Kylie Minogue

Kylie Ann Minogue (born May 28 1968) is a Grammy Award winning Australian singer-songwriter and occasional actress. Minogue rose to prominence in the late 1980s, as a result of her role in the Australian television soap opera Neighbours, before she commenced her career as a pop recording artist.
Signed to a contract by British songwriters and producers Stock, Aitken & Waterman, she achieved a string of hit records throughout the world, but her popularity began to decline by the early 1990s, leading her to part company from Stock, Aitken & Waterman in 1992. For several years she attempted to establish herself as an independent performer and songwriter, distancing herself from her earlier work. Her projects were widely publicised, but her albums failed to attract a substantial audience and resulted in the lowest sales of her career.

In 2000, Minogue returned to popularity as a dance-pop artist and became well-known for her provocative music videos and expensively mounted stage shows. She has established one of the longest and most successful careers as a performer in contemporary pop music, and in Europe and Australia, she has become one of her generation's most recognisable celebrities and sex symbols. In Australia, after being dismissed early in her career by some critics, she has been acclaimed for her achievements; she holds the record for the highest ticket sales for an Australian tour by a female performer, Frontier Touring Company official site Retrieved September 2, 2006. and has attained nine number-ones on the ARIA singles chart. She has been acknowledged as the highest selling female recording artist in Australia and Europe of the period from her debut in 1987 to the present.

Childhood and beginning

Kylie Minogue was born in Melbourne, Australia, to her Australian father, Ron Minogue who's family was from County Clare, Ireland, and a Welsh-born mother, Carol Jones who had emigrated as a child from Maesteg, Wales in 1955 to Townsville, Queensland. Kylie is the eldest of three children; her sister Dannii Minogue (born Danielle Jane Minogue) is also a pop singer, and her brother, Brendan, works as a news cameraman in Australia. The Minogue sisters began their careers as children on Australian television, and from the age of 11, Kylie Minogue appeared in soap operas such as Skyways, The Sullivans and The Henderson Kids. Dannii Minogue became successful as a regular performer on the weekly music programme Young Talent Time, in which Kylie gave her first singing performance in 1983. Kylie was overshadowed by her younger sister until achieving success in 1986 with her role in the soap opera Neighbours.
Minogue played the character of Charlene Mitchell; a story arc that created a romance between her character and that played by her then real-life boyfriend Jason Donovan culminated in a wedding episode in 1987 that attracted a large audience. Her popularity in Australia was demonstrated when she became the first person to win four Logie Awards in one event, including the "Gold Logie" as the country's "Most Popular Television Performer", with the result determined by public vote. Neighbours began screening in the United Kingdom in 1986, and it achieved high ratings.

Recording and performing career

Stock, Aitken and Waterman: 1987 - 1992

During a Fitzroy Football Club benefit concert with other Neighbours cast members, Minogue performed Little Eva's "The Loco-Motion" and was signed to a recording contract with Mushroom Records in 1987. Released as a single, and retitled "Locomotion", the Australian recording spent seven weeks at number one on the Australian music charts, and was the year's highest selling single. Its success resulted in Minogue traveling to London with Mushroom Records executive Gary Ashley to work with Stock, Aitken & Waterman. They knew little of Minogue and had forgotten that she was arriving; as a result, they wrote "I Should Be So Lucky" while she waited outside the studio. Her debut album Kylie, a collection of dance songs, reached number one on the British albums chart and became the year's highest-selling album. It sold over seven million copies worldwide, with most sales occurring in Europe and Asia, and it contained six successful singles, which includes the largest success "I Should Be So Lucky". It was only in the United States and Canada where the album did not sell strongly; however, the re-recorded version of "The Loco-Motion" reached number three on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart and number one on the Canadian Singles Chart. "It's No Secret", released only in the U.S., performed poorly and peaked at number thirty-seven in early 1989. In late 1988 Minogue departed from Neighbours in order to concentrate fully on her music career.


A duet with Jason Donovan, titled "Especially for You" was a major success in the United Kingdom in early 1989. The critic Kevin Killian wrote that it was "majestically awful... makes the Diana Ross, Lionel Richie "Endless Love" sound like Mahler". She was sometimes referred to as "The Singing Budgie" by her detractors over the coming years. Chris True's comment about the album Kylie for All Music Guide suggests that Minogue's appeal transcended the limitations of her music, by noting that "her cuteness makes these rather vapid tracks bearable".
Her follow up album Enjoy Yourself (1989) was a success in the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia, and contained several successful singles, but it failed throughout North America, and Minogue was dropped by her American record label Geffen Records. She embarked on her first concert run, the Enjoy Yourself Tour, in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Australia, where Melbourne's The Herald Sun wrote that it was "time to ditch the snobbery and face facts—the kid's a star". Minogue had become Stock, Aitken and Waterman's highest selling act, so in the face of widespread comment that the second album was a poor imitation of the first, it was decided to adjust the overall style of her music.

