Kylie Minogue and 25 Years of Fever.
Pop royalty Kylie Minogue celebrates the silver jubilee of Fever, her most successful album to date, and considers how this career landmark continues to resonate for successive generations.
Kylie Minogue for Perfect Issue 11.
Photographer: Willy Vanderperre
Fashion Editor: Katie Grand
Writer: Paul Flynn
It is the day after Willy Vanderperre has shot Kylie Minogue in Paris for the cover of the magazine (hair references: the ‘Confide in Me’ video curls and the Impossible Princess pixie cut) and Perfect’s digital director, Sid Rounthwaite, is ruminating on the day that was. Sid had travelled to Paris to capture digital content, ending the day interviewing Ms Minogue, a task he’d surprised himself to find quite so nerve-wracking. ‘The first issue of Perfect I worked on was issue five, with the first Kylie cover shot by Willy,’ he notes. ‘A massive amount of my time at the magazine has been spent looking at pictures of Kylie. Part of the rules of my job is to understand her.’
Like many of his Gen Z counterparts, Kylie Minogue comprises one of the luminescent fame constants defining Sid’s life cycle. ‘Of course, she was always there before I started here,’ he says, ‘but now we interact with her a lot on Instagram. I hear her music in the office. I got so nervous at one point in the afternoon, I rang up [digital assistant] Tai and said, “You’re gay, give me some good Kylie questions!”’
Kylie was being shot for the cover to promote the 25th anniversary of her most successful album, Fever, a multi-platinum global pop spectacle, the anchor both sides of her musical career has come to rest upon. Among its dazzling pop jewels, Fever is home to ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’, the closest Kylie ever came to astrogliding the DNA of Kraftwerk into her musical project, a synthetic patient zero for the power of 21st-century pop music, a multimillion seller across the globe. Fever is the album by which Kylie Minogue defined the tenets and parameters of what it is to be a perfect 21st-century pop star.
Astonishingly, given how boxfresh it still sounds, Sid is one year younger than Fever. He was born in 2002, the year Kylie won Brit Awards for International Female Solo Artist and International Album for the record. At the ceremony that year, Kylie appeared in a pair of thigh-skimming, silver patent leather boots, attached to a gigantic CD spinning in its player to perform a version of ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ which interpolated elements of New Order’s doleful Mancunian mirror-ball classic, ‘Blue Monday’. ‘“Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head” is my favourite Kylie song,’ confesses Sid. His disposition is a little more New Order than Kylie.
Yet there is a sweet reason he’s so attached to this version of the song. One morning, piled back at a friend’s flat, long before he’d started working for Perfect, Sid was recovering with some friends, ‘massively hungover’ (his note) from a night out, when somebody played the Kylie 2002 Brits performance. ‘We’d been talking about our teenage crushes,’ he says. The young lads sat, transfixed, processing some pop emotions that perhaps they hadn’t previously registered in public before. British heterosexuality can be a funny place to reside. Even the most unlikely subsets can benefit from a shared Kylie moment. This performance has since become shorthand for what to do among his friendship group when the morning after hits in. It is how they celebrate the uniquely complicated recovery session that accompanies the best night of your life.
This story feels so fundamentally essence-of-Kylie-Minogue that it almost brings a tear to the eye. Her habit for accessing the crevices of appealing human release stretches beyond that of the average entertainer, often quite by accident. As has been pointed out many times in her pop life, she is a kind of British shorthand for pleasure.
In real life, she didn’t disappoint. ‘I could not believe how great she was on set,’ says Sid. ‘The way she moves, I’ve just never seen anything like it. She performs the shoot. A Ronettes song would come on the stereo, and she’d dance from the camera to hair and make-up, just gliding off. That pure confidence. It’s amazing to watch. It’s beyond modelling.’ Such was the good humour of the shoot, Ms Minogue suggested a group shot at the end. ‘I’m crouching down at the front with her stiletto on my head.’ How to break the ice. At the end of recording his video interview, ‘everyone started clapping. She was just amazing.’
There was one final touch, rounding off this pretty Perfect Kylie Minogue story. ‘She signed a pair of Stan Smiths for me,’ says Sid. ‘One trainer was dedicated to me and the other was to Lucas, my friend who’d put that video on that morning, hungover, starting one of my best mates’ rituals.’ He hasn’t given Lucas the shoe yet. He’s biding his time, choosing his moment. ‘Because he will not fucking believe it.’
Three weeks later, we catch up with Kylie Minogue, to talk Fever…
“I’d been through the whole PWL era, the Deconstruction years, ‘Spinning Around’ got us back on. Then it was like riding a spaceship, this juggernaut”
So this year is the 25th anniversary of Fever.
It is.
When we were talking about it in the office, the thing that surprised us all was this ritual that Sid, our digital director, and his mates have, of watching your Brits performance of ‘Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head’.
Oh, but I love Sid. We all need a Sid on our teams. He’s genuinely special.
What does their ritual tell you about the longevity and resilience of Fever?
You know what? It’s just so beautiful it’s mind-blowing. You can do so much – due diligence, best efforts to try and make something a thing, not something that’s just self-propelling in the moment. When it gets these fresh injections of love and life, coming from a completely different mindset… I mean, what do that generation think? What do they make of it? They are just so cool about it. Honestly, it fills me with so much joy. We were there, we know what it was like. But Sid and his mates ritually go to it? That is so… I just want to hug them all. Maybe I want to go out for a night out with them all and go into their world for a minute. But not too late (laughing). All I need to know here is: is the ‘Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head’ moment 11.30pm or is it 3am? That’s all I need to know.
