Kylie Queen of the World

by Julie Aspinall

  Kylie’s video features one theme alone: she enters the spacecraft clad in a fetching pink spacesuit and proceeds to disrobe while floating in a space capsule. Her clothes are whisked away in to the ether until she is left with nothing but a blanket to cover her modesty. The reaction to it was much like that produced by her later video ‘Spinning Around’: a lot of hormonally charged men gripped the side of their armchairs and prayed that they could be reincarnated as a favourite item in Kylie’s wardrobe. ‘As I get older,’ Clive James, the Australian cultural commentator wistfully remarked, ‘Kylie seems to be taking her clothes off at approximately twice the speed I’m putting mine on.’

  But a backlash was beginning. Men of a certain age might be drooling over Kylie, but the rest of the world was taking a different point of view. Virgin Radio ran an ad campaign at the time: ‘We’ve done something to improve Kylie’s records,’ it ran. ‘We’ve banned them.’ Even Pete Waterman was having reservations about the route chosen by his former protégée. ‘Kylie changed,’ he observed. ‘She constantly wanted to be different – she wanted to deny what she was and is. I don’t believe you have a right to do that to people who helped make you a millionaire. It’s naughty. You can change but you can’t tell people who really liked you that your old records were rubbish. Kylie might not know where she is at the moment and she may want to be somebody else but to a lot of people she’s still Charlene from Neighbours.

  ‘We can shift our image but no one can completely metamorphose like Kylie is trying to do,’ he added. ‘You are who you are. Oasis are superstars because they present themselves as they always were – boys from Manchester who scowl a lot and say foul-mouthed things. Björk’s the same, but she’s not putting it on. Kylie might want to be like Björk, but she can’t – for a start Björk didn’t come out singing “I Should Be So Lucky”.’ In retrospect, of course, Waterman was spot on. IndieKylie was never really convincing and it was only when Kylie returned to her pop roots that she again achieved the kind of success she had known in her early days. But everyone’s allowed to make a few mistakes. This was Kylie’s time.

  One man was lucky enough to share Kylie’s favours, temporarily, at least. At the beginning of 1995, after a gap of nearly two years, she embarked on her next proper relationship, with the model Mark Gerber, who was then 35. Kylie had seen him cavorting around naked in the film Sirens; as an onlooker at the time rather indelicately put it, ‘Gerber had been a massive hit in the film and was clearly massively endowed, too. Kylie made him her mission.’

  It was a mission in which she intended to succeed. Kylie asked him out on a date to cruise Sydney Harbour; by the end of it he was reportedly besotted. His parents were not so happy. ‘Gerber was no spring chicken yet his parents were worried,’ said a friend. As it turned out, the relationship didn’t last very long anyway. ‘It’s in the past now,’ says Gerber today. ‘You move on.’

  All the while, her search to be taken seriously continued. Kylie was popping up here, there and everywhere: judging the Look Of The Year model competition with Karen Mulder and Vivienne Westwood, lip-synching to a castrato for the mega-trendy artist Sam Taylor-Wood and appearing in the T in the Park rock festival at Hamilton’s Strathclyde Country Park.

  The latter marked her first-ever appearance at a British music festival and her fans were beside themselves with joy. ‘She was unbelievable,’ said Charlie Gibson from Glasgow. ‘Better than I ever thought she would be.’ And not forgetting her gay fans, Kylie managed to fit in a skimpily clad appearance at the Astoria Club during London’s Gay Pride Festival, during which one woman managed to leap on stage and give her a kiss. ‘Kylie looked tickled pink,’ said an onlooker. ‘She seemed to have forgotten to put on her dress and the crowd were going completely bonkers.’

  Next Kylie really began to make waves, both in her choice of lover and duettist. The lover was comedian Pauly Shore, best known for his role in California Man, with whom she had a brief relationship that August. News that they were an item caused ructions, both because of Shore’s wild man reputation and because his previous girlfriend had been a porn queen called Savannah, who had committed suicide the previous year. Kylie met Shore in Los Angeles where she was again making a bid for screen stardom in the film Bio Dome, in which Pauly also starred; she was actually still seeing Mark at the time, but that came to an abrupt end.

