I’m probably showing my age and my country of origin when I tell you that I once screamed in a cosmetics shop in Lagos, Nigeria, when I saw some makeup that had “Kylie” emblazoned on it. It was for Kylie Jenner. But I’d still defy most places in the world to tell me that they haven’t heard of Kylie Minogue, who in one of the best lines in her new Netflix documentary tells us: “The irony is that Kylie does mean boomerang, I do my best to come back.” The word is Indigenous and from the Noongar word “kiley”, meaning “curved, returning stick”. As for Kylie defending her good name, a trademark battle was ultimately resolved in her favour in 2017 (incidentally, the same year I went to Nigeria).
There aren’t that many singers who you grew up with who are still having hits these days and whose career and life you can chart by specific events and places in your own. Now Minogue, 58, who got her first role in the soap Neighbours when I was just six and released her first single only a year later, is the subject of the Netflix celebrity documentary, which has become a streaming genre of its own.
My earliest Kylie memory is sitting in the granny flat at my parents’ house in the country in Australia when I was about eight on Easter Sunday, having just received from our grandparents a photo book each of Kylie. It was circa 1988. I’ve tried to find the one and am sure it is this one here, and below.
There was a small window of time early on in Oz where Dannii, three years younger, was the more famous via a TV show called Young Talent Time. (We got it in the country via the Brisbane channels once a guy came to put in an aerial on our roof - there was huge excitement that day - and I had later had a board game featuring the program). Kylie was just "Dannii's older sister." However, that dynamic shifted permanently in 1986 after Neighbours came on the scene.
My highlights of the Nextflix docu include English record producer and songwriter Pete Waterman, who produced her first album and three others with trio Stock Aitken Waterman, admitting: “I didn’t know what an antipodean is.” The word comes from the Greek word antipodes - anti meaning “against” or “opposite,” and podes meaning “feet”. This was funny considering that at that time in the ‘80s, Australians and New Zealanders were already a dime a dozen in the UK, and Neighbours, where Minogue got her break, was at its height. We’ve kept coming, since. People were, as Minogue said in the series, changing doctors’ appointments to watch the show. “What do you think makes Neighbours so popular?” a journalist vox-pops someone in Britain at one stage in the first episode of the Netflix program. It makes me think back to a press trip that I went on to Portugal in 2011 with a Daily Mail journalist who insisted to me that it did so well in the UK was because there were no Black people.
We’re also reminded in the first episode of Kylie by Waterman also that some of the best pop or art arrives “on the hoof”, or spontaneously. The title for “Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi” (I Still Love You) came about after he had an affair with a French woman. “You don’t try to analyse it to find out what’s happening in Nicaragua,” the legendary producer tells us of Kylie’s songs. I can’t help but think he has a point and that part of the appeal of her is that we have enjoyed her music so much because the tunes were so catchy we know some off by heart, but we don’t dissect the words. She also became famous pre-social media and cancel culture, although of course today when you’re a pop star you’re not always asked your views on Gaza, nor may you put them forward. Interestingly, someone else who features in the show is fellow Australian performer Nick Cave, who recorded a duet with Kylie in 1995 and has been the subject of boycott calls in relation to Palestine.
Former co-star and lover Jason Donovan pops up of course and comes across as a tad jealous and bitter - although maybe that’s hard to avoid when you’re still being overshadowed by someone every day of your life some three decades on, as he says. Along with Kylie he also still has fondness for the Sydney Travelodge, which he brings up again, talking about when they got together there. When Donovan first spoke about this in 2012, it prompted this tactful headline from one Australian news site. I am familiar with the UK Travelodge brand, which seems to be well known, and have stayed in several there, but I didn’t even know we had our own, to be honest. Donovan went to the London premiere of the series however, and as Mingogue says in the docu, they’ll always have a strong bond.
I’d forgotten how much more Australian Kylie had sounded back in the day, but hearing one UK journalist talk about her accent and “the high irritant factor” was infuriating. She was given the nickname “the singing budgie”, evoking a small, brightly coloured native Australian bird known for chirping. Surprisingly (or not), according to a 2008 Sydney Morning Herald story though, it was an Australian journalist, Anthony Dennis who coined the nickname in 1988, after three Sydney radio stations refused to play “I Should Be So Lucky”. It followed market research revealations that it really got under the skin of their 25- to 40-year-old demographic. I’m not sure if there was a touch of Tall Poppy Syndrome evident in this moniker, which the UK press picked up and then ran with, or not. However, as we’re reminded by Cave, in one scene, of antipodeans, “they just give stuff a shot.” Over the years, Kylie has become much more comfortable in her own skin, and one of the other best lines in the documentary is when she says: “I might not be blessed with a voice from the heavens, but I don’t have anyone else’s voice. What I have is my voice.”
