{"id":485147,"date":"2026-06-05T21:21:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T21:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/485147\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T21:21:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T21:21:16","slug":"kylie-minogue-netflix-doc-shows-why-we-cant-get-her-out-of-our-heads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/485147\/","title":{"rendered":"Kylie Minogue Netflix Doc Shows Why We Can\u2019t Get Her Out of Our Heads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe world has caught Kylie fever all over again. The new Netflix documentary Kylie is more than just a celebrity portrait \u2014 it\u2019s a tribute<\/a> to the bizarrely unkillable allure of Kylie Minogue<\/a>. Stars come and go, but somehow Kylie has kept shimmying on forever. That isn\u2019t how it\u2019s supposed to go for dance-floor princesses\u2014especially the ones who blew up in the Eighties, just one of the decade\u2019s countless disposable big-hair disco dollies. It makes no sense that this Australian soap star got so famous in the first place, or that she became a hipster fave, but for her to stay on top of the world this long? Only Kylie.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the oddities of her story is that she\u2019s been a woman of so many comebacks, yet she\u2019s never really had a fame void to return from. She just shows up every few years with another global dance-floor banger, a \u201cCan\u2019t Get You Out of My Head\u201d or \u201cPadam Padam,<\/a>\u201d without breaking a sweat. By now, she\u2019s the disco Lemmy \u2014 thriving forever in a ruthlessly fickle music scene, just by being herself. She\u2019s stuck around long enough to intersect with so many weird cultural phenomena. Two of the biggest presences in Kylie are rock stars from the dark side \u2014 her doomed lover Michael Hutchence of INXS, and her longtime friend Nick Cave. \u201cShe had everything but credibility,\u201d Cave says. \u201cI had credibility, but not much else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe heart of Kylie is a love story, chronicling her torrid romance with Hutchence. Everyone was shocked when these two got together: the squeaky-clean 1980s pop starlet meets the rock & roll bad boy. But they were a couple for two wild years, from 1989 to 1991. \u201cWe were good together \u2014 shoulda, coulda, woulda, whatever,\u201d she says in Kylie. \u201cIt was definitely an amazing point in time.\u201d Yet the memory of his tragic 1997 death still brings her to tears. As she says, \u201cI\u2019ve probably been looking for something like that ever since, and I haven\u2019t got it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Minogue is as close as pop culture gets to a sure thing. She never loses it. She\u2019s just kept hitting new peaks in the 2020s, with her massive club jam \u201cPadam Padam,\u201d setting off a new level of Kylie-mania \u2014the \u201cPadamic.\u201d She carried the Euro-sleaze dance vibe for her entire album Tension, and its brilliantly titled sequel Tension II. Her catalog is full of wedding-reception hits, but also cult faves prized by the hardcore fans, like her 1997 detour Impossible Princess, or her 2018 country oddity Golden.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tNobody would have predicted this when she first showed up. She came from the Australian soap opera Neighbours, with exactly as much musical promise as any other Australian TV star. (Though the same soap later gave us Natalie Imbruglia.) She hooked up with the U.K. production squad Stock Aiken Waterman, with their hyped-up Eighties hi-NRG synth-glitz style. Their most famous hits in the U.S. were Rick Astley\u2019s \u201cNever Gonna Give You Up\u201d and Dead Or Alive\u2019s \u201cYou Spin Me Round (Like a Record),\u201d although some of us will go to our graves arguing that their masterpiece is Bananarama\u2019s shamefully forgotten 1987 feminist aggro-disco bombshell \u201cI Heard a Rumour<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHer 1987 debut \u201cI Should Be So Lucky<\/a>\u201d was written in 40 minutes, according to Kylie \u2014 the producer says it took two whole hours. But she was Britannia\u2019s Sweetheart, with her equally wholesome boyfriend, singer Jason Donovan. He was her Neighbours costar \u2014 they played brother and sister! \u2014 yet followed her into music, with their duet \u201cEspecially for You.\u201d Jason and Kylie were the quintessential Eighties cheese-pop couple, with their matching mullets and terrifyingly shiny teeth. They were young, innocent, madly in love. What could go wrong?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tUnfortunately for Jason, his Titanic was about to hit a leathered-trousered iceberg named Michael Hutchence. Donovan\u2019s a poignant presence in this doc, as he relives the agony of losing her to the INXS frontman. It looks like he\u2019s never gotten over it \u2014 even talking about it now brings him to the edge of a meltdown. \u201cLove hurts, mate,\u201d he tells the interviewer, fighting back tears. \u201cI don\u2019t think I can say any more, to be fucking honest.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tAs for Kylie, she took one look at Mr. Your Moves Are So Raw, slid over there, and gave him a reason. Their surprise romance became one of the Nineties\u2019 great pop love stories. She was the girl next door; he was the decadent rocker who sang \u201cNew Sensation,\u201d \u201cNeed You Tonight,\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Change.<\/a>\u201d Her goody two-shoes image took a tumble, as he brought out the devil inside. \u201cSex, love, food, drugs, music, travel, books, you name it, he wanted to experience it,\u201d she said in the great 2019 BBC Hutchence doc Mystify<\/a>. \u201cHe opened up a whole new world for me. A lot of it was based around pleasure, let\u2019s face it.