She’s a disco icon, pop princess and OBE. Over a career spanning 30+ years, Kylie Minogue has been many different things to different people. From her tentative teenage post-Neighbours years to pumping out a succession of chart- topping dancefloor favourites, Kylie is now a shimmering one-woman hit parade. Or in short, a legend.
The stats tell their own story. Kylie has achieved seven UK #1 singles plus a further twenty-four Top 10 hits. Seven of her albums have also topped the charts, including her most recent studio album, 2018’s ‘Golden’, and last year’s ‘Step Back In Time: The Definitive Collection’. She has sold 80 million albums worldwide, but has also been sufficiently embraced by the streaming generation to command over 6 million monthly listeners at Spotify. And that’s before you consider the impact of three BRIT Awards, a Grammy and two MTV Europe Awards.
But even that doesn’t tell the whole story. If you have a passing interest in pop music, you’ll recognise countless songs from her back catalogue. Not only do they inspire flashbacks to Kylie’s many years at the top, but you’ll find that your own memories are indelibly interconnected to many of them too.
Each stage of her career has seen Kylie deliver effervescent pop, complemented by an inimitable mix of glamorous star quality and a charming, relatable, down-to-earth candour. Her late ‘80s breakthrough saw her conquering the charts with songs such as ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ and the Jason Donovan duet ‘Especially For You’, which resulted in the duo being the cover stars of Smash Hits’ biggest-selling issue of all-time.
The ‘90s saw her shift from euphoric dance-pop (‘Better The Devil You Know’, ‘Shocked’) to the timeless cinematic sheen of ‘Confide In Me’ and then exploratory collaborations with the likes of Nick Cave and Manic Street Preachers. But by the summer of 2000, it had been almost five years since Kylie had fired into the Top 10. And so Kylie did exactly what we’d now expect Kylie to do - to launch a resurrection that was both impossible to ignore and that reminded fans exactly why they fell in love with her in the first place.
‘Spinning Around’ took her back to the top of the charts before the glitterball whirl of ‘On A Night Like This’ and the anthemic Robbie WIlliams collab ‘Kids’ confirmed she was back at the top of her game. The electro-pop classic ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ became the biggest selling UK single of 2001 after spending four weeks at #1. The hits just kept coming: the exuberant ‘Love At First Sight’, the erotic tension of ‘Slow’ and the sunburst power of ‘Wow’, to name but a few.
Kylie has continued to command the spotlight ever since. Buoyed by the sophisticated electro-pop of lead single ‘All The Lovers’, ‘Aphrodite’ became her first #1 album in almost a decade. ‘Golden’, flavoured with glam country-pop, became her seventh #1 album and took her back to filling arenas across Europe and Australia.
If there’s a snapshot of what Kylie means to her legions of fans, it came with her 2019 ‘legends’ slot at Glastonbury. She pulled out all the stops: a set of some of pop’s most enduring classics, striking costume changes, a cannon of confetti, and special guest appearances by Chris Martin and Nick Cave. There were also tears, as Kylie finally returned to the stage that she was due to headline back in 2005 before she was diagnosed with breast cancer. And the reaction was something else. It became the BBC’s most watched set in the festival’s history, with the NME describing it as “a surreal pop spectacle” and an “all-out celebration”.
Now Kylie is preparing to release her fifteenth studio album ‘DISCO’, which features the recent singles ‘Say Something’ and ‘Magic’ (both Record of the Week at Radio 2). Over the course of 30+ years in music, Kylie has delivered hit-after- hit, each of which has the power to transport fans away from the mundanity of daily life to somewhere altogether more thrilling. And that escapism is needed now more than ever.