The film also naturally documents her cancer journey. That’s another day I remember, where I was and what I was doing, because it was such a huge news story about an antipodean that made headlines all around the world. I was also in my second year as a journalist and on the showbiz round at the national news agency. But I was on a training day with the other journalists from my cadet year from the year before, when I popped upstairs to check the wires and discovered the news. This was in 2005, so it’s hard to find stories from back then, but I remember writing a feature with the lede: “If anyone knows about survival, it’s Kylie Minogue.” As we’re reminded in the series, she’d not only been compared to a “crochet scarf”, branded meaningless, ordinary and unable to sing by her critics at home and on the other side of the world, she’d already endured several high profile breakups in the public eye including one with INXS rock god Michael Hutchence, before his death.
As I learnt that day at work, when you’re working for a national publication and stories like that break, it’s all about reaction, phoning around to ask people what they think. Again this was before social media and I didn’t even have a mobile phone, only a contact book with names written down. In Britain, the news was so big that not only did it get a total seven pages in The Sun, they scrapped the page three section for it that day. The best thing that came out of this was that beside surviving, we now know that publicity about her illness led to what a professor described in The Medical Journal of Australia as “the Kylie effect”, with a University of Sydney study finding that coverage of her cancer diagnosis led to an never seen before increase in breast screening bookings.
The footage of Kylie with Hutchence and the interviews with Cave were my other favourite parts of the docu, and including he scene where INXS performed in London, which was electric. At the peak of their fame, the band played to 74,000 fans in Wembley Stadium. Kylie has been panned by some press in Australia for featuring too much of her personal life - although coming from the Murdoch media, this is interesting. But it also came up in a University of Technology Sydney (UTS) critique. Kylie’s relationships have been a big part of her life though and let’s face it, I don’t know if as many people would have watched it if it had just focused on her music, despite her popularity. Hutchence was a massive star in his own right - that’s another time and place firmly planted in my mind, the Saturday afternoon when I was at home and the news flashed up that he’d been found dead at the Ritz-Carlton in Sydney’s Double Bay - and it was also a lovely tribute to him and a reminder of what the world lost.
We also see, weaved in through interviews, the relentless obsession with Kylie’s fertility, a standard, exhausting trope of the celebrity interview. On this subject, she has been elevated to a level that probably no other celebrity apart from Jennifer Aniston can understand and of course writing a song about being “lucky in love” never helped. At one stage in Kylie, the singer is asked - after she has battled cancer and IVF - when she is going to have children, and by a woman, although no doubt the interviewer (Cat Deeley) would have been under strict orders to ask that. It reminded me of a line from the 2009 memoir from British journalist Jane Bussmann who said that her job in Hollywood as a celebrity writer was to ask women who had just won an Oscar or directed a major motion picture when they were going to have a baby.
The film also captures how physically gruelling it is to be a singer and how professional Kylie is. Over four decades, she has headlined 19 concert tours and one residency. In some scenes in the docu, you can see in her face how hard she works. After one performance, she’s taken backstage and is given oxygen. You can see in some of them too, that despite all the criticism Kylie’s received in the past, that you do need to be skilled to do what she does.
I got some insight into this when I starred in a Bollywood film with Kylie in 2009. It came about while I was on a brief stopover in Mumbai, on my way back to the UK from Australia. I was walking down the main drag in Colaba when a guy called Kieran - I’ve forgotten everything about him bar his name since then - stopped me and asked me if I wanted to star in a film with her. I said yes - I mean what else would you say - even though part of me wondered if it was a joke and I was due back at work in the UK in a few days’ time when the shooting would take place. But later when back at the hotel I did some research and found that indeed Minogue would be in town to make a cameo appearance in the underwater action thriller Blue, produced by Dhilin Mehta. The song that she’d be singing in it was written by AR Rahman, who composed the soundtrack for the Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire, which had only been released at the cinemas a month earlier. (It was inspired by and filmed in Dharavi slum, one of the largest in Asia, which I also visited on a tour during my time in Mumbai. I don’t know if I’d go on this now, but here’s a photo below).
Needless to say, now that the opportunity to star in a movie alongside one of my country’s most famous exports and a superstar had cropped up, I changed my flights and phoned work to tell them that I wouldn’t be able to make my shift pronto.
