Why writing for Kylie Minogue made Eddie Perfect nervous
Tourism Australia’s new ad fronted by Kylie Minogue has taken our country and the UK by storm. But there was one thing that made songwriter Eddie Perfect exceptionally nervous.
Entertainment
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Eddie Perfect admits his call to write the song for a Tourism Australia ad featuring Kylie Minogue came at just the right time.
Perfect, an actor, musician and comedian and writer, relocated to New York four years ago with his family to pursue a career writing for Broadway musicals.
His first major work, a musical version of King Kong, closed early, but he struck lucky writing the score for a stage version of the movie Beetlejuice, which opened earlier this year.
“I was at a point where a vacuumous black hole opens up, one goes from being occupied for 17 hours a day writing a musical to nothing and it’s a horrible feeling,” Perfect explains.
“I got a call saying Tourism Australia want to do a campaign, they want it to be a song targeted to the UK, about the fact they’ve been going through it with Brexit and how we have this close cultural and historical relationship with them and maybe they can lean on us as a friend. I thought that was an amazing brief. I asked who was going to sing it? They said they were hoping Kylie Minogue would. Amazing.”
Minogue had yet to sign on to the campaign; Perfect was charged with writing the song that would get her over the line.
He initially wrote a song that recalled Minogue’s work with UK pop trio Stock Aitken Waterman, who penned her early hits such as I Should Be So Lucky, Hand On Your Heart and Better The Devil You Know.
“I thought I could maybe play on nostalgia, make it sound like a late 80s Kylie vintage pop pastiche,” Perfect says. “I wrote something poppy and fun, but it didn’t have the emotional depth I felt the song could have.”
Inspired by Daniel Johns, who once buried an album in a garden, he deleted the song from his hard drive, rather than keeping it on file anywhere.
“I destroyed it and started again. It was inspired by I Still Call Australia Home and its anthemic kind of vibe. We were going for timeless and classic rather than contemporary or pop, something that people can hear and it feels like it’s always been in their bones. That’s hard to do, something that’s new that feels familiar.
“I was very nervous about pitching it to Kylie I went back and listened to everything she’s ever recorded from the pop stuff to the ballads to some amazing jazzy stuff, I had some trepidation. And she hadn’t signed on yet, it depended on the idea.”
He took his finished product, Matesong, to London where he met Minogue for the first time.
“When we had to pitch the song to her and went to meet her, that’s scary. You want to make a good impression on her. I’m pleased to announce Kylie Minogue is everything you want and expect her to be and more. She’s really funny and warm and lovely. We got to do a one-on-one session together and she’s totally creative and a really great singer. We workshopped some of it together. I was also writing it at a time when I was really homesick myself.”
The campaign taps into the political unease around Britain’s political system over the past few years, offering Australia as a good place to get away. However the almost daily fighting over Brexit made discussing the topic in an ad due to launch on Christmas Day difficult for Perfect.
“It’s been a tightrope walk, there was a very real possibility Brexit might be done and dusted by the time the song hit the airwaves. Bad news for Britain good news for us is it’s still going.”
The finished version of Matesong discusses Brexit and British politics in vague terms; Perfect says his first draft was more explicit.
“There was stuff that I didn’t know if I could get away with, that’s usual for me. There were lyrics that wouldn’t be topically relevant by December 25. One line was ‘Don’t throw your shakes, take a break with your mates in Australia’. That was written when politicians were having milkshakes thrown on them.
“You have to be inclusive. You don’t want to ostracise anyone or take sides, whether it was leave or remain, the song had to be completely neutral and all love. And that’s where we got to, thankfully. It was a lot of work.”
Minogue enjoyed some of Perfect’s more humorous lines.
“I’m singing stuff that I never thought in a million years that I’d be singing, rhyming cuticles and marsupials. To Eddie’s credit he was really clever with it. I asked if he had the melody in his head floating around for a while, but hadn’t found its home, but he said he wrote it just for this. It’s annoyingly catchy. He got it so right.”
Perfect flew from New York when the superstar recorded the song in London, giving it the working title Off Your Quokka and printing out photos of the marsupial to place around the studio.
“She stuck the pictures up everywhere with Blu-Tak, it was a really great experience. I was very fortunate to work with Kylie. She lives in the UK, she has a very dual sense of identity. We wanted the comedy to step up to the line a little bit, to have an Australian spirit, a bit tongue in cheek, to be a bit naughty and irreverent and you can just get away with a bit more when it’s Kylie Minogue. She’s so warm and delightful and that’s how she comes across in the clip.”
For Perfect, after a trip back to Australia for Christmas, he’ll return to New York to keep working. He’s heard whispers about plans for Beetlejuice to come to Australian stages (“the producers are cagey with the information but Australia keeps getting mentioned”) and says he’s enjoyed watching the show become a cult hit.
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“We have pretty rabid fans who come back to the show multiple times. There’s a cast album now so people know all the lyrics, it’s like a wild rock concert in there every night. We’ve found our audience and our audience are weirdos and misfits. There’s whole communities that have sprung up around the show and it’s delightful to see.
“It’s going the opposite way to how most Broadway shows go which is you start big and you taper off and you eventually wind down and stop. Beetlejuice grows and grows. They’ve just put more tickets on sale until June 2020.”
Perfect is now pitching songs to films (“massively unsuccessfully”) and working on more ideas for musicals and movies.
“Everything’s on the garage floor disassembled. I didn’t want to crawl into bed with the first time that came along, I’m trying to get married, I’m dating ideas at the moment.”
Originally published as Why writing for Kylie Minogue made Eddie Perfect nervous