Rhythm of Love (1990) presented a more sophisticated and adult style of dance music and also marked the first signs of rebellion against her production team and the "girl-next-door" image. Determined to be accepted by a more mature audience, Minogue took control of her music videos, starting with "Better the Devil You Know", and presented herself as a sexually aware adult. A relationship with INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence furthered her attempts to gain acceptance as a mature performer, with Hutchence saying his favourite hobby was "corrupting Kylie", and writing the INXS hit song "Suicide Blonde" in reference to her.
The singles from Rhythm of Love sold well in Europe and Australia and were popular in British nightclubs where Minogue started to be regarded as fashionable by the older audience she had targeted. When "Shocked" reached the British Top 10 in 1991, she became the first recording artist to place their first 13 single releases in the Top 10. Dispite the album seeing no Stateside release, "Shocked" became popular enough with club DJ's that it still is on some dance music radio station music databases. In May 1990, Minogue performed her band's arrangement of The Beatles's "Help!" before a crowd of 25,000 at the John Lennon: The Tribute Concert on the banks of the River Mersey in Liverpool. Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon offered Minogue their thanks for her support of "The John Lennon Fund", while the media commented positively on her performance. The Sun wrote "The soap star wows the Scousers - Kylie Minogue deserved her applause".
Minogue's contract had been for three albums, but she was persuaded to record a fourth. Let's Get to It (1991) was designed to broaden her appeal by presenting a diverse range of ballads and slower dance songs, but despite generally positive reviews it failed to make the British Top 10, although the Let's Get to It Tour in late 1991 sold out in Britain.
By this time Minogue had fulfilled the requirements of her contract and elected not to renew it. She had often expressed the viewpoint that she was stifled by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and later compared the experience to her time with Neighbours, saying all they wanted her to do was "learn your lines... perform your lines, no time for questions, promote the product". Realising that her fans were growing apathetic towards the Stock, Aitken and Waterman formula, and that she could only develop as an artist if she broke away from them, she decided to leave. She agreed to record three new songs to be included on the Greatest Hits album, which was released to coincide with her departure from them in 1992. The album reached number one in the United Kingdom. The new singles ("What Kind Of Fool" and "Celebration") were top 20 hits.

Deconstruction: 1993 - 1998

Minogue's subsequent signing with Deconstruction Records was highly touted in the music media as the beginning of a new phase in her career, but the self-titled Kylie Minogue (1994) received mixed reviews. It sold 500,000 units worldwide, and the single "Confide in Me" spent five weeks at number one in Australia. Subsequent singles, "Put Yourself in My Place" and "Where Is the Feeling?" were top twenty hits in the UK.
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Australian artist Nick Cave had been interested in working with Minogue since hearing "Better the Devil You Know", saying it contained "one of pop music's most violent and distressing lyrics" and "when Kylie Minogue sings these words, there is an innocence to her that makes the horror of this chilling lyric all the more compelling". "Where the Wild Roses Grow" (1995), was a brooding ballad whose lyrics narrated a murder from the points of view of both the murderer (Cave), and his victim (Minogue), and its success demonstrated that Minogue could be accepted outside of her established genre as a dance artist. It received widespread attention in Europe, where it reached the top 10 in several countries, and acclaim in Australia where it reached number two, and won ARIA Awards for "Song of the Year" and "Best Pop Release". She performed it with Cave at the Australian summer rock festival, "The Big Day Out" before a crowd of alternative music fans, and was well received. She also appeared with Cave during several of his concerts in small venues throughout Europe, as well as the T in the Park festival in Scotland which gave her more experience performing outside of the dance/pop genre and before audiences that were not necessarily her fans. She recited the lyrics to "I Should Be So Lucky" as poetry in London's Royal Albert Hall "Poetry Jam", at the suggestion of Cave, and later credited him with giving her the confidence to express herself artistically, saying: "He taught me to never veer too far from who I am, but to go further, try different things, and never lose sight of myself at the core. For me, the hard part was unleashing the core of myself and being totally truthful in my music". Frontier Touring Company official site Retrieved September 2, 2006. Her six planned Melbourne shows were increased to twenty-two due to public demand. Minogue was inspired by the style of Broadway shows such as 42nd Street and films such as Anchors Aweigh, South Pacific and the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals of the 1930s. Describing Bette Midler as a "heroine", she also incorporated some of the "camp and burlesque" elements of Midler's live performances. The show directed and choreographed by Luca Tommassini featured elaborate sets such as the deck of an ocean liner, an Art Deco New York City skyline, and the interior of a space ship, and Minogue was praised for her new material and her reinterpretations of some of her greatest successes, turning "I Should Be So Lucky" into a torch song and "Better the Devil You Know" into a 1940s big band number. She won a "Mo Award" for Australian live entertainment as "Performer of the Year". Following the tour she was asked by a Seattle Post-Intelligencer journalist what she thought was her greatest strength, and replied, "That I am an all-rounder. If I was to choose any one element of what I do, I don't know if I would excel at any one of them. But put all of them together, and I know what I'm doing."




