DAVE FANNING: Would you agree that Light Years is harder than Fever?

KYLIE MINOGUE: Slightly harder, yeah, I think we’ve trimmed the decorations slightly. It’s more streamlined, but I think the nuts and bolts, the songs, are still the same.

And who have you worked with this time round?

I did a bit of work in Dublin, in fact, with Richard Stanard and Julian Gallagher, otherwise known as Biff Co – probably half the hits you hear on the radio they’ve worked on – with Cathy Denis and Rob Davis, Steve Anderson, Tom Nicholls, Greg Fitzgerald. They’re names that possibly don’t mean much to you, but you would know the music that all these people have been involved with.

Why don’t you do more movies?

I will!

I know you’ve done a few bits and pieces…

I’ve done some really terrible ones, that’s for sure.

But you haven’t done the A division ones that I thought you might do. Let’s face it, when you made your name first, it was as an actor?

Yeah. I truly think that’s where I’ll end up. I know I haven’t done work I would hope to have done with acting, but then I probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking with you today and I wouldn’t have this album that, literally, was mastered last night. So I’m quite excited about it and very pleased for everyone that’s involved with the album as to how it’s turned out. So, I’ve got to compromise a little.

Do you look back on your career to date as something of a rollercoaster?

Yeah. Em, that’s akin to life, isn’t it? My career started up there and I had nothing to gauge it against. I always knew that what I was doing was really hard work, but it was just – finish school – I actually signed up for the dole. I thought “OK, I’d like to do acting full-time now”. I’d done it through school as well and you always think there are more out-of-work actors than working actors. So I was trying to be very sensible about it and that’s just what you did if you were to become an actor – quick, sign up for the dole you might not get work for six months!. But I was lucky enough to land Neighbours, the No.1 TV show and the first single I release is No.1 for seven weeks and then subsequently coming to England and recording here. So everything was like that.

But there were times when your career nosedived.

Since then, yes, I’ve experienced times that weren’t as successful, times that were a lot more trying in many different ways but it all comes out in the wash as very positive stuff, a positive experience.

Do you feel proud of the fact that you’ve sustained a pop career?

I do feel proud of that. I also feel very proud of the relationship I have with my audience and I think it’s because of that that I’ve been allowed to have the longevity thus far in my career. Traditionally you’re meant to be one thing or another. And it’s funny that as an actor it took a while for me to be taken seriously as a singer. And now when I’m trying to take a big step back into acting, there are probably teenagers out there who have no idea where I came from and that I started out acting.

Does longevity help bring credibility?

Well, years ago I was attacked for everything you could think of – “she can’t do this, she can’t do that” – I got the works. Yes, I was very successful but I also had so much shit thrown at me, some of which I can understand now that I know more about the music industry. I would have been a bit ticked off myself if I’d spent three years working on this album and it’s come out and this girl from Australia comes and hogs the No.1, No.2 position for weeks on end! I would have been a bit miffed too. And I hadn’t proven myself, so now with longevity, over the years, slowly building up a reputation for being able to do different things – I guess I have.

Were you disappointed with the indie Kylie not getting the credibility you hoped it would have got?

I was disappointed at the time. I was never so disappointed that I thought – “Oh, that’s it, I’m washed up. It’s all over”. I just thought “OK”.

Bouncing back from that must have been a challenge.

I was fully aware that I was quite lost at that point in my career. I didn’t have the help and the support that I’m used to having, that I like having. The way that I’m working with Parlophone now is fantastic. There’s wonderful communication. We all know what each other’s talking about. We have a mutual respect for each other and we get things done. And I think it’s the second time now that we’ve proved we can do things swiftly, with it not being at the expense of the product. And I think that’s because we’re meant to be working together at this point in time.

You’ve always made yourself pretty accessible. I’m sure that must have cost you now and again?

Well, I can only be who I am. Doing a day’s worth of interviews or a week – if you’re always on show whether you’re doing down the street to get a video or to buy milk or waltzing into a premiere, you can’t maintain something that isn’t you.

But is the public Kylie the real Kylie?

