Kylie Minogue: the divine Miss M

Posted June 8, 201015 yr

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Her upcoming album, Aphrodite, has seen Kylie Minogue return to her uplifting dance-pop best with the help of such luminaries as Jake Shears, Tim Rice-Oxley and producer Stuart Price. Music Week caught up with the pop princess to discuss the project and her live plans

Interviewing Kylie Minogue stirs up a strange sensation. Sitting in a sun-drenched converted church in west London with the diminutive pop star, it feels like catching up with an old friend.

During a career that spans 22 years and 10 studio albums, Miss Minogue’s media presence has rarely been far from ubiquitous – there can be few better-known faces in music and even fewer personalities so disarmingly unaffected and likeable.

Bristling with vitality and clearly enthused by the impending release of her 11th studio album, Aphrodite, via Parlophone on July 5, Kylie is bang in the middle of promotional duties. It’s a task she embraces with surprising enthusiasm.

“Luckily I like people, I like having a chat and flitting around doing the butterfly thing,” she says, before admitting she is still recovering from an evening that started with a flight from Germany and ended with her dancing in a nightclub into the early hours, accompanied by a host of retail, media and label reps. Naturally a track from Aphrodite made it on to the decks.

“We just thought it kicked off,” she smiles.

Despite the well reported troubles that have dogged EMI and Kylie only having one album left in her contract, she says she has no plans to leave her long-time label. And, so far, Parlophone’s campaign for Aphrodite is shaping up nicely ahead of the digital delivery of first single All The Lovers on June 13 and its physical arrival on June 28.

While the red tops have preferred to concentrate on tales about Kylie’s love life or her choice of skin cream, the team at Parlophone have been working hard on a promotional campaign focused very much on the music. The results would suggest their efforts are paying dividends.

Discussing the campaign just nine days after All The Lovers made its radio debut, Parlophone vice president of promotions Kevin McCabe enthuses: “We have had the perfect start, it couldn’t be going better.”

Indeed, All The Lovers has been making strong weekly climbs on the airplay chart, having been C-listed at Radio 1, made Radio 2 single of the week and A-listed at Capital FM. Meanwhile, more than four hours of radio interviews have generated widespread PR, Twitter and Kylie.com have been buzzing with activity, the single’s risqué video has been making waves and there is a planned appearance on the Jonathan Ross show this month. All of this is helping the campaign to build momentum.

It’s a campaign Parlophone vice president of marketing Mandy Plumb says could roll on for 18 months with the release of up to five singles, including Get Out Of My Way in September.

“We are spoilt for singles choices; it is just a question of making sure we get them in the right order,” says Plumb.

Commencing with the line “Dance, dance, that’s all I want to…” the first single and album opening track All The Lovers sets the tone for Aphrodite, which is packed tight with dance-fuelled pop gems. But at the outset, back in April 2009, when plans for Aphrodite were first being laid, Parlophone president Miles Leonard says that the emphasis was much less on uplifting electronic sounds and more focused on live instrumentation.

“It started with Kylie working with Nerina Pallot,” says Leonard. “Nerina had a song called Better Than Today, which is an incredible song that marries electronic programmed sounds with live instrumentation – if you can imagine Fleetwood Mac and Scissor Sisters collaborating, it has that sort of feel.

Leonard adds Better Than Today was the starting point and bench mark. “We absolutely fell in love with that song and felt it would lead the direction the album would take – it would have more of a live, organic feel to it but not turn completely away from dance beats,” he continues.

Kylie recalls that, after former Parlophone head of A&R Jamie Nelson had tracked Pallot down, she took some persuading to give up the track, despite being a huge Kylie fan. “She is a real pop fan and apparently knows every chord of every song I have done,” says Kylie. “But the song was supposed to be on her album and [Jamie] did whatever he had to do – there was definitely some wrangling, she took some convincing that it would be worthwhile giving it up.”

Kylie not only went on to record Better Than Today with Pallot and Andy Chatterley, but also the song Aphrodite, with Pallot suggesting it as the album title. “In her mind she wanted to say ‘she’s back and she’s doing what we love her doing’,” says Kylie.

Better Than Today was showcased on Kylie’s 2009 US tour, but slowly and surely as the album came together, both the song and the album’s feel evolved to become more electronic and club friendly.

“I was terribly confused at the beginning,” Kylie admits. “I will listen to people and you don’t know unless you try, but I did reach a point where I thought ‘where are the dance songs?’.”

With Aphrodite including production and writing contributions from a wealth of top talent, including Keane’s Tim Rice-Oxley, Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears, Calvin Harris, Fraser T Smith and Kylie herself, the job of providing continuity was handed to executive producer Stuart Price, whose long CV includes work with Madonna, Scissor Sisters and The Killers, the latter inspiring Leonard to drop him a line.

“It was more his work with The Killers than Madonna, but Stuart’s work across both those artists was something of huge interest for us,” says Leonard. “One of the benchmark tracks we had in our minds initially when we approached this album was Human, by The Killers – the sound of the record, stylistically, it is a song that Kylie could sing and make her own. It’s a great pop record; it has elements of programmed electronic sounds as well as live sounds and real depth lyrically as well,” explains Leonard.

