"Spinning
Around" … from "singing budgie" to hugely successful pop queen,
Kylie Minogue has come a long way. Photo:
William Baker/Darenote
The
Sydney Morning Herald reports
She
was once derided as "the singing budgie", only to be resurrected as
Saint Kylie. Despite the wild swings in her public approval, not to mention her
battle with breast cancer, Kylie Minogue remains "hopeful and
realistic". Jane Wheatley meets her in London.
Who could have predicted that Kylie Minogue, aka Charlene, the
miniature grease monkey of Neighbours,
would one day sit, bemused and delighted, in a Cannes movie theatre as wave
upon wave of a standing ovation breaks over her head? The applause is for Holy Motors, in which she
has a critically acclaimed cameo role, and triumph has bathed her in its glow.
As a result, Minogue has been spending a good deal of this
northern autumn in the company of the film's French director, Leos Carax,
entertaining audiences and media in a series of interviews.
They make an odd couple: Carax hunched in black duffle coat and
sunglasses, an unlit cigarette held between long fingers; Minogue sitting
beside him, chic in cream Burberry, crossing and recrossing perfect legs,
smiling encouragingly.
Getting the director to shed light on his surrealist film -
variously described as "brilliant", "deranged" and
"bonkers" - is like pulling teeth. "Leos is always being asked
to explain his work," Minogue tells me when we meet, "and he doesn't.
He just kind of mutters and smokes, which is fascinating to me because I spend
my life doing the opposite, going blah blah blah."
The pairing of perky pop princess with the enigmatic intellectual
auteur was a shrewd move by the film's promoters: Minogue is a drawcard for
those who might otherwise give this bizarre offering a miss.
Arriving for our 3pm rendezvous, I am told by a friendly but
puzzled waiter that the kitchen has already closed. When I say I am meeting
Minogue, his brow clears. "Ah," he exclaims, wreathed in smiles,
"for Kylie we are open 24 hours."
A few minutes later she is ushered to a table curtained off from
the main dining room, a tiny vision in a sparkly wool coat, tasselled
high-heeled ankle boots and slim black pants. The restaurant is just around the
corner from her Chelsea home. "I call it the office. I'm in and out of
here all the time." She has a cold and has been saving her voice:
"I've only spoken 15 words today." She is just back from Brazil and
will be off to New York the next day for another film screening with Carax:
"So I have to be fine, no choice."
Asked by one interviewer why he cast Minogue, the director said
simply: "I thought she was the angel I needed." How did it happen?
"Apparently," she says, "all he knew of me was my duet with Nick
Cave." The ballad, Where
the Wild Roses Grow, recorded in 1995, was both erotic and violent,
ending in Minogue's character being battered to death by Cave - suitably weird,
then, to appeal to Carax.
She nods, "Yes, but the ironic thing is I'd been saying for a
few years, after being involved in the wrong sort of film projects, that what I
really need is the Nick Cave of the film world to go" - she beckons with a
finger - " 'Hey, you, come with me. Trust me, I know what to do with
you.' "
It is a telling choice of words: for years people knew what to do
with Minogue, from the publicists who ferried her to shopping centres to be
mobbed by Neighbours
fans, to the fabled UK music producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman, who turned
her into a bubble-gum pop princess; from British artist Sam Taylor-Wood, who
got her to strip off and mime along to a castrato voice, to her long-time
stylist William Baker, who rejoiced in being able to "project all my
fantasies onto her".
How does that make her feel? "Well," she says calmly,
"I like being malleable." But she once said she felt like a
manufactured product. She nods:
"I was." Didn't it feel, well, a bit masochistic?
"No, but sometimes I can sense the balance has tipped too far and I need
to pull back some control.
I learnt how to do that a long time ago."
She says she never went looking for work, it always came to her,
but this may be a touch disingenuous. Contemporaries from her early years in
Australia recalled that she was always "driven and very focused", and
these days there is little doubt who is in charge of Brand Kylie.
This year, she has sung at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in front of
Buckingham Palace, wearing a jewelled military cap and waving to the cheering
throng in The Mall; performed pop favourites for the classical music crowd at
the BBC's Proms in the Park;
recorded a new album (The
Abbey Road Sessions, out on October 29, reworks her greatest hits
with full orchestration) and published a book, Fashion, reprising a quarter century of
Kylie-wear, from Dolce & Gabbana evening frocks to the famous hot pants
from her Spinning Around
video (YouTube hits: 5.7 million).
There are now four Kylie waxworks at Madame Tussauds - only the
Queen has more; and at Sydney's Mardi Gras earlier this year there were four
floats, each dedicated to a different version of Kylie (Showgirl Kylie, Cute
Kylie, etc), and hundreds of people dressed as Australia's favourite gay icon.
They serenaded her with her own Love
at First Sight as she watched from a balcony: "I felt like Eva
Peron," she says.
Last May, the 2011 Sunday
Times Rich List estimated her fortune at £40 million ($63 million),
she outsells her one-time heroine Madonna, and she is the only solo female
artist to score a No. 1 album in four separate decades. She is much more
successful than her avowedly fame-seeking sister Dannii and, following a tussle
with breast cancer, a "brave" post-recovery tour and the White
Diamond documentary, in which she was "reborn", Kylie has had
near-deity status bestowed upon her. She is often represented as other-worldly
- nymph, goddess, Venus, Virgin Mary, astral being, bathed in light: "Her
sanctification has progressed beyond parody," academic Peter Conrad has
observed in The Monthly.