People came to know me from Neighbours from being 18, from making really big blunders and mistakes and I feel like the way they relate to me is as if I was a member of the family, or next-door, or down the road or one of those relatives that you hear a lot about and you see pictures of them but you’ve never met them, like second-cousins or whatever. So people see me grow up and I think for that reason they’ve allowed me a few mistakes along the way. It’s like if you did something really terrible, your parents would kind of pretend it didn’t happen. I’ve done that in my career – things I shouldn’t have done, whether it be a song, an album, an outfit, something I’ve said and people would tend to go ‘we’ll pretend that didn’t happen, we’ll just move onto the next thing’ and that’s beautiful.

Whatever you’ve done you’ve always remained Kylie!

Yes, I was asked by a journalist a while ago “Am I still the eighteen-year-old Kylie or am I the 33-year-old Kylie?”. And I thought that was kind of a dumb question because how can I separate the two. I am the person sitting here today partly because of that girl. So yes, she is still part of me. I tried to get rid of her for a while but that didn’t work. The past will always catch up with you and I realise it’s better to accept it and therefore you’re going with two engines. You can actually progress further.

’80s pop stars, in particular, are generally consigned to the past.

You are. Pop is traditionally a transient place. Just after my album was mastered, I played it to my brother and he said “kicking goals”. And I went “yep, just pulling my socks up mate”. I felt really proud. I felt a sense of achievement. This is what I’ve been working on since the beginning of this year and I have worked myself stupid trying to fit everything in around touring – before and straight after touring – in studios all over the place. And there it is, it’s done and I’m thrilled with it.

How do you cope with tabloid coverage of your life?

Normally, you have to laugh at it. I’m always quick to – normally I don’t need to remind myself. Actually, as I’m saying it I realise that’s incorrect – I’m normally aware that with the press you’re that big, (demonstrates smallness) in fact, you’re smaller than that big. You’re helpless. The media is such an almighty beast. It’s like, befriend the enemy, you know! I wouldn’t be here talking to you if I hadn’t had the press.

So on balance has the media been good to you?

They’ve done a lot for me and they are in a position where they… the fact that something’s not true in the paper is irrelevant – in the law it’s irrelevant. So, yeah, they write things that are untrue all the time, but perhaps because I’ve had a respect for the way we work together, touch wood they’ve always been pretty good to me. If you consider what someone like Michael (Hutchence) and Paula (Yates) went through, I don’t know how they coped with that.

For you, I suppose, it all began with stories about you and Jason Donovan?

Well, we played along with that. That was my education into the world of media. We just never really wanted to say yes or no. I think we were too young and innocent to want to lie. I’m still no good at it. I’m such a useless liar. I end up blurting the truth out. So the two of us tried to avoid the subject and just be non-committal with it.

What about other stuff – like reports of eating disorders?

That’s par for the course if you’re in the media, you’ve got to have been anorexic and had a pact with the devil, been an alien. They’re standard really.

So how did you feel when that stuff was being churned out?

I can laugh about it now. At the time I did think “that’s not fair. I’m not anorexic. Don’t make my family worry in Australia”. But what absolutely amazes me is that it only takes one person in a publication that may not even be a major publication, it could be from anywhere, one person to write something and especially with the internet these days, its pssscht… everywhere. It might be harmless but it’s incorrect, it’s not factual. And I’ve got to spend the rest of my time going “That didn’t happen and that didn’t happen either. Well, that isn’t exactly true”. But that’s the way it is.

Have you felt guilty sometimes reading something about someone else in the papers and saying “that’s amazing… but wait a minute, why do I believe it?”.

I have. I get those magazines and want to get some juicy gossip and then go “no, wait a minute”. So I’m a culprit myself.

Little things like changing to eating meat and not being a vegetarian anymore… are they conscious decisions or was there no veggie stuff around and you said “oh, give us a burger”?

That was years ago. I went to see a naturopath, a couple actually, and they both said “do you eat meat?”. And I said “no I haven’t eaten meat for a few years” and it just became a habit. I just didn’t eat red meat. And they said “we think you should have at least three servings of meat a week”. Because I was working so hard, so, yeah, I believe everything in moderation. Your body tells you what you should and shouldn’t have.

You once said in the past that when you get into a relationship you expect something to go wrong at some stage of the game. Is that your way of saying “I don’t look upon anything as five years or ten years or twenty years, let’s see what happens”. You know, if it goes wrong it doesn’t mean the relationship was bad.