In 2001 Parlophone released Fever, which retained some disco elements and combined them with 1980s electropop. Its lead single "Can't Get You out of My Head" became the biggest success of her career and reached number one in over forty countries, and sold more than six million copies worldwide. The album's success was equally widespread, and following extensive airplay by North American radio, Capitol Records released it in the United States in 2002. It attracted favourable comment, with Rolling Stone calling it "campy as a tent full of Boy Scouts and yet easy on the cheese", while Popmatters described it as "a perfect album of gorgeous dance music".

Minogue attracted some negative commentary, such as from Launch's Bob Gulla, who wrote: "she'll do virtually anything to get our attention. Not since Pia Zadora have we seen a more vacant talent grab... an astoundingly bland helping of hollow dance pop grooves and nauseating pleas for sex... it's so desperately lightweight it's in imminent danger of disintegrating altogether".

The album debuted on the U.S. Billboard 200 albums chart at number three, and the single reached number seven on the Hot 100. Fever peaked at number ten on the Canadian albums chart and the single reached the BDS airplay top three. Following singles "In Your Eyes", "Love at First Sight" and "Come into My World" were substantial successes throughout the world, and Minogue established a presence in the mainstream North American market, achieving particular success on the club scene. In 2003 she received a Grammy Award nomination for "Best Dance Recording" for "Love at First Sight", and the following year won the same award for "Come into My World".
Minogue's former stylist and creative director William Baker explained that the music videos for the Fever album were inspired by science fiction films—specifically those by Stanley Kubrick—and accentuated the electropop elements of the music by using dancers in the style of Kraftwerk. Alan MacDonald, the designer of the 2002 Fever tour, brought those elements into the stage show which was based around a framework of seven iconic female images, drawing from Minogue's past incarnations. The show opened with Minogue as a space age vamp, which she described as "Queen of Metropolis with her drones", through to scenes inspired by Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, followed by the various personas of Minogue's career. Minogue said that she was finally able to express herself the way she wanted, and that she had always been "a showgirl at heart".

Her next album, Body Language (2003), was released following an invitation-only concert, titled Money Can't Buy, at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. The event marked the presentation of a new visual style, designed by Minogue and Baker, inspired in part by 1960s icon Brigitte Bardot, about whom Minogue commented: "I just tended to think of BB as, well, she's a sexpot, isn't she? She's one of the greatest pinups. But she was fairly radical in her own way at that time. And we chose to reference the period, which was... a perfect blend of coquette and rock and roll."
The show attracted mixed reviews, with the main criticisms being that nothing substantially new was presented, and that the new songs did not match the appeal of her previous hits. Despite this, the concert was made into a successful television special that drew high ratings.
The album downplayed the disco style and Minogue said she was inspired by 1980s artists such as Scritti Politti, Human League, Adam and the Ants and Prince, blending their styles with elements of hip hop.VH1.com Interview, "Kylie Minogue - The Thin White Dame", February 24, 2004. Retrieved January 27, 2006. It received some of the most positive reviews of her career with Billboard Magazine writing of "Minogue's knack for picking great songs and producers".
All Music described it as "a near perfect pop record... Body Language is what happens when a dance-pop diva takes the high road and focuses on what's important instead of trying to shock herself into continued relevance" Sales in the United Kingdom and Australia were good but paled in comparison to "Fever", despite the large success of its first single, "Slow" and in the United States the album made little impression, although the singles became major club hits. In November 2004, "Slow" was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of "Best Dance Recording".
Minogue released her second official greatest hits album in November 2004, entitled Ultimate Kylie, along with her music videos on a DVD compilation of the same title. The album introduced her singles "I Believe in You", co-written with Jake Shears and Babydaddy from the Scissor Sisters, and "Giving You Up". Both songs reached the British top ten, and with a tally of twenty-nine top ten singles, Minogue became the second most successful woman on the British singles charts, behind Madonna. "I Believe In You" reached the U.S. Hot Dance Club Play top three and attained dance and rhythmic radio airplay nationwide. Minogue was nominated for a Grammy Award for the fourth consecutive year when "I Believe in You" was nominated in the category of "Best Dance Recording".
In April 2005, Minogue and her creative director William Baker ended their professional relationship, with Minogue commenting that the break had been timed to coincide with the release of the Ultimate Kylie album and the launch of the Showgirl - The Greatest Hits Tour. The tour was intended to be the most extensive of her career, and anticipated a total audience of more than 700,000. Minogue completed the European stage of the tour, and was in Melbourne when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, leading to the postponement of the remainder of the tour.

