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Pop Princess Kylie gets her disco groove on

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It may be one of the most maligned of all musical genres – at times, even violence-provoking – but Kylie Minogue just can’t stay away from it.

“I was just a baby when disco happened,” says Minogue, of her beloved genre. “I [remember] playing my dad’s Donna Summer record over and over and over and over and over, which is possibly a little inappropriate for a 10-year-old ... That’s when I started to love music.

“I feel closer to disco,” she adds – in contrast to the country twang of her 2018 album, Golden – “because that’s something I’m more familiar with, and have played with over the years.”

Minogue has musically tap-danced across countless musical styles – from new wave to electro and murder ballads – but she has repeatedly returned to the syncopated bass lines, synthesisers and hyper-feminine vocals –in songs like Spinning Around and Your Disco Needs You – that define disco.

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So it tracks that the singer’s newest album – to be released on November 6 – is called DISCO.

Minogue admits that filming the sequin-dripping videos that support the new album in the middle of a pandemic lockdown was a jarring experience. In one video, for the single Say Something, she rides a golden horse through space, much like Bianca Jagger entering Studio 54 on a white stead, except accompanied by shooting stars and fireworks.

“I'm more used to it now, but for the the first one I was totally exhausted. I think because I've been, well everyone has been, so insular,” says Minogue, who recorded much of the album in a last-minute-built studio in her London home earlier this year. “It was so crazy: that in a relatively short period of time, we had to kind of just get up to speed with interacting with people. [And] I certainly had to wean myself off track pants and T-shirt[s] that I think I had rotated for six months.”

So why does Minogue keep coming back to a style of music that has defeated so many greats, and even, at times, inspired rage? (The Beach Boys’ much-derided disco-version of their song Here Comes the Night prompted the head of CBS records to say, “I think I’ve been f---ed”; in 1979, thousands of disco-haters travelled to a baseball stadium in Chicago to watch a DJ detonate disco records in an event that became known as “Disco Demolition”.)

Put simply, Minogue is a pop-disco savant; the genre has brought her enormous highs, throughout her career, and even resuscitated it.

Because, although the singer, now Australia’s highest selling female artist, has been recording music since the late 1980s, and scored early hits with bubblegum songs like The Loco-motion (the cover of a 1960s hit) and I Should Be So Lucky, she didn’t score a No. 1 album in Australia until 2000’s disco-flavoured release, Light Years.

Boasting singles such as Spinning Around and On a Night Like This, Light Years gave Minogue what one critic called “the greatest resurrection of recent times”, restoring her to commercial prominence after her indie-flecked 1997 album Impossible Princess (inspired by the likes of Bjork and Garbage) divided critics and inspired British radio station Virgin Radio to declare it would ban her records.

Similarly, her next disco-y album, 2001’s Fever, boasted Can’t Get You Out of My Head, ranked by NME magazine in 2012 as No. 4 on its Greatest Pop Songs in History list, and Come into My World, which nabbed a Grammy award for best dance recording. In contrast, sales and notices for her 1980s-inspired album that followed, 2003’s Body Language, were comparatively tame.

So what is it with Kylie and the champagne-bubble lightness of disco-pop that proves to be such a winning combination?

“When you think about it, when she started out, it wasn’t far removed from disco,” says Samantha Bennett, a professor of music at the Australian National University, noting that Minogue’s early hits, such as I Should Be So Lucky, were marked by “the very sweet underlying rhythms and the progressions, that real rhythmical drive, particularly with the drums and the bass” that are the hallmarks of a style called Hi-NRG, which had its roots in disco.

So her disco-inspired work, says Bennett, is on the “continuum” of the music that brought about her first initial burst of stardom. “It’s about sonic familiarity,” she says.

There’s also, it has to be said, a harmonious synergy between the emotional DNA of disco – originating in the multiracial gay clubs of the 1970s, and associated with sexual liberation and celebrating triumph over obstacles – and Minogue’s personal story.

“That whole triumph over adversity [theme] is absolutely optimised in probably the greatest disco record of all the time, Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive,” says Bennett of the famous 1970s “Queen of Disco”, who recorded the vocals for her most celebrated song from a wheelchair, after suffering a spinal injury during a performance.

“And there has been plenty of that [triumphing over adversity] in Kylie Minogue’s career, both on and off the stage, and so to that end, I think that that is part of her appeal,” she adds.

Minogue is nearly as well known for bouncing back from personal devastation as she is for her hits: a breast cancer diagnosis in 2005, a self-described “nervous breakdown” in 2017 after splitting from fiancé Joshua Sasse and being derided as a “singing budgie”.

So it is perhaps fitting that she recorded her latest album during the deadliest pandemic in 100 years.

“It would probably be hilarious if you were a fly on the wall watching me unpack all this stuff and try to figure it all out,” says Minogue, about having to set up her home studio, sometimes by herself.

“Just trying to, you know, technically make it all work … When we were able to just get on our groove, and focus, it began to feel like normal. If you were lucky and you weren’t having any technical issues that day.”

That she has persevered, and created an album that sounds likely to bring hope and escapism through every synthesiser beat and sweep of strings – ''Love is love it never ends, can we all be as one again?” she sings in Say Something – says Bennett, will likely produce her next hit.

“It’s a shrewd move, because she’s capturing a club vibe at a time when no one can go to a club,” Bennett says. “It's bringing the club and the disco aesthetic into your living room.”

with Nathanael Cooper

Kylie Minogue’s DISCO (Liberator Music/BMG) is out on November 6.

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• Kylie Minogue

Samantha Selinger-Morris

Samantha Selinger-Morris is a lifestyle writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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