Kylie Minogue on recording Disco and lockdown life with Paul Solomons
Kylie Minogue reveals she felt far from home while locked down in the UK and how her boyfriend Paul Solomons is now seeing her in “obsessive” work mode.
Stellar
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Rewind to December 25, 2019. People across the UK were rugged up in front of the TV, cups of tea and a bowl of plum pudding in hand on a typically cold and drizzly Christmas Day.
Just a few minutes ahead of the annual holiday message from the Queen, the most beloved Australian celebrity in Britain, Kylie Minogue, appeared on the screen to literally sing the praises of her home country as part of a global campaign encouraging overseas travellers to visit Australia in the year ahead.
The gambit worked – immediately after it aired, and no doubt inspired by Minogue’s singing and the bright and sunny glimpses of our pristine beaches, cuddly marsupials and laid-back lifestyle, tens of thousands of Brits flooded the social media platforms of Minogue and Tourism Australia, declaring that 2020 would be the year they would finally travel to the other side of the globe.
But, of course, this has been a year when nothing has gone to plan, and travelling much further than our letterboxes – much less the other side of the world – is but a pipe dream. Even Minogue hasn’t been able to return to the country she so cheerfully and emblematically represents to the world.
“When lockdown happened here, and there was that eerie silence, I really felt far from home,” Minogue tells Stellar from London, nearly a year later. “I always miss home anyway, but in the back of your mind it’s, at worst, 48 hours – and you’re home. We’re trying to maintain cruising altitude and hold tight until I can get back.”
Just as her Tourism Australia “Matesong” campaign was airing in the UK, Minogue was in the midst of one of her trademark stealth return visits, this time to celebrate the 100th birthday of her grandmother Millie Jones.
“Please, bring on those genes!” she says now. “It’s incredible. She’s such a matriarch for us. She got her letter from the Queen. She cracked some great jokes during her speech.
“We tend to do things fairly small as a family, but she had eight children, and a lot of them have children, so we had relatives there from North Queensland who we don’t get to see very often. It was a very beautiful day. We had a Welsh male choir there. Some of those old fellas had sung at her 80th – it was very touching.”
And for the first time, her boyfriend Paul Solomons was by her side at the Minogue family gathering, having flown into Melbourne the day before to join the celebrations. “He was completely sideways, but he welled up when the Welsh choir started singing,” Minogue recalls. “There were so many extended family for him to meet. He did very well.”
Solomons is “100-per-cent Welsh”, says Minogue, who first met the 46-year-old through a mutual friend in February 2018. “Apparently his grandma on one side and my grandma grew up almost on the same street – there’s some kind of connection. When Wales play Australia, I’m torn.”
Last year, he proudly watched on while Minogue headlined Glastonbury Festival’s legends slot – a moment that had been a long time coming given that she had to cancel in 2005 after being diagnosed with breast cancer.
It proved to be worth the wait, with the Australian singer becoming the most-watched Glastonbury performance on UK television ever with 3.9 million viewers, outpacing even the likes of British singers Adele and Ed Sheeran.
The crowd estimates for that day were at about 150,000 people, but all Minogue saw was an endless sea of people, and she’s hardly a stranger to large audiences.
“Even I thought, wow,” she admits now. “I did The Graham Norton Show and they played a bit of it back. It was like I’d never seen it before, even though I was right there, in the flesh, and it was in front of my eyes. I’m still just amazed. Apparently, it’s the most full it’s ever been.”
“It’s still kind of unbelievable that it happened. Even more so now, thinking back to an event with all those people. No-one thinking about much more than having a great time, me thinking about trying to get through it and trying to enjoy it. It’s so hard to fathom after this year. Did that really happen?”
Minogue’s facial expression as she came out onstage and saw the audience has even been immortalised in a GIF, with her mix of pride and surprise now digitally looped for posterity. “I didn’t recognise myself in the GIF,” she admits.
“I know all my facial expressions, voluntarily and involuntarily, and I don’t know who that was, which kind of says everything. I still don’t know. I can’t even recreate it. It was just.... other. I’ll be eternally grateful for it.”
Since March, Minogue and Solomons have been working from home – she on her forthcoming album, and he on British GQ, where he works as creative director.
He was also on hand to pitch in with his partner’s quarantine beauty regimen. “Luckily, I know how to do my own roots... I’m equipped with skills from life on the road – you [learn] how to maintain yourself; I’ve got all the kit,” Minogue says.
“[But] Paul did give me a haircut one weekend, a bit of a trim. I really didn’t go out much through lockdown – I had to build up to take a walk. I didn’t get totally agoraphobic, I just had to build up to it.”