Success has not always followed Minogue. She was 19, with three
smash hits behind her, when the backlash came: Australian radio refused to give
air time to the relentlessly chirpy I
Should Be So Lucky and British DJ John Peel interviewed a cardboard
cut-out of her on the grounds that it had more personality.
She thinks she was a victim of tall-poppy syndrome. But the flak
came not only from Australia. "Oh I know, there was loads
everywhere," she says. "I think I would need to reach a state of
enlightenment - which I doubt I will - in order to really let go of that tiny,
tiny little red light that tells me I'm still ticked off about all that. I
forget about it most of the time, and all those insecurities that stuff played
on - I'm over them, anyway. But still a bit of me goes, 'Why? Why were you all
so nasty?' "
When she began live stage shows she was, she says,
"absolutely annihilated by the critics. But I kept going and kept going -
to the point that it's what I'm known for. I've overcome a lot of fears."
In the early years, under contract to Stock, Aitken and Waterman,
she wanted to write her own songs but was discouraged: "Rightly so,
probably," she says, "I wasn't very good." But now, she says,
she writes about a quarter of her material. "And I love it, absolutely
love it. You start the day with nothing and by the end you have a song. Not
that most people would pick the difference [between the songs she's co-written
and those written for her] - only super fans know, really."
A waiter comes to the table with a pot of four baby carrots
apparently "growing" in dark soil. "Dirty carrots," he
announces. We each take a tentative bite: they are crisp, cold, fresh and
coated in chocolate. "Wow!" says Minogue, going in for another dip.
"Bravo!" She licks her lips. "Sorry, where were we? I can't
concentrate."
Does she get things off her chest by writing a song? She laughs:
"Oh yeah, definitely. I don't always realise it at the time. Now when I
listen to some of the songs on Impossible
Princess - actually, my least successful album - I think, 'Wow, you
weren't very happy then, were you?' "
For years, Minogue has suffered the label "unlucky in
love" thanks to a series of relatively short-lived relationships and no
wedding bells. French actor Olivier Martinez supported her through breast
cancer, but they split in 2007. She has been with her current partner,
34-year-old Spanish model Andrés Velencoso, for four years: "Yes!"
she exclaims, "four years - really! I'm like, ding! Ready to ring the
bell. It's a record."
Probably the most intense, most unlikely and certainly most
influential relationship of her life, though, was with Australian rock god and
INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence. They first met at a music awards ceremony
in Sydney, when Minogue was dating Neighbours
co-star Jason Donovan. At the after-party, Hutchence famously lurched up to her
and said, "I don't know what we should do first - have lunch or have
sex." Neither happened, but a year later they started dating and very
quickly the carefully packaged girl-next-door Kylie was transformed into sexy,
pouting Kylie in black PVC, barely-there slip frocks and bleached blonde locks
- Hutchence supposedly wrote the song Suicide
Blonde in honour of the new hairdo.
But image was the least of it: 30-year-old Hutchence opened doors
for the Melbourne girl, barely out of her teens. "Oh, he broadened my
horizons," she says, "gave me my first European experiences, taught
me about fine food. He was often referred to as a bad boy. Yes, he was, but he
was also poetic and smart and cultured and inquisitive. He watched me grow and
blossom."
The relationship lasted for 15 months; Hutchence died six years
later. "A good friend of his told me that just a very short time before he
passed, he was talking about me and talking about getting together again."
She gives a tiny shrug. "I don't know, but who's to say what might have
happened. I truly believe he didn't stop loving me. And the same goes for
me."
So why did they break up? "I think that he went back on the
rock'n'roll road and he couldn't take me. I think it came from a good
place." What does she mean? "That ..." she hesitates, "what
goes on tour stays on tour. I think he had to go on his path."
She remembers the night a girlfriend rang her with news of
Hutchence's death in a Sydney hotel room, and then flying in to Australia for
the funeral five days later, a hot summer afternoon, the casket piled high with
brilliant blue irises. "Typical," she says with a small, wry smile.
"I had so many first experiences thanks to Michael - and this was my first
funeral."
Life has dished up a good few more experiences since then,
including a brush with her own mortality: "I have never felt such
terror," she says of her cancer diagnosis. She took a year off for
treatment. "My mum was with me most of the time; I don't think she could
let go, and I didn't want her to."
She is free of cancer now - as free as you can be - and of the
medication she took for five years after treatment. She has been a generous
ambassador for breast-cancer charities, credited with raising awareness of the
disease among young women.
"Breast cancer really affects your sense of femininity,"
she says, "and how desirable you feel. And there's still a little bit of
that, because I'm not what I was. But I pulled myself together and I'm no less
attractive to my current boyfriend than I would have been before cancer."
Minogue has lived in the same London street for 16 years - does
she miss Australia? "What I miss most, apart from being on home soil, is
being able to drive over to my parents' and have a cup of tea. But Skype and
FaceTime are a blessing: I can keep in touch, see the changes in my
nephews." Her brother Brendan has two sons and sister Dannii has a
two-year-old: "His language is just going through the roof," she
marvels.
And babies for Kylie? "Possibly," says the 44-year-old
evenly. "Who knows? I'm hopeful and I'm realistic. That's how I feel about
babies."
More immediately, her involvement in Carax's film has made her
want to do more acting. "I'd had film projects that frankly would have
been better if they hadn't happened, and I'd started to think that maybe
there's a reason singing keeps me so busy," she says. "But Leos has
reignited that little flame of desire. I'm a sucker for experience, I'm like a
puppy: 'Hey, yeah, yeah, I'll do that.' "
