Why school mums stare at Dannii Minogue
AFTER four decades in showbiz, Dannii Minogue admits the hardest job of all is trying not to embarrass her young son when she picks him up from school with bright pink hair.
Stellar
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DANNII Minogue laughs in mock horror as she recalls the one time she forgot to remind her son she was going to look drastically different when she picked him up from school.
In the hours before the school run, she was having her locks transformed into a shocking pink crown. It has always been one of Minogue’s things, playing the hair-colour chameleon, so when she broadened her business portfolio to take on the role of L’Oréal Professionnel ambassador in January last year, the vivacious entertainer wanted to be what she refers to as “that crazy guinea-pig person” for every trend before it hit the streets.
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“I went to the salon so excited about going pink,” Minogue tells Stellar. “I hadn’t thought it through, that I was going straight to school pick-up. And I walked in with freshly done, brightest-ever pink hair! I’m thinking, ‘When I’m onstage, fine... stare at me.’ But when you are walking into the school grounds, it’s ‘Please don’t look at me.’ I hadn’t remembered to tell Ethan: ‘When you see Mummy again, I’ll have pink hair.’ You don’t want to embarrass your kid on the school grounds. By the time he had come out of his class, all these little girls had gathered around me, loving the pink hair. And mums I hadn’t talked to before came up saying it looked awesome.”
Luckily for Minogue, her son liked it, too. “He came out and said, ‘Wow, that’s so cool.’” In the year and a half since, Minogue has transformed her hair again. She’s gone with a metallic silver. She’s been blonde. She’s rocked curls. But Ethan thought she was prettiest in pink. “He keeps saying to me, ‘Mummy, when are you going pink again?’ He likes it the best.”
As shocked as Ethan, now eight, could have been on the day of that school run, Minogue’s team at the new Seven Network series Dance Boss have come to terms with the fact that their host is going to look different again by the time the show kicks off in the coming weeks.
Less than 24 hours before her shoot with Stellar, Minogue received a new balayage treatment at the hands of colourists using the new L’Oréal Professionnel Instant Highlights system. These makeovers are on trend for Minogue – anyone who has followed her career since she debuted on Young Talent Time at the age of seven is aware of her ability to shapeshift at will.
Young Talent Time was a launching pad for a role in Home And Away in the late ’80s and helped facilitate a music career that would eventually lure her to the UK, where she lived for several years and performed on London’s West End in Notre Dame de Paris, one of a handful of stage musicals in which she has starred.
But her most successful and enduring career switch came just over a decade ago, when Minogue reinvented herself to become a judge on a swathe of musical-competition series. From Australia’s Got Talent to The X Factor in the UK and at home, as well as Britain & Ireland’s Next Top Model and last year’s Let It Shine, she has proven to be both popular and bankable.
But Dance Boss marks something of a homecoming for Minogue, at least in terms of the role she’s playing – it’s her first foray back into a hosting gig since the mid 1990s, when she starred alongside Chris Evans and Paula Yates on Britain’s The Big Breakfast. More importantly to her, she’s getting the opportunity to put four decades of business experience to the test by also serving as an executive producer.
“I felt I had more to offer to the show,” Minogue tells Stellar. “I’ve had 10 years of being a judge, and nobody told you what to say. It was 100 per cent what comes out of your mouth, in that moment. I thought it might be hard to go back to something where you’re employed to just rock up and say something.”
In her initial meetings, she was sitting alongside respected reality-television producer Geraldine Orrock (The Voice, My Kitchen Rules) and Seven Network’s Head of Programme Development Sonya Wilkes, creating a show from the ground up. Working with an all-female executive team was an “unusual” experience, Minogue admits – particularly after a near-lifetime working across industries dominated by men.
Still, she sees this not so much as a statement about gender equality, but a testament to the wealth of their individual achievements. “We didn’t feel like it was, ‘Finally the women
are here!’ We felt like we were there because we were all super ready to do it. I did feel this magic underneath it all, a kind of energy every day I went to work – like, it’s the one.”
The show, which features workers from various industries competing in dance battles with the help of choreographers and stylists, was also attractive to the 46-year-old entertainer because it anchored her in Melbourne. She can switch hairstyles at the drop of a hat, but new shows tend to require a commitment of around three years at the onset.