When she wasn’t recording, there was a domestic triumvirate of gardening, cooking and cleaning. “A lot of cleaning,” she adds. “It’s amazing how much cleaning there is when you’re home all the time.”
One pandemic-prompted tidy unearthed a rare treat: the demo tape that Minogue recorded in 1985, and has never escaped from the vaults. Before she found success in Neighbours, a young Minogue used the money she had made from her role in the mid-’80s TV hit The Henderson Kids to pay for a Melbourne studio and recorded a few of her favourite songs, from Donna Summer and Quincy Jones to Patti LaBelle.
Just 17 at the time, Minogue still had no idea her future would be in music. “It was a demo tape more for acting,” she explains. “If a production needed someone who could sing, I could hand that over. I guess I wanted to show I could reach a few notes.”
When her 2018 album Golden was released on cassette tape – the latest retro format to follow vinyl back into fashion –Solomons surprised her with a gift of a vintage Sony Walkman so she could play it. “The clunk of putting the cassette in, pressing play, hearing it through those really bad foam headphones… I was instantly 15 again,” Minogue says.
It was on that same Walkman that she listened to her long-lost demo for the first time in more than 30 years, and getting it digitally preserved is now on her to-do list. “It was doubly weird to hear my voice through an old Walkman,” she says. “It’s not the original tape – it might have been dubbed many, many times – but my voice is tiny. I’m singing so high. And I could have chosen easier songs.”
The irony of unexpectedly listening to her teenage self-singing ‘Dim All the Lights’ by dance-floor legend Donna Summer as she prepares to release a new album called Disco isn’t lost on Minogue.
Disco music has been a touchstone throughout her career, and a Studio 54 segment on last year’s tour for her country-inflected album Golden got her itching for a return to dance music. “It was possibly a bit inappropriate for a nine-year-old, but I played Donna Summer’s ‘Bad Girls’ over and over and over,” Minogue recalls of her youth. “I’ve had so many links to disco over the years.”
Minogue had started making Disco, which marks her 15th studio album, last year. But once lockdown kicked in, she suddenly had to set up a makeshift studio in her London lounge room, and teach herself the basics of recording.
“[I used] wardrobe rails and duvets to try to get the sound as good as possible,” she says. “It wasn’t without its technology hiccups. I did feel pretty worn down after however many weeks of that and I’d be ready to burst into tears. I’m proud of what we were able to achieve, but it did get the better of me at some points. And I needed to let that out – to let myself have those emotions.”
As for Solomons, he got a front-row seat to his partner’s creative process for the first time. “He was really proud of me,” Minogue says.
“I’d say, ‘OK, I’m going to the studio’. And as a caring partner, he’d say, ‘Don’t overdo it, don’t be there too late’ – as if I were going to an actual studio! It’s the first time he’s gone through the cycle of making an album with me, albeit in a very different way. He hadn’t seen how focused – slash obsessive – I am about getting it right.”
Minogue tells Stellar that dating someone outside of the music industry (albeit one who’s a “big music lover”) has given her a new perspective on the gruelling job she’s spent more than three decades trying to make look effortless.
“I just think everyone knows about this business and what it is and how it works,” she says.
“And he didn’t. It’s been interesting having a new set of eyes and a big heart watching that. He’s able to talk a little objectively. He can see that it takes something more than what you think it does. That’s what it should do, but I think that’s been illuminating to him and he’s helped me a lot.”
If Disco enters the UK chart at number one, Minogue will become the first solo female artist to have an album top the British chart in each of five consecutive decades, dating back to her eponymous album in 1988.
“I’m definitely not presuming I have that in the bag by any means. Thankfully I had no idea about this stat when I was making the album – it was a pressure I didn’t need and it’s making release week seem more fraught. I want [the album] to do its job and make people feel good. But to be on the precipice of potentially being the first solo woman to do it would be phenomenal.”
For now, Minogue continues to do all of the album’s promotion from her home, and says that while she has plans to do a career-first tour in the round, with her fans around her underneath a giant disco ball, she has no idea when that may become a possibility. The same goes for getting back to Australia.
Speaking of which, she’s keen to clear up recent UK tabloid headlines that emerged following a misconstrued interview, in which it was claimed that Minogue said she would never return to Melbourne to live.
“I think about being in Australia all the time,” she tells Stellar. “I used to have my apartment on Chapel Street [in Melbourne], which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I don’t have a home there now – I stay at my parents’ house – but it’s different now as a 52-year-old woman with a partner... I’d want my own space. It’s an absolute dream to have a place in Australia.”
Disco is out this Friday.
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