‘We’re so lucky’: why Kylie Minogue is still queen for some
Owen Lambourn’s childhood fascination with Kylie Minogue has become full-blown fandom, as the pop singer-songwriter releases her 15th album Disco.
Owen Lambourn was first drawn to Kylie Minogue while watching her cheerful and captivating music videos, but his childhood fascination with the pop singer began to attract some snide comments during his adolescence.
“I hadn’t worked out who I was at that time, but I used to get made fun of in high school for liking her,” he says.
Now an out-and-proud gay man, the Melbourne finance worker — who goes by the cheeky moniker Owen Minogue on his social media accounts — has seen more than 20 of her concerts since 2000, and he has assembled a large collection of Kylie memorabilia at the home he shares with his partner.
As to why the pop singer has long been held in high esteem by the LGBTQI community, Lambourn says: “She became a bit of an icon because she respected the community during a period of time when it was a career killer to affiliate yourself with something that was negative, and there was that negative spin on the rainbow community during the late 1980s and early 90s with the AIDS epidemic.
“Her first performance at Mardi Gras was in 1994, and that was during that peak,” he says.
“If you’re going to risk your career to show support for such a minority community at that point in time, I think that when someone gives you that love, you have got to give it back. That’s the way I view it.”
On Friday, Minogue released her 15th album, Disco, which she began working on last year. When the pandemic forced her into lockdown, she stayed in touch with her collaborators via Zoom while also recording most of her vocal tracks at home in London for the first time in her career.
On Saturday, Minogue will premiere the next best thing to the world tour that would have ordinarily accompanied the album release: a ticketed online concert called Kylie: Infinite Disco, which will screen at 8pm AEDT.
“If you do the same thing over and over again, your key fans are going to get bored and you’re not going to gain new fans either,” says Lambourn. “I think that’s something that she’s been able to avoid over the years.”
As for whether his partner shares his enthusiasm for all things Kylie, Lambourn says with a laugh: “He does, but probably not to the level that I do. There are definitely no fights over the record player at home at all.”
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