Kylie: the pop princess at 40

Playing Belfast next month, Kylie is still ringing the changes after a 20-year career. By John Meagher

Friday, May 09, 2008

David Bowie was the master of reinvention, but others — including Minogue — have realised that chameleon qualities can prolong a lifespan in this most fickle of businesses.

There are four distinct chapters in her music career.

Like many Australian soap stars who came to prominence in the 1980s, the Melbourne-raised Minogue fancied turning her Neighbours fame into genuine pop stardom.

Enlisting the help of the most successful — and derided — production team of the day, Stock, Aiken & Waterman, she released a batch of super-catchy, throwaway singles. With her kiss-curls and computer-aided chipmunk vocals, the Kylie Minogue of the late 1980s was a pretty fixture in the pop charts; slight and inoffensive.

Few expected Minogue to have staying power, predicting her music career would nosedive in much the same way as those of the other Antipodeans soapstars-turned-singers, Jason Donovan and her sister, Dannii. And they were right. By the age of 24 in 1992, Minogue — and her synthetic, high gloss sound — was a spent force.

The second instalment in her career occurred in the mid-1990s. Like many ex-Stock Aiken & Waterman performers, she had spent much of the decade striving for credibility. A contemporary, Rick Astley, attempted a comeback as a 'serious' artist, but the results were shoddy.

Not so with Minogue. First up was a savvy pop song, Confide In Me. Then came something unexpected: together with fellow countryman Nick Cave, she performed a duet of his haunting ballad, Where The Wild Roses Grow. It offered a riposte to those who had questioned her ability to sing. But it proved to be a fleeting comeback as Minogue was unable to build on the strengths of both songs.

Like Madonna, she realised that carefully chosen collaborations could offer resuscitation. And the third chapter of the Kylie Minogue story kick-started in spectacular fashion with her 2000 album Light Years — her first on the Parlophone label. An out-and-out disco album, it found her delivering songs penned by Guy Chambers (who had worked wonders with Robbie Williams) and former US pop star Paula Abdul.

Kids, a duet with Williams, came at the perfect time, just as the former Take That star's career was going stellar. Even better was Spinning Around — her first UK number one in 10 years and her most memorable video of her career to date. It featured Minogue in gold lame hot pants — a look created by her then stylist William Baker, a figure every bit as pivotal in her comeback as her music collaborators.

Keen to consolidate her newly won success, Kylie released an even better album in 2001. Fever was an electropop album designed to rock the dancefloors.

It contained her most perfect song, Can't Get You Out Of My Head — one of the greatest pop singles of the decade, which reached number one in 40 countries.

Once more, Minogue — wearing futuristic outfits devised by Baker — delivered a striking video inspired by Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and seminal German electronic music pioneers, Kraftwerk. Once more, it featured a highly sexualised routine that was as much criticised as it was copied. Minogue was quick to cash in on her new-found style icon status.

The Love Kylie lingerie range appeared in 2003 and an own-name fragrance quickly followed and proved to be a far bigger seller than Victoria Beckham's eponymous perfume.

In May 2005, shortly after playing a handful of well-received dates in Dublin's Point, the bottom fell out of Minogue's world when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

She had been due to headline that summer's Glastonbury festival and had to be replaced with British dance-pop outfit Basement Jaxx who performed a cover of Can't Get You Out Of My Head in tribute to her and all others suffering from cancer.

After spending more than a year recovering from the ordeal of chemotherapy, she returned with a series of live shows in Sydney. In her hometown show at Melbourne, she performed a duet of Kids with Bono, who was in town with U2. A live album soon materialised.

Her subsequent studio album, X, released in November 2007 marked the fourth phase of her music career. It proved to be a disappointment. Despite working with the songwriters who had delivered the goods in the past — as well as an array of top young talent — the album failed to deliver songs to match her greatest hits.

There was also criticism for the fact that the album seemed stuck in an early 2000s time-warp, so desperate was it to replicate the sounds of the past. And others found it odd that the album's party mood seemed to ignore the life-threatening trauma she had experienced during the album's gestation. Some have pointed out that Minogue's look —so carefully cultivated by Baker — seems to be more misguided than inspired since she dispensed with his services.

Whether or not Minogue has the nous to reinvent herself again remains to be seen.

Madonna offers a useful template — her latest album, Hard Candy, shows she's got no intention of throwing in the towel just yet. Don't bet against Kylie, who has made a career out of confounding expectations.