  ‘It’s definitely over,’ said a friend. ‘He guessed it was coming because Kylie left him in London while she filmed Bio Dome and he noticed her calls were becoming infrequent. Then one night she rang him and told him things weren’t working out. Mark was very upset and now he’ll be even more hurt at finding he was dumped for another guy.’

  It might well have been her continued hankering after Michael that made Kylie able to offer Pauly help, but help she did and for a short time it was just what both of them needed. Savannah, whose real name had been Shannen Wilsey and who had also been out with Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose, died just a year after US comic Sam Kinnison, who had been like a father figure to Pauly. Friends were amazed at his new choice of partner. ‘Pauly’s been around the block a lot more than Kylie,’ said one. ‘It’s an unbelievable match because she’s so wholesome and he’s so crazy. [But] Kylie is helping him realise that life’s not all sadness. He has tended to go for tarty women and loves them and leaves them. But he has a lot more respect for Kylie. He’s really smitten. He calls her lots of soppy names and is very gentle.’

  Indeed, their brief relationship was really rather touching. ‘At first, she just thought he was this crazy guy who made her laugh a lot,’ said an insider who watched the relationship develop. ‘But she started feeling something for him after he arranged a surprise birthday party for her on the set of Bio Dome. She’d flown her mom and dad from Australia because she thought her twenty-seventh birthday was going to be a lonely affair. But Pauly surprised them by wheeling out a big cake with the words Happy Birthday Barbie On The Shrimp. That’s his nickname for her because she reminds him of a Barbie doll.’ For her part, Kylie was realistic about her new man. ‘While I don’t know how long this will last with Pauly, I’m having fun again,’ she said.

  The relationship was not to last. And of Bio Dome – a would-be comedy about brothers who gatecrash a scientific experiment, which finally came out in 1996 – Kylie said this: ‘You know with parents, you can do something not so great and they’ll tell you they loved it? My dad said, “I can’t believe you did that. That was just diabolical!” So I never watched it.’ Kylie’s character in the film, incidentally, was called Petra Von Kant, which might well have acted as a warning from the start …

  Next, Kylie managed to cause a really serious stir. She sang a duet with Nick Cave, an ex-heroin addict and Serious Artist who achieved the seemingly impossible and actually made her look unattractive in the video they recorded together. ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’, a cheery little ditty about the murder of a woman called Eliza Day, reached number 11 in the charts – a reasonable performance from Kylie’s point of view, but not outstanding; by contrast, it was Nick’s most popular song to date. The single brought Kylie much credibility, but if you’re in one of those moods where a glass of champagne and a quick burst of PopKylie is needed to cheer you up, this particular song is probably best avoided. It was written by Nick especially for Kylie. ‘I wrote the song because I have the utmost respect for her,’ he revealed. ‘It’s a song about a man who can’t control his love for a girl, who finds her so beautiful he feels compelled to kill her.’

  Label deConstruction was pleased to see Kylie’s changing image. “Kylie is constantly reinventing herself and this is just another stage,’ said a company spokesman. ‘She is moving towards a heavier sound and working with Nick Cave is all part of that change.’ Mercifully the stage didn’t last long: Kylie spent most of the video lying in a river, à la Ophelia, sporting a seriously unwise red bobbed haircut and entertaining the attentions of Nick Cave, a rabbit, a millipede and a snake.

  Kylie gave
and still gives every indication of being star-struck by Nick, in a way that she’s never been about anyone else. She has spoken wonderingly on a number of occasions about the fact that around the time she was singing ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, Nick was recovering from heroin addiction, the clear implication being that while Kylie was acting in a silly and frivolous way, Nick was experiencing life in the raw. ‘I really didn’t know that much about Nick Cave before I worked with him,’ she admitted in The Kylie Videodrome, which came out in 2001. ‘He contacted me about duetting with him on Murder Ballads [Nick’s album of the time] and explained to me that for six years before that he had been thinking about recording with me but had waited. It is a mark of him and how he does things that he waited and waited until the time was right.’