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tKylie was 21 and still insecure about her talent; Michael was 29, with most of his hits already behind him, yet oozing sensual adult confidence. He wrote \u201cSuicide Blonde\u201d for her, inspired by her latest hairstyle. The footage of these two together provide the doc\u2019s most poignant moments. For two years, Michael expanded her world, artistically and in other ways. \u201cHe was the first, in so many ways,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd one of those firsts was heartbreak.\u201d In 1997, after the road tore them apart, he became the first funeral she ever attended. But as she says, \u201cI feel he\u2019s always with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the confidantes who helped her get through it was Nick Cave, the baddest of bad seeds. These two stars have one of the most bizarrely heartwarming friendships in the music world. Australian or not, they came from opposite ends of the Eighties spectrum \u2014 Nick from goth-punk hellions the Birthday Party, Kylie as the soundtrack to actual birthday parties. When he first enlisted Kylie as his duet partner on the surreal murder ballad \u201cWhere the Wild Roses Grow,\u201d as a tragic sex-and-death maiden, most people assumed it was a joke, for both of them<\/p>\n

\n\tThey sang it together on Top of the Pops, but even Nick was intimidated by her rabid fans. \u201cEvil, evil people,\u201d he calls them with a shudder. \u201cThey were terrifying. Just these sort of monstrous, awful teenage girls. They did not like me and they did not like me to go near their princess.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tYet they\u2019ve shared a weird bond over the decades. In the Cave doc 20,000 Days on Earth, Kylie suddenly appears in the back of his car, as they confess their secret fears \u2014 she tells him, \u201cI worry about being forgotten and lonely.\u201d He gave her a strange kind of literary notoriety in his novel The Death of Bunny Munro, about a serial killer obsessed with her music. \u201cThere\u2019s a particular video for \u2018Spinning Around<\/a>\u2019 that captured the minds of all Britain for a year,\u201d Cave told me in 2010<\/a>. \u201cKylie\u2019s hot pants were all the tabloids could talk about. I think she has to take a certain responsibility for this novel, by wearing those hot pants.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the late Nineties, Kylie made some of her artiest, edgiest music, tuning into Mo\u2019 Wax grooves and trip-hop for her excellent 1997 sleeper Impossible Princess.<\/a> It\u2019s her turning-30 statement, comparable to Madonna\u2019s Ray of Light or Billie Ray Martin\u2019s Deadline for My Memories, in terms of the era\u2019s hipster-disco watersheds. But she harkened the call to get back to mega-pop, leading to 2000s classics like \u201cCan\u2019t Get You Out of My Head\u201d and \u201cLove at First Sight.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was Nick Cave, of all people, who convinced her to return to the dance floor. \u201cI was like, \u2018What the fuck are you doing?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cIndie? No one willingly wants to be indie! They may say they do \u2014 but that\u2019s not what Kylie is. Kylie is this force that is there to affect thousands and thousands and thousands of people. It\u2019s all outward. It\u2019s all giving.\u201d As he says, \u201cThe great beauty of pop music is that it is a joy machine.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\tKylie took his words to heart. \u201cYou\u2019ve got the coolest guy on the planet saying, \u2018Where\u2019s the pop tunes?\u2019 Right \u2014 let\u2019s get the jet packs on and let\u2019s get back to the dance floor.\u201d The rest is padam padam, as this one-woman \u201cjoy machine\u201d has kept cranking, with one high-profile cancer battle in 2005 and another recent one that she kept secret until this doc. Musically, she can try whatever she pleases. I will always be a ride-or-die fan for her country gem Golden, going Nashville with her rhinestone-cowgirl disco twang. It\u2019s a confident statement about sashaying into her fifties, facing up to mortality and heartbreak, from the elegiac ballad \u201cMusic\u2019s Too Sad Without You<\/a>\u201d to the banjo-disco \u201cRaining Glitter.\u201d It\u2019s hard to think of any Eighties pop star who\u2019s stayed famous this long without going through a phase of being unbearably annoying.<\/p>\n

\n\tMusic docs being what they are, Kylie tries hard to give her a three-act rise-and-fall-and-rise narrative \u2014but it doesn\u2019t work because she\u2019s never had any of the career disasters that documentarians adore. She never lost her audience, never had to play the underdog. The doc tries to scrounge up pity over her negative press reviews \u2014 boo hoo \u2014 but that\u2019s the dippiest possible way to frame her charmed life. Hell, Kylie never even went broke \u2014 her accountant dad advised her early to invest in real estate, so she\u2019s always been filthy rich. Can you sustain a pop legend for four decades with any fall from grace? For Kylie, it\u2019s no trouble at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The world has caught Kylie fever all over again. The new Netflix documentary Kylie is more than just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485148,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,32038,278],"class_list":["post-485147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kylie-minogue","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}