The Deconstruction years (Kylie the showgirl princess? - Part four)

This is Part 4.

Part 3 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 1 is here.

News to hand – Kylie Minogue has just dumped her boyfriend of 4 years, Olivier Martinez. Good for her.

Mind you, is this any of anyone’s business?

Anyway, we’d got to the point in the story where Minogue had just signed a deal with Deconstruction Records.

About 1994.

She immediately got to work by picking out some songwriters and producers with the best track records in the British music scene.

Her first album for Deconstruction featured a staggering 8 producer and 19 songwriter credits including the Brothers in Rhythm and the Pet Shop Boys. Minogue wasn’t messing around.

The first single, “Confide in Me”, was hugely successful, but the album itself was only moderately more successful than the previous one that she recorded. Minogue wasn’t happy, and could not understand why her albums weren’t selling more.

Some reasons for this are now, in hindsight, pretty obvious:

• Minogue’s work is hugely popular with dance music fans who largely do not buy albums;
• In fact, albums themselves had been declining as a preferred package of music. This had previously come and gone in cycles, but the rise of clubby Eurotrash was proving to be fairly much unstoppable at this point in the 1990’s; and
• As much as she tried, Kylie’s attempts to garner a more grown up audience was yielding her old audience, but all grown-up, only. They had long since reached the age where they stopped buying long players outright;
• Lastly, Minogue continued to be popular with a segment of the music market who didn’t buy music all that often anyway – the incidental fans.

I won’t accept the shitcanning it got from the critics as a valid reason for it not selling – Kylie’s previous works were similarly pilloried, and they still sold.

Minogue simply wasn’t getting the extra audience boost that she had hoped for. This was, no doubt, frustrating for her.

It was probably symptomatic of a rising threat to Minogue’s career – in mid-1995 the Brit-pop explosion of the nineties was pretty much going full blast, and by the end of the year, Oasis had released their now classic album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and Blur had released their not-quite-so classic, The Great Escape. In their wake came efforts from Pulp, The Verve and (The London) Suede, further cementing the Brit-pop revival as a movement to rival that of Grunge 5 years beforehand.

Record companies across Britain and, indeed across Europe and the rest of the world (except North America) abandoned their Eurotrash filler for another couple of years as they got behind Brit-pop for all it was worth.

I always wondered why it was Brit-pop and not Brit-rock. After all, these guys were playing rock and roll with real instruments.

At about this time, Nick Cave embarked on an ambitious concept album called Murder Ballads. On his wish list was a duet with Minogue called “Where the Wild Roses Grow”. The song was released as a single, and was a rip-roaring success.

For Minogue, there was but one option after seeing the new audience that this single opened up for her:

Milk it!

Minogue started writing her own tunes and ensuring that her image was a little more “rocky”.

She wasted no time getting back into the studio and recording a new album, and she supplemented her stable of writers and producers with the likes of Dave Ball, Rob Dougan and James Dean Bradfield from the Manic Street Preachers.

She hung out with all the right people, and made sure that she was seen in all the right places.

Then boyfriend, photographer Stephane Sednaoui, ensured that her image was absolutely spot-on.

And when the new album, Impossible Princess was released, it was an unmitigated disaster for her. Sadly for her, Brit-pop was over, and Eurotrash was on it's way up again.

Minogue had timed her move into this sphere appallingly.

Kylie meets Hutch (Kylie the showgirl princess? - Part three)

This is part 3.

Part 2 is here.

Part 1 is here.

Around the turn of the 90's, Kylie Minogue began making greater demands on her producers, Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

One of her demands was to create a more 'adult' sound to go along with her newer, more adult image. She was, understandably, miffed that the kiddies who were buying her records now were going to be completely disowning her in another year or so, just like so many other disposable pop stars.

She had to revise her image and sound, and fast.

SAW did their best - but Minogue wasn't taking any chances. She roped in (then) big-name producers such as Teddy Riley and Stephen Bray to assist with her third album.

In normal circumstances, this all could have sunk like a stone.

But Minogue had an ace up her sleeve. Just prior to the release of her third album, she began a very public and very messy affair with probably the one person no one expected - the then INXS frontman, Michael Hutchence. At the time, INXS were probably the second biggest band on the planet.

Hutchence was a typical lead singer who had had scores of affairs mainly with supermodels, singers and actresses and was rumoured to be into all sorts of nocturnal activities ranging from merely suggestive through to bizarre.

In fact, rumours persist to this day that suggest that his suicide in 1997 (which was what the coroner's finding officially said) was a peculiar accident instead. The day of his death I was told this:

"Apparently, he had a belt around his neck that he had closed in the doorway between the top of the door and the doorjamb. He then had a bit of a thrash and, unfortunately, slipped in a pool of his own semen and accidentally hung himself."

Anyway, the fact that this is even remotely plausible should give you an idea about the quirks of this bloke.

So Minogue started seeing Hutchence, and because INXS' star was at its zenith and Minogue's was in the ascendant, the media went absolutely wild for it.

The media, incidentally, had a picnic painting Hutchence as this lecherous rockstar and Minogue as the innocent ingenue. Hutchence was even quoted once as saying that one of his favourite hobbies was 'corrupting' the young Minogue. It is now obvious, ironically, that the roles were reversed, and it was the ambitious Minogue who chewed the fragile Hutchence up and spat him out.

Needless to say, Minogue's third album was a smash hit and her extreme image makeover worked like a publicist's dream.

(Incidentally, the hit song, Better the devil you know was on this album. Nick Cave once claimed that this song had the saddest song lyrics he knew. The fact that he meant sad-sad and not pathetic is testament to the brain-sapping combination of a lengthy heroin addiction and the pretence of a Byron complex)

Minogue quickly threw her efforts into milking this sudden rush of mature respect by recording a fourth album. It was to be her last with SAW.

It wasn't a hit. Apart from the track Word is out, she just couldn't latch on to the record-buying public with this work.

Unsurprisingly, she sacked SAW, and left PWL - her contractual obligations were over.

She was now a free agent. And she was still a marketable commodity. A wonderful spot for a musician, or 'artist' as Minogue would prefer to be described, to be in.

What she craved, however, was cred. Not just any cred, mind you, it had to come with sales attached.

At about this time, a label called Deconstruction Records had just struck 24 carat gold with two acts - D:Ream and M People.

Minogue's people knew that this wave was breaking and also that new owners BMG were throwing a lot of money at the label.

She hardly needed much more convincing to sign on the dotted line. For a very short window, she had an opportunity to receive both a ridiculously lucrative deal funded by a major label, but with the cred and cachet of a minor label, which just happened to be the hottest dance music label in the world.

Deal out of the way, she proceeded to celebrate this new phase of her life by recording a new eponymously titled album with new songwriters, producers and money and also by dumping Hutchence.

Her first album with Deconstruction was a moderate success. Hutchence and INXS, however, never had the same level of success again.