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Impossible Princess: Kylie
If there is a single characteristic that Kylie Minogue shares with the great pop survivors - Madonna, U2, the Rolling Stones - it is a fierce work ethic.
- The Telegraph Group Limited
- Published: 00:04 May 28, 2008
- A brave and more mature Kylie was lauded after her breast cancer battle.
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If there is a single characteristic that Kylie Minogue shares with the great pop survivors - Madonna, U2, the Rolling Stones - it is a fierce work ethic.
She keeps the records coming, and, having put her 2005 cancer scare behind her, is once again preparing to embark on a major tour.
We first fell for Kylie as Charlene Ramsay, the tomboyish mechanic in Neighbours, who was like an updated version of Olivia Newton-John - just as bright and button-cute, but with a bit more naughtiness and spirit behind the innocence.
She launched a successful pop career at just the right time, with the right producers, Stock Aitken and Waterman, and so demonstrated the popular instinct that has led to her long career.
I Should Be So Lucky or Locomotion are not songs that have stood the test of time, but in their day, SAW's bubblegum hit factory was the sound of mainstream UK pop. It was exactly the girly, bouncy sound that Kylie's audience wanted to hear.
And Kylie was a fast learner. She shares Madonna's gift for reinvention, knows that one's look matters just as much as one's music. So curly-haired ra-ra Kylie transformed herself into cool Kylie doing house records and indie Kylie doing duets with Nick Cave and the Manic Street Preachers.
In doing so, she has constantly flowed with the currents of pop culture, appearing across the full spectrum of front pages: from Smash Hits to NME, to Loaded, to Heat, to Grazia, and on to the broadsheet press.
She latched on to the power of the stylist to keep you in the fashion pages and, in William Baker, her own fabulous gay best friend, stayed connected and loyal to an audience who had supported her during the leaner years of the late Nineties.
She has, like Madonna, been less than successful in Hollywood (who can forget the disaster of The Delinquents?), but also resilient enough to take the blows and wait for her star to rise again.
Reinvention
That moment came for Kylie with 2001's Can't Get You Out of My Head, only her second UK number one but the record that catapulted her back into icon territory.
Unlike Madonna, though, Kylie has projected a much more ambiguous persona. She manages to be plucky yet passive, chatty while saying nothing. She was happy to strip to her gold hotpants as the late Nineties turned increasingly soft-porn and bottom-fixated. And yet, even while smuggling handcuffs through customs with Michael Hutchence, she has never seemed sexually threatening.
If anything, she has become more doll-like over the years, more often than not playing the romantic victim, messed around by some dark-haired cad, denying her the fairy-tale white wedding that Charlene got all those years ago.
It would be hard to call her a feminist role-model - she has been happy to have control over her career and the right to stay in the game and yet has never attempted to use her position to say or do anything challenging or provocative.
Maybe this has been a canny move. She has seen off all of her male contemporaries and many of her female contemporaries - she is now second only to Madonna in terms of the number of UK hits she has had. Mostly, what Kylie can celebrate is in giving us some of the most uplifting, playful, creative pop of the last decades.
In a year that sees such cruel milestones as the 50th birthday of pop diva Madonna and Grace Jones's 60th, even pop princess Kylie Minogue celebrates her 40th birthday today. Yet the girl next door seems strangely immune to the ravages of time.
Some of our favourite Kylie moments
He loves her? He loves her not? If their screen romance was complicated . . . In the early years of her music career Kylie and Neighbours co-star Jason Donovan acted out a real-world soap opera, keeping the world guessing about the true nature of their special friendship.
A career on edge: In 1989 Kylie made a dubious attempt to ride the winds of fame onto the silver screen. Her main attempt, the teen drama The Delinquents, brought those plans to a screaming halt before they had properly started, and the rest of her acting career consisted of minor roles in Moulin Rouge and TV series like Men Behaving Badly.
Good girl meets naughty boy: In an apparent attempt to bury her squeaky-clean image Kylie hooked up with INXS rebel Michael Hutchence in 1990. Later paramours included French photographer Stephane Sednaoui and actor Olivier Martinez, with whom she had an on-and-off relationship for years. In 2000 she was even spotted holidaying with bad boy Robbie Williams.
Sibling rivalry: Coming close to pulling a Janet on Kylie's Michael Jackson, sis Dannii Minogue launched her own pop career just as Kylie's was floundering. Young Dannii scored a few hits and even got engaged to a former member of the band Bros, but could she usurp the Minogue crown? Ask anyone under 20 which of the sisters they know.
Cancer struggle: Kylie's bout with breast cancer won her not only the support of fans, but also encouragement from Australian Prime Minister John Howard and the admiration of women worldwide. Kylie bravely spoke out about her battle, even when undergoing chemotherapy.
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