When asked to reflect on working with Price, Kylie’s face lights up and she admits to calling him a wizard. “The whole point was to have him put the songs together and create that harmony and cohesive nature to the album and I am beyond thrilled that he did it. I know he had his heart in the record and you can’t pay someone for that. It couldn’t have been better.”

Price first encountered Kylie when he made one of his first seven-inch vinyl single purchases, a copy of her 1988 number one hit I Should Be So Lucky. He recalls being struck by the sound of PWL’s production and Kylie’s “naive and distinctive” vocals, which he says has stuck with him ever since.

In September 2009, Kylie and Price met for the first time at Downtown Studios in New York, the singer with a handful of tracks including Better Than Today, Aphrodite and Everything Is Beautiful, the producer with an open mind.

“At the beginning of a record you are standing at the edge of the abyss and you have nothing, you can’t say ‘here’s the idea for the album now let’s go and make it’. You have to start stabbing in the dark and see which things feel right,” says Price.

“We had talked a lot about the album before we met for the first time in the studio. There is a great blind date quality to that, a lot of anxiety and nerves, but luckily our first song was Looking For An Angel and not only did we feel comfortable and have fun doing it but this idea of angels started floating around, it suggested euphoria and an uplifting feel and that’s the direction we took,” continues Price.

“It is way more exciting when an album is allowed to start evolving rather than sticking to a plan. One of the great skills with a record is the ability to abort all plans at any point and follow a new lead, and that is what happened.”

Having penned Looking For An Angel and the album track Closer in New York, Price and Kylie moved to his own studio in Acton, west London, where different levels of work were needed on the other tracks to create a feeling of continuity.

“[Everything Is] Beautiful felt so right with everything else that was going on with the record that I didn’t touch a thing – it is 100% Fraser T Smith and Tim Rice-Oxley’s work,” says Price.

“But Even Better Than Today, which started off more acoustic and organic, became filtered more into this dancefloor world and songs like Aphrodite and Can’t Beat The Feeling were good ideas but didn’t initially fit in with the record, they didn’t sound like the real Kylie, so we re-vocaled them.”

Working out of the west London studio Price and Kylie formed something of a bond as they went on to record new vocal tracks for 80% of the album, with the producer encouraging the singer to turn her back on vocal booths and perform using whatever equipment was at hand.

“Once I got there with Stuart it was the most inspired and relaxed I have felt in a studio,” says Kylie. “I had moments where I was aware that ‘this is so cool, all the experiences I have ever had all led to this moment and it has paid off – I know what to do vocally, I know how to get that effect’. It was just easy, it was so easy, and I think that comes through on the album. It wasn’t forced, it wasn’t like trying to put a square peg in a round hole.”

Kylie even enthuses about Price’s $80 mic, which she claims enabled her to be more “connected” to what was happening.

Price laughs at the mention of one of pop music’s most successful artists using his old Shure SM58.

“The big thing about using the Shure was that instead of Kylie being in a vocal booth she could grab the nearest microphone and start singing. For me a performance will always trump any technical considerations. We would be standing next to each other, doing a disco-shuffle and smiling. I can hear that smile on the record and that’s so important, that’s what I respond to.”

With Kylie admitting she is considering the possibility of playing one or more UK festivals this summer, she will be hoping it is also something her wider audience will respond to and both Kylie and Price admit to thinking about how the material would work in a live environment when they were recording it.

“I did think about it a lot when I was making the record because there are times when you have no control, your hands just go up. Perhaps it is the emotion in the dance music that makes it feel it can reach out more, that it can reach beyond the arena shows I normally do,” says Kylie.

“Whenever we started making music that made us want to put our hands in the air we moved toward it,” agrees Price. “We were considering the live show and what she could do onstage to the music and that influenced the songwriting because instead of working in the vacuum of a studio you are thinking ‘if you had a field of 80,000 people, what would be the best way to make everyone go nuts at this point?’”

One market that has proved relatively slow in going nuts for Kylie is the US, but having thoroughly enjoyed an excursion there last year, she is intent on making a return journey and is already planning a worldwide tour next year. “I’d better limber up,” she laughs. “I bring it upon myself because I want to go everywhere I have been and also go to new places. It will be so exciting to have new material to play and the last shows I did in North America were really rewarding and inspiring.

“I’m certainly going to return to the places I went on that US micro tour, it was very small, we were just testing the waters, it was really a tour born out of love,” adds Kylie. “Terry [blamey, her manager] was probably having sleepless nights because we might as well have been burning money. But I wanted to do it properly and invest in it – the fans had been waiting 20 years, I couldn’t go over and do my first US shows and not go with all bells and whistles.”

Whether it be promotional activity, making records or taking a loss in order to reward die-hard fans, it seems Kylie does very little without those bells and whistles – an admirable quality that not only makes her one of the most enduring figures in popular music but also one of the most endearing.

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As promised the article from Music Week