The world has caught Kylie fever all over again. The new Netflix documentary Kylie is more than just a celebrity portrait — it’s a tribute to the bizarrely unkillable allure of Kylie Minogue. Stars come and go, but somehow Kylie has kept shimmying on forever. That isn’t how it’s supposed to go for dance-floor princesses—especially the ones who blew up in the Eighties, just one of the decade’s countless disposable big-hair disco dollies. It makes no sense that this Australian soap star got so famous in the first place, or that she became a hipster fave, but for her to stay on top of the world this long? Only Kylie.
One of the oddities of her story is that she’s been a woman of so many comebacks, yet she’s never really had a fame void to return from. She just shows up every few years with another global dance-floor banger, a “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” or “Padam Padam,” without breaking a sweat. By now, she’s the disco Lemmy — thriving forever in a ruthlessly fickle music scene, just by being herself. She’s stuck around long enough to intersect with so many weird cultural phenomena. Two of the biggest presences in Kylie are rock stars from the dark side — her doomed lover Michael Hutchence of INXS, and her longtime friend Nick Cave. “She had everything but credibility,” Cave says. “I had credibility, but not much else.”
The heart of Kylie is a love story, chronicling her torrid romance with Hutchence. Everyone was shocked when these two got together: the squeaky-clean 1980s pop starlet meets the rock & roll bad boy. But they were a couple for two wild years, from 1989 to 1991. “We were good together — shoulda, coulda, woulda, whatever,” she says in Kylie. “It was definitely an amazing point in time.” Yet the memory of his tragic 1997 death still brings her to tears. As she says, “I’ve probably been looking for something like that ever since, and I haven’t got it.”
But Minogue is as close as pop culture gets to a sure thing. She never loses it. She’s just kept hitting new peaks in the 2020s, with her massive club jam “Padam Padam,” setting off a new level of Kylie-mania —the “Padamic.” She carried the Euro-sleaze dance vibe for her entire album Tension, and its brilliantly titled sequel Tension II. Her catalog is full of wedding-reception hits, but also cult faves prized by the hardcore fans, like her 1997 detour Impossible Princess, or her 2018 country oddity Golden.
Nobody would have predicted this when she first showed up. She came from the Australian soap opera Neighbours, with exactly as much musical promise as any other Australian TV star. (Though the same soap later gave us Natalie Imbruglia.) She hooked up with the U.K. production squad Stock Aiken Waterman, with their hyped-up Eighties hi-NRG synth-glitz style. Their most famous hits in the U.S. were Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” and Dead Or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),” although some of us will go to our graves arguing that their masterpiece is Bananarama’s shamefully forgotten 1987 feminist aggro-disco bombshell “I Heard a Rumour.”
Her 1987 debut “I Should Be So Lucky” was written in 40 minutes, according to Kylie — the producer says it took two whole hours. But she was Britannia’s Sweetheart, with her equally wholesome boyfriend, singer Jason Donovan. He was her Neighbours costar — they played brother and sister! — yet followed her into music, with their duet “Especially for You.” Jason and Kylie were the quintessential Eighties cheese-pop couple, with their matching mullets and terrifyingly shiny teeth. They were young, innocent, madly in love. What could go wrong?
Unfortunately for Jason, his Titanic was about to hit a leathered-trousered iceberg named Michael Hutchence. Donovan’s a poignant presence in this doc, as he relives the agony of losing her to the INXS frontman. It looks like he’s never gotten over it — even talking about it now brings him to the edge of a meltdown. “Love hurts, mate,” he tells the interviewer, fighting back tears. “I don’t think I can say any more, to be fucking honest.”
As for Kylie, she took one look at Mr. Your Moves Are So Raw, slid over there, and gave him a reason. Their surprise romance became one of the Nineties’ great pop love stories. She was the girl next door; he was the decadent rocker who sang “New Sensation,” “Need You Tonight,” and “Don’t Change.” Her goody two-shoes image took a tumble, as he brought out the devil inside. “Sex, love, food, drugs, music, travel, books, you name it, he wanted to experience it,” she said in the great 2019 BBC Hutchence doc Mystify. “He opened up a whole new world for me. A lot of it was based around pleasure, let’s face it.”