I can’t remember much about any of this now and sadly I’ve lost my photos, the hard copy of the story and nor does the link to it work. But I can remember being picked up in a taxi, sitting in the back with a gay American who was a MAC makeup artist (he later stayed at my place in London) and how excited we were as we were driven to the set through the mad traffic of Mumbai.
Once we got there, we were taken into wardrobe to be given our costumes. I can’t even remember my character now. I think I was supposed to be a nondescript person in the background of a pool scene with many others and I’ve still to this day not watched the movie.
Not only was I literally dripping with sweat, but my legs were also covered in bed bug bites at the time, thanks to the hotel I was staying at, and I was trying not to scratch them. So I wasn’t that thrilled when I was given a spicy red sleeveless lace dress with a black leather sash and high split up the side although they did kindly give me some black bike pants to wear underneath.
It was actually a pretty long, boring, tiring day. All we mainly did was stand around. But of course seeing Kylie up close and personal even for a minute was thrilling and made it worth it. I’d seen her sister before at some showbiz events for work and interviewed several big stars including the Neighbours and Home and Away ones in my short-lived entertainment reporting stint, but had never seen Kylie. The one thing that stuck out to me was how short she is.
It was hilarious seeing her in her day job and being ordered around, so funny that I wrote this below for a newspaper in Australia later:
I was a Bollywood extra with Kylie.
Kylie gets shouted at, bossed around on Bollywood film set.
Kylie Minogue is standing on stage on the set of the Bollywood film Blue, wearing a dazzling silver mini dress with sequins, surrounded by one of Bollywood’s leading men, Akshay Kumar, and scores of doting dancers - and she’s looking sensational.
Yes, the pint-sized Australian superstar, whose career has lasted over two decades, is being bossed around.
“Kylie, I want to see those tassels move more!” barks legendary Bollywood choreographer and musical director Farah Khan.
The singer, sporting a showgirl-style outfit made by Indian designer Manish Malhotra, her blonde hair flowing, just nods.
But my Australian friend and I, sitting on the lounges right behind her, are flabbergasted.
Not only have we managed to get ourselves cast in the Bollywood film in Mumbai, but we’re watching one of the world’s most famous stars being shouted at.
“She can’t boss Kylie around like that!” my friend exclaims.
I’m also feeling very defensive on behalf of the girl whose songs I’ve been singing since I was little.
And also a little nervous: it is the 100 extras - besides myself, there are several other Westerners who have been transformed from backpackers and travellers into clubbers - now standing on a set supposed to be the Bahamas, who are the most starstruck, being just metres away from one of our most famous celebrity exports.
At first, when Kylie walks past me and some other nervous extras and says, “Just pretend it’s fabulous, it’s fabulous”, I really do feel like I’m spinning around.
Unfortunately, despite all our hard work and our own prospects of stardom, our pay is nothing like hers. Kylie is reportedly taking home a staggering $1.5 million for just two days of rehearsals and five days of shooting.
In contrast, we pocketed a handful of rupees - about $17 each per day — as well as lunch and dinner.
It’s hard work being a Bollywood extra, I’ve discovered.
We’re suffering through gruelling 12-hour days in a sweltering studio.
For her million-plus salary, Kylie is in Mumbai for just a week’s work, and isn’t even the main star of Blue, which is an epic about a friendship marred by betrayal and a search for buried treasure.
Kylie is, however, famous enough - even in India - to play herself. Cameo appearances, unrelated to the plot, are a trend in Bollywood blockbusters right now.
In the scene we’re filming three days into the shoot at Mumbai’s Film City, Kylie is dancing alongside Akshay Kumar to the song she has recorded with Bollywood singer Sonu Nigam in London.
She’s recorded the track with A.R. Rahman, who won two Oscars for his Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack.
It’s a Western, Hindi and Punjabi pop hit, with catchy phrases such as “chicky chicky”. Kylie sings in English, while Nigam mixes in Punjabi and Hindi lyrics.
Kylie also stars in scenes with the film’s cast, including Bollywood stars Zayed Khan, Lara Dutta and Sanjay Dutt.
As well as Mumbai, scenes have been filmed in the Bahamas and Bangkok. In those filmed on the first day — which I was also part of - the pop princess is dancing on a stage in a fictional Caribbean resort, complete with an outdoor pool.
Hovering around her are male Bollywood dancers dressed in black zippered vests and gold pants.
Tiny Kylie is even tossed up in the air by one of the dancers, before looking startled and running off the stage.
Kylie is clearly a hit with the rest of the cast. Dancer Veron Khan tells me that he loved dancing so close to her - his new very good friend Kylie.
Kylie may well be Bollywood’s highest-paid foreign celebrity, but as for me, I’m not giving up my day job just yet.
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