Melbourne’s petite popstrel Kylie Minogue zoomed to superstardom in the late Eighties, with her celebrity from Aussie TV soap Neighbours helping to boost her spectacular recording career under the manipulative auspices of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit factory. Apocryphally, her debut UK Number One hit "I Should Be So Lucky" was knocked together in a brisk 40 minutes, though, interviewed here in director Michael Harte's compelling three-part documentary, Pete Waterman insists it took all of two hours.
Suddenly Kylie was a pop phenomenon, banging out chartbusters as easily as some people walk the dog or order a takeaway – "Got to be Certain", "The Locomotion", "Je ne sais pas pourqois", "Hand on Your Heart"… She was the queen of all she surveyed, and her pert bottom and dazzling smile earned global renown, but it wasn’t quite what she wanted. Far from being an airheaded production-line doll, Kylie had brains, determination and ambition, and she had her own ideas that she wanted to put into action. However, this was not the way PWL operated, and as day follows night, she and they parted company.
One catalyst for this was Kylie meeting Michael Hutchence, INXS’s tumble-haired rock’n’roll sex god, with whom she embarked on a whirlwind romance. This left poor Jason Donovan (pictured left), her great Neighbours buddy, former lover and singing partner on the chart-topping "Especially For You", bereft, and in the interviews he gives here it’s clear that dredging up memories of it all still causes him considerable anguish. Watching Kylie and Hutchence when they first met backstage after an INXS gig, it was all too clear to Jason the way things were going to go.
But splitting up with Hutchence in 1991 was evidently traumatic for Kylie, though she generously credits him with boosting her self-belief and encouraging her to grow both as a person and as an artist. But it was the prelude to more dramatic turns in her career, particularly her seemingly implausible hook-up (artistic but not romantic) with Nick Cave. Cave gives a brilliant and very funny interview here where he describes how he’d wanted to write something for Kylie for years, though he was well aware of the seemingly unbridgeable divide between his own dark and dangerous art-rock tendencies (not to mention those of his audience) and Kylie’s gleaming golden-girl image.
Yet they found an immediate rapport which blossomed into an enduring friendship, and it even seems to have persuaded Cave of the wonders of pop (“the great beauty of pop music is that it is a joy machine,” he enthuses). The most tangible result of all this was "Where the Wild Roses Grow", a Cave-penned murder ballad featuring Kylie’s vocals which shot up charts around the world, earned raves from critics and gave Cave and his band the Bad Seeds their most successful single.
The coverage of Kylie’s treatment for breast cancer after she was diagnosed in 2005 has been one of the most talked-about aspects of this documentary, and how it prompted her to scrap the rest of her Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour and pull out of a headlining slot at Glastonbury. More startling was the revelation that she’d received a second cancer diagnosis in 2021, which she chose not to publicise while undergoing ultimately successful treatment. The unwavering support from her parents, sister Dannii and brother Brendan has evidently been a godsend.
One of the most poignant scenes here is where Kylie is discussing her song "Flower", which she wrote in 2012. She had initially delayed her cancer treatment in order to try to conceive via IVF, but to no avail. "Flower" was her message to an unborn child, “a letter to what might have been.” As pop star docs go, this one is head and shoulders above most of ‘em.
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