Kylie Minogue: ‘I’m single but I’m not lonely’
IN the most revealing interview of her 30-year career, the singer opens up about heartbreak, her “nervous breakdown”, and how she feels about turning 50.
Stellar
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LIKE many who have found themselves staring into the void after a devastating break-up, Kylie Minogue dealt with the heartbreak by diving headfirst into work. For the Australian pop icon, her day job is writing songs to eventually perform when she clocks on at night. When Minogue started to plan her 14th album, Golden, the very public split with her ex-fiancé, British actor Joshua Sasse, was still fresh in her mind as she looked for lyrical inspiration. “The really bad part was late in 2016, when I was still in it,” Minogue tells Stellar of writing through — and about — the pain of her relationship ending.
“I wrote songs that were very literal — like, really literal,” she says. “It was too much and they weren’t very good songs. I don’t mind that, because it’s out of my system. Once it was done, things got easier. I don’t want an album full of songs about my last relationship. I just don’t.”
One break-up post-mortem survived: ‘A Lifetime To Repair’. In keeping with Golden’s theme, it is a country-tinged heartbreak song. And in keeping with Minogue’s MO, there’s a sense of humour shining through the sadness. “I’d really moved on when I did that song. It was more about, ‘What’s my story with love? Where have I been going wrong? What do I need? What do I want? How did that happen? What was I thinking?’ Not so much, ‘This happened with this guy.’”
Minogue is acutely aware that her love life is the subject of international fascination. It’s been that way since she kept her offscreen relationship with Neighbours love interest Jason Donovan a strategic secret for years. She’d eventually leave him for Michael Hutchence, who opened a portal to a whole new world — and career — for the budding superstar.
Tellingly, only one of her exes has ever sold a story about Minogue. Equally, she’s never been the type to gush too much about her boyfriends. Until Sasse.
The pair met in 2015 when she filmed a guest role in the actor’s US musical fantasy TV show Galavant. Despite claims that he hadn’t quite left the home he shared with his wife Francesca Cini (the couple have a son), he and Minogue quickly started a relationship. Dates at the rugby were posted on Instagram — a very un-Kylie move. Media outlets frothed about the near 20-year age difference; Minogue noted he was an “old soul”, more interested in poetry than pop music.
When the pair announced their engagement in February 2016 (in the old-school manner of a notice in a British paper’s classifieds) there was a rush of excitement from the public, who had been willing Minogue to find “The One” for decades.
The usual stories about whether she’d start a family surfaced again, with Minogue trotting out the line she has had on standby for years: if it happens, it happens.
Literally hours after they confirmed their split (via the more modern vehicle of social media) in February 2017, the hoary old “unlucky in love” story was updated by sections of the media, and Sasse was promptly added to Minogue’s well-documented roll call of exes.
“I tried to be like other people,” Minogue now admits of her engagement. “That’s what people do, they get engaged. I thought maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong... I don’t know that marriage is for me.”
Minogue pauses — she’s done this long enough to know when she’s uttered a headline. “Of course I want love. Of course I do. You want love in all its forms, in friends and family and your partner. Let’s just say I’m not looking for it right now. I’m not. I’ve spent a year rebuilding myself. It was pretty much nervous breakdown time at the end of 2016.”
There’s another headline.
“Well, I don’t want to over-dramatise it, but it actually was nervous breakdown time,” she continues. “It ended up being not so much about heartbreak and more about stress. It was a stressful time. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good for either of us, but I’m not in his head. My head and my body were saying, and friends and family were saying...” She takes a long pause. “You know, when you are in something like that you’re not thinking straight; you can’t see clearly. It’s really weird to look back and see that everyone else was going, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’”
Minogue took a short break in Thailand to recalibrate after the split. Sources say some in Camp Minogue were a little suspicious of Sasse. Last month, in what some may view as karma, Sasse was reportedly dumped by his latest whirlwind romance, actor Harriet Collings, just days before their wedding.
Minogue is too polite to address her former fiancé’s rumoured failings, and does not even mention him by name. At one point she notes: “I’m trying to be diplomatic.”
So what did go wrong?
“It was a great beginning. And it just went too fast, too soon,” Minogue explains. “Eventually we realised that we were cut from different cloths. It wasn’t right. But in the period of trying to figure that bit out, that wasn’t easy. By the time 2017 really got going and I was back in the studio, I was so relieved to regain my sense of self and meet exciting, new people and make new music; the future looked bright, that’s all I can say.
Once I was out of the dangerous waters and back on terra firma, I was already thinking, ‘OK, that was another experience in life.’ If you’d asked me if I wanted to go through it before it happened, maybe not. But it was over in a flash. It was intense, but it was over in a flash.”
It was an unusually public relationship for Minogue. Sasse read an erotic poem (written by his father) on a radio show that Minogue was a guest on; he also used Minogue’s publicist to launch a campaign for marriage equality in Australia — amid criticism he was promoting himself as well as the cause. “I’m not usually that public,” she admits. “It was partly him as well, it wasn’t just my decision. I went along with it. It was slightly out of character. But I give most things a go...”
There’s another line in ‘A Lifetime To Repair’ about “swimming in a sea of loneliness”. Minogue says that was poetic licence, rubbing off by osmosis from time spent writing the album in Nashville, Tennessee, and those vintage country songs about love gone wrong.
