gold hotpants Minogue sported. It resulted in a media sensation regarding her bottom. British national broadsheet newspaper The Sunday Times deemed her bottom a "wonder of nature" and The Sun sponsored a campaign to "have Kylie Minogue's rear-end heritage-listed, preserved for "posteriority" on the grounds that it's an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty." Readers were requested by the tabloid newspaper to persuade the government to make sure "[Minogue's] bum remains in safe hands - by turning it into a national institution." Rumours and speculations claiming Minogue had undergone plastic surgery to make her bottom look more appealing also began to arise during this time. In the same year, English broadcaster and journalist Johnny Vaughan commented "if an alien landed on Earth he would think Kylie's arse is the world's leader." Minogue's stylist and close friend William Baker explained his decision to "showcase" her bottom in the video, saying "Kylie's bottom is like a peach - sex sells and her best asset is her bum.” The singer's response to the attention regarding her bottom was "dry," claiming "You never know what the future holds. It could become a pear." It was reported that Minogue had her bottom insured for five million dollars”.
Co-written by Paula Abdul, Spinning Around is ranked alongside the best Kylie Minogue singles. I shall end with links to a couple of single ranking features where Spinning Around is high in the mix. First, in 2020, Official Charts spoke with the track’s producer, Mike Spencer. One cannot really overstate the impact the song made in 2000. A perfect summer hit, it was also seen as a bit of a comeback and career resurgence for Kylie Minogue. I was in sixth form college when Spinning Around arrived. It was a song that was played widely and fondly discussed. Having been a fan of Kylie Minogue since I was a child, it was a real revelation:
“As comebacks go, Kylie's Spinning Around, released in 2000, was less a reinvention and more a reminder of what Kylie Minogue is all about: fun, sparkly and undeniably catchy pop tunes.
After taking a left-turn on 1998’s Impossible Princess, an intriguing, experimental album that divided critics, Spinning Around was a return to the core principles of Brand Kylie. It was fun. It was camp. It was for the clubs. It was tiny gold hot pants.
Rather than re-treading her Stock, Aitkin & Waterman sound, which didn't hold the nostalgic value then that it has today, Spinning Around played into the disco-pop revival happening in 2000 (see also: Spiller’s Groovejet and Modjo’s Lady Hear Me Tonight).
The result was Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky for the new Millennium - and it went down a treat with the public. Spinning Around landed straight in at Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart with opening sales of just over 82,000. Against the odds, Kylie was back.
To celebrate the release of her new album, Golden, read back our interview from 2018 with Mike Spencer, who produced Spinning Around (and has also worked on this incredible list of hit singles) and told us more about how Kylie's big comeback track came together.
Hello Mike! All these years later, Spinning Around is still a great pop song. It’s aged well, don’t you think?
"I guess it has, yes! It was part of the beginning of Kylie’s sort-of second incarnation. At the time, I was just starting out - I’d had very little chart success. In fact, Spinning Around was my first Number 1 record."
How does someone who was just starting out as a producer suddenly get to work with Kylie?
“I remember I was based in Roundhouse studios in London at the time. People at this point had assumed Kylie couldn’t get back inside the Top 20. Obviously she’s really famous and an iconic artist, but her career had gone adrift somewhat. I guess it was just one of those records that struck a chord.
“I’d been working with Beverly Knight at the time on music that had a very soul edge to it, and that’s what Spinning Around was in its original demo form. It was a soul record. The musicians I was using on it were Rob Harris from Jamiroquai and Winston Blissett who played for Lisa Stansfield. We upped the tempo and made it into a disco record. We didn’t know if it was necessarily the right thing to do, but it felt like a return to where she’d come from, back to what she does best."
You’d sort of updated Kylie’s '80s sound for the Noughties.
"In retrospect maybe, but we weren’t thinking like that at the time. The SAW (Stock Aitken Waterman) sound was very processed, very programmed. Although this was a processed dance record, it actually has real instruments playing, harping back more to the original disco era. In hindsight, it looks like a genius move, but at the time – honestly - it was a bit of a shot in the dark."
After that initial meeting, what was she like to work with in the studio?
