It’s Kylie Minogue as most people have never seen her before: Losing her cool.
One infamous 90s moment with a rude reporter gets an airing in the new Netflix three-part docuseries Kylie, as an example of the occasionally rough treatment she copped from the media in the years before her status as national treasure was secured.
It’s 1998, the release of Minogue’s Impossible Princess album – an album that had been delayed and then hastily retitled in the UK in the wake of Princess Diana’s death months earlier.
Kylie is at an in-store album signing in the UK, sat behind a table and busy signing autographs, while on one side an unnamed journalist films her while peppering her with tough questions.
Kylie handles the questions about the album’s difficult release with grace, but another line of questioning immediately hits a nerve: “Is there any truth to the rumours that you and Dannii aren’t talking?”
Clearly, the intimation she’s feuding with little sister Dannii Minogue is a step too far. Kylie’s smile instantly drops and she rises from her seat to meet the male journalist who has been standing over her.
“Excuse me, where are you from?” she demands. “Channel One? Is that a serious question, ‘Is there any truth that we’re not talking?’”
“I find that so ridiculous. Are these your questions, or someone else’s questions? Well. God. We’d best go back to primary school. Are we not talking?”
As the top comment under the clip on YouTube, where it’s amassed close to a million views over the past decade, notes: “She even gets mad adorably.”
The footage is one of a number of 90s clips shown in the Kylie doco to demonstrate how the media treated Kylie long before she was considered the pop icon of today.
In early Aussie TV appearances, a sniggering Stan Grant is shown asking her if she’s had a boob job, while Derryn Hinch tells a visibly shocked Kylie that her “sexy” new image is like “hearing that Mary Poppins has turned into a hooker.” Other media headlines from the period label her everything from “talentless” to “ordinary” to the infamous “Singing Budgie” nickname.
Elsewhere, one major revelation from the documentary has fans piecing together some answers to a mysterious move Kylie made during the pandemic.
In the closing minutes of the doco, after detailing her very public illness with breast cancer back in 2005, Kylie drops a bombshell: The illness returned in early 2021. This time, she chose to deal with it privately, successfully completing treatment and again getting the all clear.
This revelation sheds light on what was really going on during a period that had seemed puzzling to fans. Kylie had released her Disco studio album in November 2020 to great success, but promotion for the album seemed to grind to a halt by the new year – amid reports that Kylie had moved back to Melbourne to be close to her family.
As with her first bout of cancer, it now appears she chose to seek treatment in her hometown so she could by supported by her loved ones. By the end of 2021, she was back in the public eye, resuming promotional duties for Disco as if nothing had ever happened.
And as Kylie revealed, while she wasn’t ready to publicly share news of her illness, she did put it into her music, hinting at the struggle in the lyrics to the song Story on her next album Tension: “I didn’t let the world know / I was fightin’ a big fight / fightin’ a dark light / Ragin’ hard on the inside …”
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