“It’s exaggerated. I’m not sitting at home crying. I’m single, but not lonely,” Minogue says. “I never thought I would get married. Then I did a swerve. Who knows what is around the corner? Anything could happen... To use the way we’re destroying the English language: I have mega lolz. I have laughed a lot this past year. I really, really have. Something changed in me. I don’t know what. I think it was after a dramatic end to the previous year, so partly it was relief — learning more about myself and the people who really are there for you and support you through thick and thin. I’ve got a few more laugh lines, but that’s OK.”
There were some royal lolz, too: last year the pop princess was linked to Prince Andrew. “That was an amazing rumour,” she tells Stellar. “It’s also one of the most phantom rumours. It wasn’t even like I was photographed with him at an event; it just literally came from nowhere. I would rather it be one about nothing, though!”
Another story that surfaced: Minogue’s successful legal action against Kylie Jenner trying to trademark the name Kylie. Legal documents called the Kardashian clan member a “secondary reality-television personality”.
Minogue clarifies that it was actually lawyer-speak, and not her words. She was merely protecting her name, which has been famous around the globe since she first appeared in Neighbours in 1986.
“I wasn’t suing her. It was totally not a personal thing at all; I admire them as a business, they’re amazing,” she says of the Jenner and Kardashian clan. “But I’ve trademarked that name for years and years, the same way people trademark soft drink names or coffee brand names.”
On Golden, the Kylie brand is expanding into new musical horizons. The first single released, ‘Dancing’, is her biggest Australian radio hit in years — a pay-off for the risk she took in moving out of her electro-disco comfort zone and heading to Nashville. But it’s not Minogue’s first rodeo.
“If you think about ‘Spinning Around’, that was a move into a different direction at the time, that R&B-pop-disco flamboyant sound,” she says. “‘Confide In Me’ was a totally different sound for me when I made it. ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ was electro. ‘Aphrodite’ was the rush of synth feels. I couldn’t argue with that point of trying something new.
“When I’ve spoken to friends and family and said, ‘It’s got a bit of a country feel,’ they’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s got some banjos and fiddles, but it still sounds like Kylie music.’ I don’t think people should be frightened or think, ‘Oh god, Kylie’s gone country!’
“I’m by no means a hellraiser; I don’t feel I take wild risks, but maybe in my own way I do. I’m definitely a curious person and I wanted to try something different.”
The title track, ‘Golden’, takes its cue from the fact that Minogue has been asked about her age for as long as she can remember. She turns 50 on May 28.
“I had this line in my head: ‘We’re not young, we’re not old, we’re golden.’ It was my response to being constantly asked, ‘How does it feel to be your age in this industry?’ You could have asked me at 18 what it was like to be an 18-year-old in the music industry. I don’t know — I feel the way I feel.”
In 2015, Minogue inducted Tina Arena into the ARIA Hall of Fame and watched her long-time friend call out the music industry, face-to-face, for putting women over 40 out to pasture. It’s an issue Minogue has faced, as commercial pop radio gets younger and younger — Sia is the only woman over 40 regularly played on chart stations, while even Madonna was pensioned off years ago.
“Tina nailed it,” Minogue says. “My Hall of Fame speech [in 2011] I scribbled in the back of the car; I’m so bad at those things. So I was listening to Tina and thinking, ‘I really should have thought about mine a bit more.’ But that’s my way, I guess. Tina did a great speech about the use-by-date issue for women. This morning, I saw a magazine with Julia Roberts on the cover — I look at that and think, ‘Yes you’re older than you were in
This will be a milestone year for Minogue. Along with turning 50, she will reach the 30th anniversary of the release of her debut album, Kylie — which included hit single ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ — and also of her 1988 Gold Logie win. “It’s a golden year!” she cheers. “I’m embracing turning 50 — so far. I might have a big party in London, which isn’t very me, but why not give it a try? The party might be the most stressful part of it — everyone’s asking what I’m doing. I’ll have a quiet family do, as well.
“I feel good this year. I feel excited about everything. I’ve become more aware of time. If you want to do it, you better do it. Don’t faff around. Of course, I’m not 25 with no cares in the world. Life throws you curve balls, you always have to navigate them. It’s like a game of Frogger: even when you’re resting you still have to navigate your way from here to there. There are different challenges in life now — we can’t go forwards or backwards.
“That’s the message of Golden. A 10-year-old kid will say, ‘I’m not a baby, but I’m not a grown-up.’ How do I fit in the world of pop at 50? I know I’m not young, but I’m not old. A kid will think that I’m old. An older person will think I am young. It’s all relative.”
Minogue’s looming career anniversaries demonstrate a longevity that many never anticipated (herself included), and which seems alien in a modern-pop landscape where even superstars like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift are slammed when a single misses the Top 40.
“I didn’t plan any of this,” Minogue says. “Maybe some people think that they’ll be a megastar. I didn’t. I find it weird when people say, ‘I knew when I was seven that I wanted to be famous.’ I don’t quite know how it’s happened, but I keep doing what I’m doing. I feel very grateful — but it will probably remain a mystery to me why this is the path, [and why] this is my life.”
Golden (Liberator Music/BMG) is out on April 6.
Originally published as Kylie Minogue: ‘I’m single but I’m not lonely’