Every time her career seemed to falter, Kylie would return stronger than ever.<\/p>\n
In the Noongar language, Kylie means “boomerang,” and, as Minogue herself points out in the excellent three-part Netflix documentary titled, naturally, Kylie: “I do my best to come back.”<\/p>\n
From the same Emmy-winning director-producer team behind Beckham, Kylie is made with the co-operation of its subject, which can often be a mixed blessing for music documentaries. In this case, it’s invaluable.<\/p>\n
Minogue’s private archive of photos, writing, and home videos is masterfully edited alongside archival footage and interviews with celebrity sister Dannii Minogue, her Neighbours on-and-off-screen partner Jason Donovan, and Bad Seeds ringleader Nick Cave, who affectionately hails her as a “beam of light with this incredible positivity”.<\/p>\n
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Across three-plus hours, Minogue offers increasingly candid perspectives about her professional and personal life, telling ABC News Breakfast<\/a> that agreeing to the project “involved a little bit of bravery”.<\/p>\n She grieves over late INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, explains his and Cave’s influence on her career, and how she navigated merciless, often misogynistic media backlash \u2014 she was dismissed as a “talentless \u2026 singing budgie” from an early age.<\/p>\n The biggest revelation, however, is saved until the dramatic finale.<\/p>\n In 2021, Minogue was diagnosed with cancer for a second time, but kept the news private until now.<\/p>\n “I’ve been trying to find the right time to say it. I don’t feel obliged to tell the world,” she says, choking back tears, in the final episode.<\/p>\n “And actually, I couldn’t at the time, because I was just a shell of a person.”<\/p>\n Holding hands with her songwriter partner of 25 years, Richard “Biff” Stannard, Minogue explains wanting to exorcise her secret cancer struggle in song, hidden in plain sight on Story, the glossy closer to 2023 album Tension<\/a>.<\/p>\n In another boomerang moment, she bounced back with Padam Padam, the 2023 TikTok-viral<\/a> mega-hit single that scored Minogue’s first ARIA and Grammy award wins<\/a> in 20 years and a record-breaking appearance in triple j’s Hottest 100<\/a> after 27 years.<\/p>\n Even as Madam Padam soaked up the success of another renaissance, including back-to-back chart-topping albums Tension and 2024 sequel Tension II<\/a>, she knew “inside” that “cancer wasn’t just a blip in my life”.<\/p>\n “Thankfully, I got through it. Again. I was able to keep that to myself and go through that year. Not like the first time,” she says.<\/p>\n Struggles with cancer and IVF<\/p>\n That same final episode chronicles Minogue’s 2005 breast cancer diagnosis, forcing her to cancel a world tour and a coveted headlining slot at Glastonbury.<\/p>\n Instead, she watched the UK festival from her bedroom with paparazzi camped outside her Melbourne family home and, later, the hospital where she underwent treatment.<\/p>\n “Coldplay dedicated Fix You to me, so there I was, weeping, a prisoner in the house,” she says.<\/p>\n Her sister, Dannii, conveys her anger at the intrusive press and the devastation and fear shared by the family.<\/p>\n “We didn’t know if she was ever going to be well again. It was that bad,” she says.<\/p>\n “Is she going to live through this?”<\/p>\n Kylie also postponed her chemo to go through IVF “a number of times”, sharing the grief of being unable to have children.<\/p>\n “If it had happened, it would have been just shy of a miracle, but it didn’t work out that way,” she says.<\/p>\n Again, the experience is hidden in another song, 2012’s Flower, described as a “letter to what might have been”, with Minogue struggling to sing the lyrics on camera.<\/p>\n Minogue was interviewed by director Michael Harte, who spent two years getting her seal of approval for the project.\u00a0 (Supplied: Netflix)<\/p>\n The palpable pain of imagined motherhood comes after a clip of interviewer Michael Parkinson insensitively asking: “Do you want children? You’re 35 now, isn’t that a bit late?”<\/p>\n It’s an example of another of the documentary’s running threads: the press’s cruelty.<\/p>\n There is no shortage of interviewers grilling her with sexist questions about her “raunchy” image and relationships, or mocking headlines quick to deride her credibility or achievements viciously.<\/p>\n Minogue speaks about how deeply the “nastiness” affected her, while acknowledging the loyalty of her gay audience, whose allegiance she continues to treasure.