Where did the ‘Blue Monday’ idea come from?
Very possibly from Miles Leonard [her then label boss] or Jamie Nelson [her A&R]. It’s such a clever idea you just wouldn’t change one thing about it. Believe me, I look back on the majority of things and think, yep, maybe something different here? But that moment just thrills me – especially now that I know that story. Not only of Sid himself, but the culture around it. When he told me, I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I’m just going to roll with it.
Was ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ the first great global pop hit of the 21st century?
I’d have to look at what else came out then. Maybe something slipped out of 2000? I couldn’t definitively say that. But I do believe that it has its place in that realm. I’d have to sit with you and look at the charts and jog my memory, but it definitely… sonically and visually and at that point in my life, I think, what was I? What, 32? I was settling into myself, I guess. I’d been through the whole PWL era, the Deconstruction years. ‘Spinning Around’ got us back on. Then it was like riding a spaceship, this juggernaut.
Were you at your most confident during ‘Fever’?
A lot was simplified. It’s quite streamlined and then, in time, it got really busy again and by the time you’ve got to [her 2011 album] Aphrodite, it’s full-on over the top again. I think that when you can get to achieve so much with fewer elements, that’s when pop music is at its most incredible.
Tell me about the importance of the female gaze to the project. Dawn Shadforth directing the video for ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ lent it this very specific angle. We knew you had that in you, but it took that direction…
Sorry to interrupt you, but I hadn’t actually thought of this before – that thing that ‘we knew you had it in you but we hadn’t seen it before’. You need your collaborators, you need a team, those people to help you get there. Or I do, at least. So she was instrumental. It could’ve been a very different video, a very different treatment. The female gaze of the director is it. And also, Dawn is just… She is cool. So she is only going to do cool stuff.
She also recognised the cool in you.
Oh, I don’t know.
The danger is, of course, that when a completely definitive single like that drops, it will totally overshadow the album project, and it doesn’t…
I want to sing ‘Burning Up’ again one day. And ‘Fever’. I haven’t actually heard it myself for a long time. But to think that we had ‘Love at First Sight’, ‘In Your Eyes’ – that’s pretty unreal.
The thing I’d forgotten about the record was how sophisticated and of its moment it sounded. The Daft Punk album Discoveryhad just come out, that French Touch sound was all over it.
Oh yeah. But I mean, that was pretty much all we were listening to at that time. The vocals were not as processed as they are these days. Mine included. So, yeah, there is more of a purity. Sorry, I’ve just remembered that Dawn Shadforth did the ‘Spinning Around’ video and Vincent Peters did the front cover for Fever but also for Light Years, so we kind of had a continuity from the previous album. There’s a lot to be said for that. It’s such a clean photo, so to the point, your brain only has to absorb so much.
And the image has that fabulous nod to Grace Jones.
Grace always. She was all over our mood board. She will be forever. Also, a bit of Debbie Harry. I saw some of the outtakes recently, for the [Netflix Kylie] documentary, which weren’t part of my archive, they would’ve been part of the Warner Bros archive. They’re kind of all flawless, which is amazing. The footage, which was not like today with your socials team. It was just my assistant with a little camera she’d bust out once in a while. You’re seeing a photographer taking a considered shot. Not a whole bunch you’ll chose from after and fix in post. That didn’t happen then. It was slower and everyone had to be present. Nobody was on their phone. We hate to sound like dinosaurs, but it was a very different vibe. You hover around to look at the Polaroid, then change this light, look at what’s working and what isn’t in the outfit. I have footage of all that and it’s incredible.
What’s your favourite song on the record that isn’t ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’?
It would have to be ‘Love at First Sight’. The ad libs at the end are inspired by Donna Summer and that inspiration started from when I was nine years old. I would listen to her all the time. I love ‘Love at First Sight’. I love hearing other people’s versions. It’s done a lot of weddings, that song. It was the first song that I’d written alongside Biffco and Richard [Stannard] where the puzzle started to make sense for me. We went back and forth on the chorus and it landed where it landed. We sent four songs to Parlophone and they didn’t respond to it. We were so baffled. Then they came around and it’s become the song it’s become.
Those songs were literally everywhere that year.* *
Also, I didn’t have an American record label before it came out – next thing I did, and next thing they flung me on a G5 to Cancun to do something or other. Life got very busy. Listen, if I’d known what was coming, it wouldn’t have felt crazy at all. But this was crazy in a great way.
Did Fever make you rich?
We had good figures. I remember my former TV plugger coming into a TV show dressing room and saying, ‘Darling, darling you’ve sold 300,000 copies of the single first week’ or something and we were just like, that doesn’t happen. Whenever there is something that has really landed, it’s about having a bit of insurance for the next couple of years. The next thing might not do the same. But if it’s that big, yeah, you can ride it for a while.
The other important thing, of course, is legacy. Beyond the mists of time, when we’re all done and dust, these songs will still live in people’s lives.* *
Isn’t that wild? It makes me feel like I’m not even living on this planet. That is just extraordinary to me. I’m in midlife, everything’s happening, it’s all great. But also, inside me is a 12, 13-year-old pop maniac. Pop music is something that I love so much. To think that I have become one of those people is wild. It’s cool and humbling and inspiring and hilarious and epic. I never imagined I would be that person.