I agree with everything you’ve said except the very first part. I never actually said that. A few people have said that I said “I expect something to go wrong”. I don’t. The press say “failed relationship”. But I don’t like to look at it that way.

So how do you look at it?

I like to think that was perfection and the universe said that’s how long that relationship is meant to be. If it’s two weeks, two years or 20 years, that’s the time in your lives you are meant to be together. And you affect each other for that long. And maybe it will be for your whole life, I don’t know. But if I think about the people that I’ve been close with, that I’ve had relationships with, they’ve all meant something different. I might not have realised it at the time, but now I look back and think “yeah, that was what I was meant to experience and learn at that time”. And also the same would go for the other person.

And what about these collaboration situations – the big one being Nick Cave.

I didn’t know Nick Cave and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t really know much about Nick Cave either. And funnily enough Michae (Hutchence) had said to me, years before we recorded together, “my friend Nick wants to record with you”. Then I wouldn’t be proactive in making something happen. I would just think “OK, I’ll hear about it. Someone will tell me”. And then years went by and I saw this great picture of Nick Cave on tour. It was a black and white reportage-type picture and he had a little Kylie satchel bag. And I’m thinking “so weird”.

So what happened when the request came through?

We’re on the same record label in Australia and we actually left messages at each other’s houses, which happened to be our parents’ houses. So I left a message with Nick Cave’s mum saying “hi, is Nick there?”. “No, he’s out at the moment”. “Oh, OK, can you just let him know that Kylie called and here’s my number?”. And he calls me back and it’s my mum saying “someone called Nick Cave on the phone”.

What was it like working with Nick?

The first time I met him was the day we recorded at the studio. Which again is perfection. That’s the way it was meant to be! Because the song is so gentle in a lot of ways and it’s ultimately fatal. But that kind of sexual tension and just meeting each other and the tenderness of it. So he pretty much directed me as to how to perform the song. And I suppose now to hear that track, it doesn’t seem that different, the way I’m performing it, but at that time I’d never delivered a song in that way at all and to know that he’d been thinking about it for six years, way back when the most uncool thing you could possibly have said was “I want to work with Kylie”. I think if you look up integrity in the dictionary, it’s got Nick Cave.

I’d go along with that! You mentioned Nick had a Kylie bag. How cool was it when Madonna wore that T-shirt with Kylie written on it?

That was pretty cool, pretty surreal. Madonna is like a blueprint of pop, you know. And because what Madonna does so well is take trends from around the world and put them in her employ so they work for her… They’re trends that are happening in the world, so, yeah, you’re influenced by Madonna because Madonna is influenced by all that.

The two of you have done this reinvention thing. Yours is done by accessibility and being a cool and nice person. Hers is done very calculatedly.

Yeah, and I absolutely admire those qualities in her and I wish I had some more of them myself.

What qualities do you admire in yourself?

I like to do things nicely. It might not be the coolest way to do it, but I like… it’s like your nana used to say “do unto others”. That’s the way my system operates. The kind of family that I travel with when we go on tour, I know the names of everybody and people are surprised at that. And I think “Of course I’m going to know your names, you light me every night”, that kind of thing. And all the things you hear about Madonna, who knows how much is true and how much isn’t? She bombs through. But I think she’s fantastic. So to have my name on her t-shirt was… I was looking at it and it was just too surreal to comprehend.

The biggest thing for you at the beginning of the new millennium was to have a huge hit with the album Fever. Would you, if you’d been asked, say, to take the Nicole Kidman role in Moulin Rouge have gone for it at the expense of everything else?

Yes, I would have. I would have dropped… I would have said “Parlophone, I’ll see you in a year”. A musical is something I would love, love, love to do. And it would suit me to a T. That would stimulate my brain. I would be in heaven. To do a bit of this and a bit of that and put everything together. I love making videos – that’s a three-and-a-half minute version of a musical, I suppose. But a musical would combine

everything and be an altogether new challenge

as well.

Finally then Kylie, I get the impression although I don’t know why because I don’t know you, but you’re probably happier now than you have been really over the last ten years.

I would have to say you’re right, yeah. Yes, I feel excited and challenged by the future and at the same time I’m as content as I can be where I am. Because I always want to move on. I always want to do something different. But, yes, I think I’m at an age or a place in my life that I’m really starting to come into my own and learn a lot more about myself. At the same time I’m aware of how much I don’t know about myself. I guess I’m more accepting about myself. That’s probably the difference.