During her final year on The X Factor in Australia in 2015, Minogue realised that Ethan’s upcoming schooling was going to be an overriding influence on which jobs she would take next.
“We were living up in Sydney for four months out of every year – I didn’t want Ethan to start school and have any kind of disruption,” Minogue says. “And I needed to get my head around the job of being a mum going back to school, having that responsibility. I needed to get back to Melbourne to settle in and get my head around it all.”
“When I wanted to have a child, you think about holding a baby in your arms. I never thought beyond that. Then I’m walking into the school grounds and thinking, ‘I thought that was it when I left school. Noooo… I’m back at school!’”
Aside from providing stability for her boy, Dance Boss has also thrown fuel on Minogue’s passion for dance, which she hasn’t indulged since she was on the set of a music-video shoot about a decade ago.
She has become an “obsessed” choreographer stalker on social media, shouting out praise to those whose work blows her mind and collecting a few new friends along the way. No surprise there – a year before she landed Young Talent Time, Minogue was a determined six-year-old demanding that her parents enrol her in dance school. Today, she admits, she prefers to appreciate the art form rather than bust out moves of her own.
“I love being around dancers and choreographers,” Minogue explains. “When everyone was going off to rehearsals at Dance Boss, I kept thinking how much I would love to go and do that. I started looking up a lot of dance choreographers on Instagram when we were filming and there is just so much good stuff out there to find, so I became obsessed.”
As for her own abilities, it’s not that she doesn’t trust them. “I don’t know why I don’t do it as much,” she says, before revealing a home truth. “I feel like when you have a child, you immediately go into daggy mum dancing and daggy dad dancing. It’s almost like you lose the ability to dance. And when your child looks up at you and says, ‘Oh Mum, stop, please, you’re embarrassing me!’ it all becomes a little harder to get into those dance moves. I’d love to do some of the classes and try to learn it but it’s such a different job than when I was a kid. The muscles and bones are still in working order, so we’ll see.”
In March, the most popular album of Minogue’s recording career, Neon Nights, marked its 15th anniversary. But even before then, fans were hitting her up with requests on social media, asking her to make it available on vinyl. In response, Minogue went on a hunt that took months, playing detective as she tried to source all the parts it would take to reassemble the album best known for hits like ‘Put The Needle On It’ and ‘I Begin To Wonder’. It was a time-consuming labour of love – she had to track down rights, photos and song masters. “The album had been acquired by another company and they had to help lead us to where we might find all the pieces, because none of it was in the same place.”
When it was released last month, it sold out. “It was a real shock. I just wanted to get that album on vinyl... finally. I had friends calling me saying they had gone online to order the coloured vinyl they wanted and it had sold out. They bumped up the numbers again and I didn’t even have the time to put on my socials that we’d added more stock – they were gone again.”
The same fans who got their wish are still after something else: new music. But that, Minogue says, is the one creative endeavour in her life where she won’t be rushed to commit. In the week before she spoke to Stellar, Minogue had been in some songwriting sessions inspired by her consumption of dance videos.
But, she admits, “I don’t really have a plan. There’s no pressure, all of the other stuff I do is on a timeline so it’s nice to have something in my life that’s very free and fluid and it doesn’t matter if something comes out; I just do it because I like it.
“It was weird reading all the messages around Neon Nights when people were saying ‘new album, new album, new album’. That takes 100 per cent of your energy for a year, not doing any other job. And [Neon Nights] was before I was a mum and doing TV and clothing. I can’t be that same person again. Making that work within everything else is really difficult. The energy I’ve put into building an online community has enabled me to do stuff with music where I’m not going to go on a promotional tour or pulling myself away from Ethan. I just put it out there.”
Her immediate energies remain devoted to the launch of Dance Boss, anyway; if it does well, she wants to see another series, and possibly sell it to other countries. Same goes for her Petites clothing range at Target. “I want it to become a bigger part of my life and expand it globally.”
That, she says, requires one thing: “More time.” The trick, as with her Neon Nights expedition, is figuring out where to find it. Given Dance Boss only took six weeks to film – as opposed to the up to nine months a year she says “fell out” when she was on The X Factor – it may not be such a tall ask. As Minogue points out, “Now I have the rest of the year to try anything I really want to do.”
Dance Boss is coming soon to the Seven Network.
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Originally published as Why school mums stare at Dannii Minogue
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