Kylie finds a new generation of fans on TikTok

Kylie Minogue’s single Padam Padam was originally shunned by ‘youth’ radio stations due to the singer’s age and her Gen X fan base. They must be feeling rather sheepish now | WATCH

Kylie Minogue after the release of her new song Padam Padam Picture: Instagram

The last time a Kylie Minogue comeback single was the soundtrack to early summer, Tony Blair was in Downing Street and the Nokia 3310 was at the cutting edge of technology. Twenty-three years later, she is the queen of summer once more.

Minogue’s new single, Padam Padam, has swept to No 1 on the UK Big Top 40 on Global’s Capital and Heart radio networks. She has not had a hit like this on her hands in decades.

Yet it is the strange music video, in which Minogue, 55, plays a vampiric femme fatale in a candy-coloured Americana dreamland, that is arguably driving the Padam Padam-mania. It has been viewed 3.5 million times on YouTube and the hashtag #padampadam has been used more than ten million times on TikTok. There is a cottage industry of memes and homages on social media - with creators such as the TikToker Julian Burzinski sharing versions of themselves cavorting in red catsuits and capes. It is a bona fide viral moment - and the woman who masterminded it is not a Gen Z hotshot, but a 61-year-old Royal College of Art graduate.

Sophie Muller, a Londoner who has directed music videos for Eurythmics, the Jesus and Mary Chain and PJ Harvey, is both delighted and mystified by the response. “I have no answers,” she says. “I wish I could say, ‘This is how I did it’ but when something like this happens, nobody really understands why. It’s like magic.”

Muller directed videos for songs on Minogue’s two previous albums, Golden and Disco, including the dreamy, glittery video for Say Something. “She’s great to work with,” Muller says. “You don’t have a career that long if you’re not.”

Padam Padam - which borrows its name from a rather different 1951 song by Edith Piaf - intrigued her from the off. “There’s something unusual about it, a darkness and unease. It’s not a glorious anthem that’s going to make you jump up on to the dance floor.” When she was imagining how to shoot it, she called to mind the work of the Twin Peaks director David Lynch. “We talked about a sense of otherworldliness, a strangeness. The beauty of the format of a music video is it allows you to be very free.”

The shoot took place one day in April at the Pink Motel in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, a former working motel the colour of Pepto-Bismol, that is now used for film and TV shoots. Minogue dances in a red custom-made Mugler catsuit and sheer cape, with a matching troupe of dancers.

Born in London in 1962, Muller studied graphics at Central Saint Martins, before completing a master’s degree in film and television at the Royal College of Art.

@kylieminogue

Making it up!! ❤️PADAM PADAM❤️ with @HOLLYWOOD and these amazing dancers! #kylieminogue#newmusic#padampadam

♬ Padam Padam - Kylie Minogue

Her first job was as a third assistant on the 1984 horror film The Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan, and her career in music videos has an air of kismet.

Distraught after having her bag stolen from a pub in Soho, central London, on a night out, she woke the next morning to two calls, one from the police telling her they had her bag - and another from Billy Poveda, who ran a production company called Oil Factory with John Stewart, brother of the Eurythmics’ Dave, asking her to work with them.

She started directing videos for the duo in 1987, and later worked on solo pieces for Annie Lennox, winning a Grammy award for Lennox’s 1992 video album Diva. She won a best video Brit award in 1993 - for Shakespears Sister’s Stay - and a MTV music video award in 1997 for No Doubt’s Don’t Speak. She has directed two videos for her niece, Mae Muller, this year UK Eurovision entrant.

Still, Muller will not accept the credit for the Padam Padam-mania. “There were a lot of very talented people [involved],” she says. And certainly, Team Kylie is a slick, electro-pop machine: the single was written by Peter Rycroft, aka Lostboy, who has worked with Ellie Goulding and Rita Ora and also produced the track, and Ina Wroldsen, a Norwegian singer and songwriter who co-wrote Calvin Harris’s 2015 smash hit How Deep Is Your Love. Jose “Hollywood” Ramos was the choreographer behind the viral dance scenes and has worked with Beyonce, Rihanna and Jennifer Lopez.

The song was originally shunned by “youth” stations such as BBC Radio 1 and Capital FM due to Minogue’s age and her Gen X fan base.

Radio 1 must be feeling rather sheepish now. “Radio is having to define a new role for itself,” says the chart analyst and music critic James Masterton. “It is now the place that amplifies the biggest hits rather than creating them.”

The Sunday Times