"I recorded the instruments with the band in London and flew out to do the vocals with Kylie. I met her in a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard on January 4. I remember I was quite star struck actually. She was great in the studio. We spent a week out there recording the vocals [and] the whole experience was really fantastic."
Wasn’t Spinning Around originally intended for Paula Abdul? She has a writing credit on the song.
"I sort of knew it had been for her at some point – she definitely has a writing credit on it. That version was a lot slower – much slower in fact. It was a different song – the tune, production and concept were all different.”
Given Kylie’s career seemed to be on a downturn, was there pressure to make sure this was going to be a hit? Was there a brief on what sound they were going for?
“Not really, no. I’d had a level of success with Beverley at Parlophone and they seemed to like what I was doing with her, in particular a remix I’d done for her I’d based on Chic’s Good Times. The label liked that and asked for a similar treatment with Kylie. It was rough though. It was a, ‘Can you make this work? Can you unlock it?’ situation rather than specific instructions.
“There wasn’t much noise around Kylie at the time, which is probably why I was lucky enough to get the gig in the first place. Nobody was falling over themselves to work with her. I loved the whole experience though."
There’s an effortless quality to the song; how long did it take to bring it together?
“Quite a while. I remember I recorded the band in a studio in London on tape and ran it into Pro Tools. I also recorded a vocal on 2” tapes and took it out to LA. I remember because I got stopped at the airport with them”.
Not as much has been written about Spinning Around. Not as much as there should have been. I do hope that there is more words written about Spinning Around closer to its twenty-fifth anniversary on 19th June. I want to bring in an NME review from 2005:
“And on she goes. The years might pass but Kylie will only look younger, keep wearing smaller and smaller hotpants and continue pumping out ever more hyperactive pop music. Even when she’s done little more than eat at The Ivy for two years, she attracts more interest than all the mini-Britneys can hope for in a lifetime.
It’s good to know there’s some things in life you can rely on. And after Dance Kylie, Dodgy Madonna Kylie and Ill-advised Indie Kylie, the pint-sized Princess of Pop has returned to what she knows best. ‘Spinning Around’ is made of the same fizzing, giddy disco-pop that made Kylie famous in the first place and will thrill gay discos everywhere. Co-written by (yikes!) Paula Abdul, it has gloriously little substance and little worth remembering above the glittery, hi-NRG chorus where Kylie reminds us all that she’s back, back, back (“I’m spinning around, get out of my way”). Indie chancers throw away your hair slides and take note. This is the sound of someone enjoying what they do. Does it scare you?”.
In 2020, The Guardian ranked Kylie Minogue’s singles. They placed Spinning Around at number one (“Over the course of her career, Kylie has tried her hand at being Indie Kylie, Moody Kylie, Mature Kylie and indeed Covering Toots and the Maytals on a Children’s TV Show Kylie (see her 2009 version of Monkey Man with the Wiggles). But the fact remains that Kylie was essentially put on this earth to make glitzy, euphoric, balls-out pop bangers, and Spinning Around is the glitziest and most euphoric of the lot. A bold restatement of core values following her 90s dalliances with the left field; a perfect pop-disco nugget, a single only the terminally joyless could fail to enjoy”). Last year, when deciding on Kylie Minogue’s best forty songs, Classic Pop placed Spinning Around twelfth (“Not necessarily everybody’s favourite Kylie song – even her new label Parlophone didn’t hear a hit at first – this track brought the forlorn princess back into the public consciousness after an extended plateau. Co-written by Paula Abdul (for whom it was originally intended), the original demo was a down-tempo affair, so much so that producer Mike Spencer dubbed it “a different song”… but once it had been augmented with a classy disco design, and with eye-popping gold lamé hotpants in the video, Kylie was propelled back to No.1”). A song that Kylie Minogue has performed multiple times live since its release (including on her current tour), Spinning Around is a real fan favourite. It turns twenty-five on 19th June. The lead single from her seventh studio album, Light Years, the album itself turns twenty-five on 22nd September. I wanted to shine a light on its most famous single as I wonder if it will get a twenty-fifth anniversary release. Maybe Minogue will say a few words about the song. Hugely influential to this day, there is no doubt Spinning Around has influenced legions of artists…
SINCE its release.