  Kylie was clearly incredibly impressed to be contacted by someone with a reputation like Nick Cave’s. ‘What is really special to me is that when he first thought about it, it was at the time when the most uncool thing you could say you wanted to do was to record a duet with Kylie Minogue,’ she reflected. ‘He thinks differently. He has amazing integrity and working with him was one of the best experiences I have ever had in my career.’

  Making the video – and it must be said, Kylie is a trouper when it comes to her videos – was to prove a slightly less than pleasant experience, especially when it came to her co-stars. ‘There was mention of a snake – I didn’t really think too much about that,’ she said. ‘We’d done a few takes of this and that and I was sitting in the chair and I noticed the director and the assistant director just speaking with each other but looking quite suspicious. And I look over and see what is going on. Then the animal handler joins them and the snake joins them and I think: ‘OK, it’s the snake time.’

  ‘I had never handled, touched, held a snake before so I am probably sounding very typical to the snake handler of someone who is about to get up close and personal to a snake for the first time … The snake was a star in that video but there was also Hermann the millipede, who I believe has been on a number of videos. These guys were telling me, “This is Hermann the millipede and he has been on so and so and so and so.” So between Hermann, the snake and the bunny rabbit you notice me as well somehow.’

  For some people, at least, it was a mercy to have something to take your mind off the song itself. ‘Although a good track musically,’ said one critic, ‘the lyrics are quite depressing.’ As an understatement that ranks alongside: ‘It’s a little bit hot in the Sahara’ and fortunately for the sanity of the nation, Kylie was soon camping it up again with the undisputed Queen of Kitsch, Sir Elton John. The couple sang a duet together, ‘Sisters’, at the Equality 95 event at the Royal Albert Hall organised by gay rights pressure group Stonewall: Kylie sported a minuscule little tassly number while Sir Elt came on stage replete in black evening dress, long black satin gloves and blond wig. The duet was a great success.

  ‘When I decided to dress in a frock for the Stonewall show, I wanted to sing “Sisters”, an old song from my youth,’ Elton wrote in Kylie’s 1999 book Kylie. ‘However, I needed someone to sing it with. Kylie immediately sprung to mind as she would get the spirit of the idea. It turned out so well – not only was she completely rehearsed and note perfect, she was so much fun and a dream to perform with. As I’d always been a huge fan (since Neighbours!) I was extremely impressed. I’m not easily impressed! Simply, she is divine – multi-talented.’

  Sir Elt was not the only person who thought that. By this time Kylie was going out with the French photographer Stephane Sednaoui, with whom she’d driven across America after making Bio Dome; she fell for him when he picked her up and held her above his head at a party. Stephane was 34 to Kylie’s 29 and he was to become her second great love (or third, if you count Jason): ‘We were stuck together in a car for three weeks and we really bonded,’ said an exuberant Kylie. ‘We’re in love.’

  A couple of years previously it would have seemed an unlikely coupling but at the time Stephane seemed the ideal companion for the new IndieKylie. Formerly engaged to the eccentric Icelandic singer Björk, Stephane had made videos for Madonna, U2, Tina Turner and Alanis Morisette and had a reputation for unusual behaviour (sex in public places) and an unusual appearance (a mohican haircut). For the first time since Michael, Kylie had met a man she felt she could truly look up to: the rest of the world was rather concerned, though, as Kylie appeared to wither away under their very eyes.

  Never exactly overweight at the best of times, Kylie shrank to a shadow of her former self; there were reports, always denied, that she wasn’t eating properly. She and Stephane were spotted in restaurants in which Kylie did little more than toy with a lettuce leaf. She seemed pale and tired, with bags under her eyes and a tired quality to her skin. And not only did she appear to have lost weight, but she embraced grunge with a vengeance, regularly appearing in public in baggy trousers and trainers, sporting a cropped haircut and wearing no make-up. To put it bluntly, the woman looked rough.