<\/p>\n “I could go to war with my gay audience,” she says. “They were there way back when it was the most uncool thing [to like me].”<\/p>\n No wonder she’s developed a reluctance to give too much of herself away beyond her confident, affable, sparkling star persona, having grown up in public and been savaged for it.<\/p>\n Despite it all, she showed up time and again, smiling for the camera, knowingly tormented by critics who believed she was blessed with too much, too soon.<\/p>\n She Should Be So Lucky<\/p>\n The nostalgic first episode begins with a 19-year-old Minogue jetting to London in 1987 to record her debut song with UK hit-makers Stock Aitken Waterman, who had no idea who “the small antipodean in reception expecting to make a record” was.<\/p>\n Mogul Peter Waterman says he was clueless about Minogue’s TV soap stardom as Charlene on Neighbours, a TV phenomenon enjoyed by 24 million people a day in Britain.<\/p>\n They knocked out the blockbuster I Should Be So Lucky in a few hours, then swiftly capitalised on its instant chart success with an eponymous debut album cut between takes of Neighbours, Minogue jet-setting between record studios and a punishing promotional treadmill of interviews, photo shoots and press.<\/p>\n It was “a baptism of fire” that swiftly educated her on “how the machine works”, Minogue recounts in a kinetic sequence humorously edited to a rollercoaster’s pacing.<\/p>\n “I just did what I was told, I had no clout to really say no,” she says.<\/p>\n Dannii Minogue and Jason Donovan offer intimate interviews in the docuseries. (Getty Images: John Phillips)<\/p>\n The lack of creative control cultivated a thirst in Minogue to steer her own ship, covered in the second episode and the arrival of her highly publicised romance with Michael Hutchence.<\/p>\n Speaking about her romance with Hutchence, Minogue tears up on-camera and lets out a single, cathartic F-bomb. (Supplied: Netflix)<\/p>\n She is misty-eyed recalling the significance of her relationship with the “cultured and tender” frontman, confessing:<\/p>\n “I’ve probably been looking for something like that ever since. And I haven’t got it.”<\/p>\n The rock star “bad boy” and pop’s “good girl”<\/a> were an item between 1989 and 1991, when INXS was at the height of its powers and Minogue, in her early 20s, credits Hutchence as a major influence to embrace her artistry, shedding her bubble-gum pop image for new sounds and personas.<\/p>\n Despite being devastated over their break-up and, later, Hutchence’s death, she reflects fondly on the singer’s impact.<\/p>\n “It might feel disproportionate, the emotions of that time, [but] I felt protected, nurtured, valued and believed-in \u2026 He really didn’t want me to be someone else for him, at all. He was encouraging me to discover me,” she says.<\/p>\n Impossible Princess<\/p>\n Another unlikely influence is Nick Cave<\/a>, who convinced Minogue to be his duet partner on the 1995 murder ballad Where The Wild Roses Grow.<\/p>\n Calling her a “joy machine”, he offers the doco’s most insightful description of Minogue’s mass appeal.<\/p>\n “What the world loves essentially about Kylie is that she really went through something,” Cave says.<\/p>\n “That’s the definition of joy, in a way \u2014 the capacity to be able to rise out of a certain suffering and to see the world in a positive way.<\/p>\n “Her connection with the audience is not phony,” he remarks of her raved-about 2019 Glastonbury comeback performance. “It’s very real for her. It’s a true form of love.”<\/p>\n The wild story behind Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s iconic pairing<\/a><\/p>\n Photographer Tony Mott on how an awful situation turned into a brilliant opportunity.<\/p>\n Minogue also credits Cave for inspiring her pivot back to “mega-pop” after the commercial failure of her (underrated) 1997 album Impossible Princess.<\/p>\n “You’ve got the coolest guy on the planet saying: ‘Where are the pop tunes?’ Right! Let’s get back to the dancefloor,” she says.<\/p>\n What came next was one of Minogue’s biggest eras, producing enduring hits like Can’t Get You Out Of My Head and Spinning Around (voted in at #27 and #101 respectively in the Hottest 100 of Australian Songs<\/a>, topped by INXS<\/a>).<\/p>\n![\"pop](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779338650_985_f0cc16835b62acf8da6ee2e1746acbbd.jpeg\")
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