Breast cancer

Minogue completed the European stage of the tour, and was in Melbourne when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, leading to the postponement of the remainder of the tour, and her withdrawal from the Glastonbury Festival.

The announcement of Minogue's cancer diagnosis, and her hospitalisation and treatment in Melbourne, resulted in a brief but intense period of media coverage, particularly in Australia, where the Prime Minister John Howard issued a statement supporting Minogue. As media and fans began to congregate outside the Minogue residence in Melbourne, the Victorian Premier Steve Bracks warned the international media that any disruption of the Minogue family's rights under Australian privacy laws would not be tolerated. His comments became part of a wider criticism of the media's overall reaction, with particular criticism directed towards paparazzi.
Minogue underwent surgery on 21 May 2005 at the private Catholic Cabrini Hospital in Malvern.. Friends such as Olivia Newton-John, herself a survivor of breast cancer, urged the media and fans to respect Minogue's privacy. Soon after surgery, she commenced chemotherapy as part of her treatment regimen.
Minogue issued a public statement, thanking her fans for their support and urging them not to worry. On July 8, 2005, she made her first public appearance after her surgery, when she visited a children's cancer ward at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital. She returned to France where she completed her chemotherapy treatment at the Institut Gustave-Roussy in Villejuif, near Paris.
In December 2005, following successful treatment for her illness, Minogue released a digital-only single, "Over the Rainbow", a live recording from her Showgirl tour. During the early months of 2006, media began reporting Minogue's upcoming projects and the general improvement in her health. In June 2006, she was reported to be recording material for a new album, collaborating with The Scissor Sisters, Steve Anderson, Richard Stannard, Johnny Douglas, Ash Thomas and Teddy Riley while also making preparations to continue her newly renamed Showgirl Homecoming tour. She gave her first public interview since her diagnosis with breast cancer on the British satellite channel Sky One, July 16 2006.
Her children's book, The Showgirl Princess, written during her period of convalescence, was published in October 2006, and perfume "Darling" was launched in November 2006. On her return to Australia for her concert tour, she likened her cancer battle and chemotherapy to experiencing a nuclear bomb, and said that she is determined to resume her career.

Return to performing

On November 11, 2006, Minogue resumed her Showgirl - Homecoming Tour with a performance in Sydney, joking with the crowd that she was, after an 18 month delay, "fashionably late". She had told journalists prior to the concert that she would be highly emotional, and she cried before dedicating the song "Especially to You" to her father, a survivor of prostate cancer. Although her dance routines had been reworked to accomodate her medical condition, and longer breaks were introduced between sections of the show to conserve her strength, the media reported that Minogue performed energetically, with the Sydney Morning Herald describing the show as an "extravaganza" and "nothing less than a triumph".
The following night, Minogue was joined by Bono, who was in Australia as part of U2's Vertigo tour, for the duet "Kids", but Minogue was forced to cancel a subsequent planned appearance at U2's show, because of exhaustion.
Minogue's shows throughout Australia continued to draw positive reviews, and after spending Christmas with her family, she is scheduled to resume the European leg of her tour with seven sold-out shows in Wembley Arena, before taking her tour to Manchester for a further five shows.
Nelly Furtado was quoted as expressing admiration for Minogue's courage, and described her as "the person I'd most like to record with", leading to speculation that the two were planning a duet.

Film career

In 1989, Minogue starred in The Delinquents, which told the story of a young girl growing up in Australia during the late 1950s. Its release coincided with her popularity in Neighbours, and while both the film and Minogue's performance received poor reviews, it was a commercial success. She appeared as Cammy in the action film Street Fighter (1994), based on the fighting game series of the same name. The film received poor reviews by critics, with The Washington Post's Richard Harrington calling her "the worst actress in the English-speaking world." Subsequent films such as Bio-Dome (1996), Sample People and Cut (both 2000) failed to attract an audience.
Australian film director Baz Luhrmann, cast Minogue in Moulin Rouge! (2001) where she played the part of Absinthe, the Green Fairy, singing a line from The Sound of Music. In 2002, Minogue provided the voice of a young girl named Florence in the animated film The Magic Roundabout, released in 2006. Minogue also sang the title song in the movie and was one of the two starring actors not replaced when the film was released in the US.