  For fans of SexKylie, it was all a bit much. In no time rumours started circulating that Kylie was anorexic or, worse still, on drugs: Kylie laughed it all off and promptly disrobed for a photo session with i-D magazine. ‘Kylie is NOT anorexic,’ insisted a spokesman. ‘She has never been healthier or happier. She almost died laughing when she read the anorexia story. Kylie thinks these photos prove that far from being ill, she is at her healthiest.’ Kylie was certainly playing it up for all she was worth: she informed the magazine that she only wore clothes when necessary and was at her happiest being naked with Stephane. And who would she personally like to undress? ‘Him, him!’ she cried in response.

  The couple spent a great deal of time in Paris, where Kylie had bought a flat. As to what she was like when she was in love, Kylie admitted, ‘I’m pretty helpless, actually, uncontrollable. My manager hates it when I’m in love. Being in love is the coolest thing in the world. The coolest and the cruellest.’

  But as with Kylie’s other relationships, it was not to last. Kylie and Stephane stayed together for two years. After the split, Stephane fell in love with the model Laetitia Casta, who went on to bear his child. Kylie seemed singularly unmoved by the parting of the ways. ‘I want this on the record: I’m not grieving,’ she said firmly, in an interview given just a couple of days after they broke up. ‘I wouldn’t be wearing make-up if we were still together. [That in itself, considering that she is one of the world’s most glamorous women, might be an indication as to what had gone wrong.] This relationship lasted two years and Stephane and I had some great times. People grow in different directions sometimes, don’t they? It’s mutual. Everything’s great. I’m not a hard woman, but I’m not too bad over this one.’

  Some clue as to why they broke up came some years later in an interview Kylie gave. Although she did not specify which boyfriend she was talking about, she referred to being suffocated by an older man. ‘I won’t say who,’ she said. ‘But it’s something I had to go through to recognise it doesn’t suit me. It sounds so horribly clichéd, but I need to be able to just flit around for a bit and come back. I’m childlike. I felt I had a box around me. It’s like your colours fade and you’re a much lesser version of yourself. And it’s just not fair on you or anyone else. You’re wilting. It’s not good.’

  Another clue came with the revelation that she had painted her flat. Until she moved to Shoreditch in 2002, Kylie lived in a large home in Chelsea, which was for a time completely white, with wooden floorboards, a large sofa and a kitchen bench. Flowers provided the colour. In 1997, Kylie remarked, ‘You would never know it’s my place. There’s no indication of it being my place whatsoever.’ After splitting from Stephane, all this changed. Kylie painted the front of the house red, the front rooms pistachio, the kitchen pink and the kitchen bench chocolate. ‘My house had been white forever,’ she said, ‘when I broke up with Stephane – which was harmonious – I wanted colour. I was like, right. I broke through!’

  It might well have been that Kylie was als
o beginning to look at her relationships with men – both on a professional and personal basis – in a new light. ‘I’m not a complete doormat with men,’ she said. ‘I’m just grateful and proud to work with them. It’s true I’ve never really worked with women. If it is true that men have had control over my career, then there is more balance coming – I’m taking control but I can’t work alone. I need support around me.’

  Of course, in a career like Kylie’s, it is sensible to take advice and guidance from others in the business. But this seemed to have spilled into her personal life as well. ‘I always end up being the pupil in the relationship,’ she reflected, sounding as if she wasn’t entirely delighted about that fact. ‘I’m always the one asking the questions and being fascinated by the answers. Sometimes I feel I’m just in the way.

  ‘I’ve looked very hard at why I end up in the relationships I do. I was always Daddy’s girl. He’s an accountant and he had always looked after my money and told me when I need to save and when it’s okay to go crazy. He’s clever and I respect him. But I am aware that men taking a lead may come from that. I never rebelled. I might have worn some odd clothes and smoked a cigarette, but I never rejected my parents and their lifestyle. My mum worked on my tour a couple of years ago in the wardrobe department – there’s not many pop stars who would admit that. You’re not supposed to be a pop star and have your parents helping out backstage, are you?’

  No, you’re not, but that never bothered Kylie. She was, however, going to need parental support and indeed all the support she could get throughout the next phase of her career, when pop’s pixie princess became more indie than ever and seemingly went too far. For the first time ever, Kylie Minogue looked as if she might be facing the end of her career.