‘Fever’ is out now on Parlophone

Kylie Unlikely

the many strange adventures of kylie minogue

NEIGHBOURS

Despite an early appearance in the World War 1 homefront drama The Sullivans, it was the Aussie soap Neighbours that catapulted Kylie into mainstream consciousness. Though the show is still on our screens, it’s never since had a character to top the lovely Charlene. The curly blonde motor-mechanic really was everybody’s idea of the girl next door and she scandalised the world with her sexual coming-of-age antics before Jason Donovan made an honest woman of her. Incidentally, nu-rock chick Natalie Imbruglia also got her start on Neighbours.

STOCK, AITKEN & WATERMAN

It was the 1987 single ‘The Locomotion’ that gave Kylie her first Australian No.1 hit, becoming the biggest selling single of the decade in Oz, and the follow up, ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ earned her the No. 1 spot in the UK and Ireland. SAW’s re-release of ‘The Locomotion’ also collared the No. 1 slot all over Europe and reached No. 3 in the US singles chart. Her 1998 duet with Neighbours star Jason Donovan also went to No.1.

Pete Waterman is reported to have a poster of Kylie on the wall at his studio, inscribed with the words ‘I Should Be So Fucking Lucky’.

MOVIE KYLIE

Although she’s starred in numerous feature films in her native Oz, movie stardom has so far eluded Kylie. Perhaps her biggest movie success was 1989’s The Delinquents, which featured Kylie as a Lola Lovell, a wild-hearted tearaway in ‘50s Australia, whose romance with Charlie Schlatter is hindered by interfering parents. The film contains some raunchy sex scenes, a surprise for movie audiences at the time, who were used to a more wholesome image from our heroine.

KYLIE AND CAVE

It seemed an unlikely partnership but the bubble-gum poppet teamed up with the Lord Of Darkness, Nick Cave, on the duet ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’ from Cave’s Murder Ballads album. The video for the single featured Kylie floating downstream in a river, having apparently been clubbed to death by a rock-wielding Cave. Cave later encouraged Kylie to perform a spoken-word version of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ at the 1996 Poetry Olympics.

MICHAEL HUTCHENCE

Kylie shocked fans in the early ‘90s when she began dating the INXS frontman and all-round wild man of rock ‘n’ roll, Michael Hutchence. It’s thought that Hutchence’s influence led to her abandoning her previously squeaky-clean image and re-inventing herself as ‘Sex-Kylie’. Her videos for subsequent singles ‘Better The Devil You Know’ and ‘Shocked’ showed a confident, sexual woman who wasn’t afraid to strut her considerable stuff for the camera.

GAY KYLIE

Kylie has become something of an icon for gay men with an affinity for camp, due to her predilection for producing cheesy pop singles and her penchant for re-invention. Several of her releases have been included on compilation albums issued by the London gay club GAY.

NO KNICKERS KYLIE?

Kylie posed for GQ in 2000 when she donned tennis costume and posed on-court. Controversy ensued however when she accused the magazine of removing her knickers using a computer air-brush, giving the impression that she had posed ’commando’. The magazine later apologised and the issue has, not surprisingly, long since sold out.

MADONNA V KYLIE

Madonna is the only female solo artist to have had more UK No.1 hits than Kylie, yet there’s no rivalry between the two gals. When Madonna launched her Music album at an invite only concert at the Brixton Academy in London, she took to the stage wearing a Kylie T-shirt.

DANNII MINOGUE

Little sister Dannii sought to emulate her big sister’s career, yet despite, or perhaps because of, a string of very average pop singles she never approached her siblings success. Dannii later became best known for posing in lads’ glossy magazines wearing very little clothes, and was, until recently, romantically involved with the Formula 1 racing driver Jacques Villeneuve.

ABSINTHE FAIRY

Kylie was reportedly seeking the lead in Baz Luhrman’s musical Moulin Rouge, but lost out to fellow Aussie thesp Nicole Kidman. However, Luhrman cast Kylie as the absinthe fairy, who appears as a Tinkerbell-type character when Toulouse Lautrec, played by John Leguiziamo, imbibes heavily of the emerald nectar. This does not happen in real life, trust us.