Dannii Minogue on Neon Nights and her surprise World Pride performance

In a candid new interview, Dannii Minogue opens up about her biggest musical success - and shares how hard it was to keep a big secret with Kylie.

Twenty years on, Dannii Minogue’s 2003 album Neon Nights still stands as the musical high point of her career: That rare pop album where just about every song could’ve been a single.

It was a huge leap forward from her previous three albums, thrusting the Aussie singer into the middle of the dance floor with hits like Put The Needle On it, I Begin To Wonder and Don’t Wanna Lose This Feeling.

But, as Minogue tells news.com.au as she preps the release of a 20th anniversary edition of the album, the purple patch came after she’d all but quit music.

Minogue’s previous album, 1997’s Girl, birthed one of her most enduring hits in All I Wanna Do – but the album itself flopped in the charts, missing the UK and Australian top 50. She was unceremoniously dropped by her record company, and thought that after eight years and more than a dozen singles, her time as a pop star had come to an end.

“Once I was dropped, I thought I was never coming back to music,” she reveals.

Neon Nights: No pants, just dance.

Dannii gets her vibe on.

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s it, because I am not chasing this down. I’m not going to go running around record companies being like ‘I want a record deal!’ I thought: I’ve had a really good run, it’s been amazing, and I’m quite happy with that,” she says. “I just started to lean back.”

It took a surprise call from dance music legend Pete Tong to make her lean back in.

He had a request: Would she lay down a vocal for an instrumental club track, Stringer, that was blowing up in Ibiza?

“I was like: Pete Tong knows who I am? He’s the godfather of DJs and I was in the pop world – I never presumed that people in that world knew me. When he asked, it was for one single and I thought: Fun, great, never miss an opportunity to work with him. I had no idea it would turn into a record deal.”

With Dannii’s pleading vocal added, Stringer became Who Do You Love Now? – a UK top three hit in November 2001. It showed that with the right song, her music career was far from over. Soon after, she signed a new deal with London Records and started working on what would become Neon Nights.

Dannii for the 2003 Neon Nights shoot.

She and the team working on the album had a clear blueprint from the start: “To translate stuff that’s happening in the clubs and more underground onto a pop record. No other pop artists at big labels were getting that opportunity.”

The result, released in March 2003, was an all-bangers, no-ballads album of tight, clubby pop songs geared towards the dance floor. A couple of weeks before release, Dannii released what quickly became the biggest hit single of her career: I Begin To Wonder. It crashed into the UK charts at number two, kept off the top spot by Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful.

“We were neck and neck with Beautiful all week,” Minogue says with a sigh, recalling how close she came to landing her first number one.

“Some days we were above her. And on the last that last day of sales, she just she took it. I thought, okay, if any song’s gonna rob me of that number one, that’s an amazing one. But I wish we could have done it.”

Dannii Minogue's Neon Nights reissue.

It wasn’t for want of trying, though: Minogue hustled hard through that whole era. A DVD included with this 20th anniversary reissue of the album collates her numerous Top of the Pops performances: “I was just in there all the time,” she says with a laugh.

It was a different era for pop, pre-social media, when letting the world know you had a new single out involved a lot more grunt work than a simple Instagram post.

“It was about music, every waking hour,” she recalls. “There was so much press and promotion to do: breakfast radio, TV to roadshows, magazines, interviews, club performances. The album was blowing up, so I went to France, Holland, Germany, Russia. Always on a plane, living out of a suitcase and you just grab a few hours sleep here or there.”

Promotion for the album wrapped after Don’t Wanna Lose This Feeling became another UK top five hit in June 2003 – complete with a Madonna mash-up version, approved by the Queen of Pop herself – but it seemed Neon Nights could’ve sustained at least one more single. Dannii nominates the “sexy, dark, hot” Creep as her pick for a hit that never was.

One song that probably never would’ve been a hit – not least because it probably wouldn’t have been allowed to be played on radio – was Vibe On, an enthusiastic ode to vibrators.

“Plug it in give me my vibe on / Give me vibrations / That’s what gets my ride on / Gotta have vibrations / Jump on top it, sit right on it / Plug in give me my vibe on / Gotta have vibrations,” Minogue sings in the chorus, before a rapped middle-eight really drives the point home, so to speak.

She wrote the song with Savan Kotecha, US songwriter and frequent collaborator to pop genius Max Martin. “He was really happy to do something just fun and wacky and crazy, because with the Max Martin stuff, it’s more like Max is at the helm,” she says. She even had ideas for a video clip for the song, with dancers sitting atop buzzing speakers, but it wasn’t to be.

One more studio album followed Neon Nights – 2007’s Club Disco – but despite a couple more hit singles, that album fell through the cracks compared to its predecessor. So Dannii embarked on a different phase of her career, turning to TV as a judge on The X Factor UK before giving birth to son Ethan in 2010 and returning to her hometown of Melbourne – two things she says she never thought she’d do.

20 years later, she says Neon Nights “feels like a lifetime ago. I’m in Melbourne now, I’m a mum... Now, life’s all about revolving things around Ethan and school.”

Still, Dannii says she’s enjoying dipping her toe back into music on occasion, without the pressures that come with being a full-time pop star. She has a new single out – We Could Be The One, a fizzy, 80s power-pop anthem that serves as the theme song to her queer dating show I Kissed A Boy.

And she still loves getting onstage when the time is right – like her instantly iconic surprise appearance at the climax of sister Kylie’s Sydney World Pride set back in February.

Kylie finished her set with her 2010 single All The Lovers, telling the audience with a smile midway through the song that she had a little surprise for them. The dancers parted to reveal - another Minogue!

It’s one of only a handful of duets by the sisters over the years, usually kept as surprise for maximum impact.

A rare double-Minogue sighting for World Pride. Picture: David Swift

Dannii says Neon Nights feels like “a lifetime ago.”

Dannii says it was “crazy” trying to keep her World Pride cameo under wraps.

“Even just with our friends - I wanted them to come to the show, but I didn’t want them to know that I was performing. And so I’m telling people ‘I’ll speak to Kylie, I’ll see if she can get you some tickets …’ But everything had sold out. So only a couple of my close friends came and they couldn’t believe it – they didn’t see it coming. It was so much fun.”

The Minogues have form in this area. She and Kylie had pulled the same trick during one of her sister’s 2015 Christmas concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall, with Dannii flying in from Melbourne specially.

As Kylie later revealed, they even kept that one a surprise from their own brother and parents, who were in the audience and had no idea Dannii was even in the country.

Dannii confesses she was recently chastised by a flight attendant on a trip home from London, who’d been in attendance at both the Royal Albert Hall and World Pride concerts and would like a little more forewarning whenever they next duet.

“He told me, ‘Stop surprising me!’” she says with a laugh. “I said, well, let’s go for the trifecta.”

As someone who was also in attendance at both concerts, I can attest to one thing: A surprise double-Minogue sighting is a surefire way to make a lot of gay people immediately burst into tears.

“Oh god, that is so good. That’s the magic of it,” she says.

“Performances are always so fun anyway, but to take it to the next level like that is just so good. There’s never a plan of what’s next, but who knows … we’ll work out something.”

The 20th anniversary edition of Dannii Minogue’s Neon Nights album is available Friday June 16. Dannii will sign copies of the album at Soundmerch, 64 Oxford Street, Collingwood on Sunday June 18 at 2pm.