Kylie was 21 and still insecure about her talent; Michael was 29, with most of his hits already behind him, yet oozing sensual adult confidence. He wrote “Suicide Blonde” for her, inspired by her latest hairstyle. The footage of these two together provide the doc’s most poignant moments. For two years, Michael expanded her world, artistically and in other ways. “He was the first, in so many ways,” she says. “And one of those firsts was heartbreak.” In 1997, after the road tore them apart, he became the first funeral she ever attended. But as she says, “I feel he’s always with me.”
One of the confidantes who helped her get through it was Nick Cave, the baddest of bad seeds. These two stars have one of the most bizarrely heartwarming friendships in the music world. Australian or not, they came from opposite ends of the Eighties spectrum — Nick from goth-punk hellions the Birthday Party, Kylie as the soundtrack to actual birthday parties. When he first enlisted Kylie as his duet partner on the surreal murder ballad “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” as a tragic sex-and-death maiden, most people assumed it was a joke, for both of them
They sang it together on Top of the Pops, but even Nick was intimidated by her rabid fans. “Evil, evil people,” he calls them with a shudder. “They were terrifying. Just these sort of monstrous, awful teenage girls. They did not like me and they did not like me to go near their princess.”
Yet they’ve shared a weird bond over the decades. In the Cave doc 20,000 Days on Earth, Kylie suddenly appears in the back of his car, as they confess their secret fears—she tells him, “I worry about being forgotten and lonely.” He gave her a strange kind of literary notoriety in his novel The Death of Bunny Munro, about a serial killer obsessed with her music. “There’s a particular video for ‘Spinning Around’ that captured the minds of all Britain for a year,” Cave told me in 2010. “Kylie’s hot pants were all the tabloids could talk about. I think she has to take a certain responsibility for this novel, by wearing those hot pants.”
In the late Nineties, Kylie made some of her artiest, edgiest music, tuning into Mo’ Wax grooves and trip-hop for her excellent 1997 sleeper Impossible Princess. It’s her turning-30 statement, comparable to Madonna’s Ray of Light or Billie Ray Martin’s Deadline for My Memories, in terms of the era’s hipster-disco watersheds. But she harkened the call to get back to mega-pop, leading to 2000s classics like “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” and “Love at First Sight.”
It was Nick Cave, of all people, who convinced her to return to the dance floor. “I was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’” he says. “Indie? No one willingly wants to be indie! They may say they do — but that’s not what Kylie is. Kylie is this force that is there to affect thousands and thousands and thousands of people. It’s all outward. It’s all giving.” As he says, “The great beauty of pop music is that it is a joy machine.”
Kylie took his words to heart. “You’ve got the coolest guy on the planet saying, ‘Where’s the pop tunes?’ Righ t —let’s get the jet packs on and let’s get back to the dance floor.” The rest is padam padam, as this one-woman “joy machine” has kept cranking, with one high-profile cancer battle in 2005 and another recent one that she kept secret until this doc. Musically, she can try whatever she pleases. I will always be a ride-or-die fan for her country gem Golden, going Nashville with her rhinestone-cowgirl disco twang. It’s a confident statement about sashaying into her fifties, facing up to mortality and heartbreak, from the elegiac ballad “Music’s Too Sad Without You” to the banjo-disco “Raining Glitter.” It’s hard to think of any Eighties pop star who’s stayed famous this long without going through a phase of being unbearably annoying.
Music docs being what they are, Kylie tries hard to give her a three-act rise-and-fall-and-rise narrative —but it doesn’t work because she’s never had any of the career disasters that documentarians adore. She never lost her audience, never had to play the underdog. The doc tries to scrounge up pity over her negative press reviews — boo hoo — but that’s the dippiest possible way to frame her charmed life. Hell, Kylie never even went broke — her accountant dad advised her early to invest in real estate, so she’s always been filthy rich. Can you sustain a pop legend for four decades with any fall from grace? For Kylie, it’s no trouble at all.