{"id":533100,"date":"2026-07-04T18:57:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T18:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/533100\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T18:57:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T18:57:15","slug":"indie-kylie-minogue-is-back-thanks-to-snow-patrol-can-we-keep-her-for-a-little-while-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/533100\/","title":{"rendered":"Indie Kylie Minogue is back thanks to Snow Patrol. Can we keep her for a little while? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Has Kylie Minogue<\/a> resurrected her short-lived \u201cIndie Kylie\u201d incarnation for another spin? The evidence is strong. This week brought the release of These Alarms, her collaboration with Snow Patrol<\/a>. Definitions of \u201cindie\u201d vary, but some musical dictionaries just go with an image of the band in their pre-hit youth.<\/p>\n

Minogue also hinted to Attitude magazine in May that she might soon return to elements of her Impossible Princess era. This refers to her modestly alternative, genre-spanning 1997 album, though for arcane reasons both \u201cImpossible Princess\u201d and \u201c1997\u201d are contested descriptors here \u2013 full marks to anyone who knows this relates to a certain fatal Paris car crash in August of that year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like her energy,\u201d Minogue said, when shown an image of herself on the cover of Attitude in September 1997. \u201cThings from that time I\u2019d like to somehow incorporate into now.\u201d (It\u2019s a relatable sentiment. The things I would choose are eyebrows and hope.)<\/p>\n

Indie Kylie, a term in regular use in the 1990s music press, received an official Minogue endorsement in the video for Did It Again, her fun single from the end of 1997, which presented a line-up of four personas: Cute Kylie, Dance Kylie, Sex Kylie and Indie Kylie.<\/p>\n

In Michael Harte\u2019s wonderful Netflix<\/a> documentary series on Minogue, Nick Cave<\/a> offers some hilarious thoughts on this musical sidestep. \u201cNo one willingly wants to be indie,\u201d he says. \u201cThey may say they do, but that\u2019s not what Kylie is, you know. Kylie is this force that is there to affect thousands and thousands of people. It\u2019s all outward, it\u2019s all giving.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Michael Harte on Kylie Minogue: \u2018She walked in with an energy. I was totally blown away\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

This is funny, largely because back then the opposite was the case. Everybody wanted to be indie. The term evolved beyond its original meaning \u2013 a way to categorise artists signed to independent record labels \u2013 and came to signify a certain fake-DIY aesthetic and guitar-based sound that, for a while at least, meant you weren\u2019t crushingly uncool. <\/p>\n

\"Attitude:Attitude: Kylie Minogue on the cover of the magazine’s September 1997 edition <\/p>\n

You didn\u2019t have to be moody and introspective \u2013 jangly, bouncy, wit-fuelled indie was often the best indie \u2013 but it sometimes helped. Popularity and indieness were no longer mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n

Indie was dealt a near-fatal blow in the Noughties with the advent of various unoriginal, uninspired and charisma-deficient bands who were just as unpopular and inward-looking as Cave\u2019s quote implies. Naff \u201clandfill indie\u201d became the music industry\u2019s stubborn stain. More recently, the genre-marker \u201cindie sleaze\u201d has been retrospectively applied to bands who were active in roughly the same period but had the good sense to be from New York.<\/p>\n

The prevailing verdict, which Minogue has occasionally perpetuated over the years, is that her indie foray was an ill-advised failure. For sensitivity reasons that also seemed bizarre at the time, the planned autumn 1997 release of Impossible Princess was delayed following the death of Princess Diana, with the record not emerging in Europe until March 1998, when, retitled Kylie Minogue, it flopped. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Nick Cave: \u2018How did I stay so young? Twenty years of drug addiction and a good face cream\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Critics were harsh. Radio stations were indifferent. The debacle prompted a parting of ways with her independent label, Deconstruction, and in 1999 she signed a new deal with Parlophone with the intention of re-embracing pop. Her most personal album to date was also her most rejected.<\/p>\n

But I like it. Not in a \u201ctime for a reappraisal\u201d sense. I own it, and I\u2019ve always liked it. Here\u2019s where I can get a bit territorial in my Kylie fandom. Whenever people latch on to her again in some way \u2013 praise her Glastonbury set, succumb to the pleasure of Padam Padam \u2013 I think, okay, but where were you when Breathe stalled at number 14 in 1998?<\/p>\n

That languorous song, more electronica than anything else, is the high point of an album of many delights, among them its frustration-laden drum-and-bass opener, Too Far, and the deliciously frenetic Limbo.<\/p>\n

With any luck, Minogue isn\u2019t referring to Some Kind of Bliss or I Don\u2019t Need Anyone, the Manic Street Preachers\u2019 pleasant but underwhelming contributions to Impossible Princess, when she talks about revisiting things from her indie years. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s plenty of other stuff to channel. What would be most thrilling would be a return to the spirit of avant-garde work such as her guest vocal on Towa Tei\u2019s German Bold Italic, the 1997 curio on which she personifies a typeface, or the boldness that led to the trip-hop, range-testing experiment Confide in Me, her early Deconstruction-era hit, which sounded novel in 1994 and is still an enchanting centrepiece of her live performances today.<\/p>\n

As for These Alarms, on which Minogue duets with Snow Patrol\u2019s frontman Gary Lightbody, it\u2019s fine. The verses have a nice pulse to them, and her vocal is given precedence in the mix. It suggests that, while few humans with joy in their soul would ever trade in Pop Kylie for Indie Kylie permanently, it might be nice to have the latter back for a while.<\/p>\n

Buying stock in indie more generally, however, remains a risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Has Kylie Minogue resurrected her short-lived \u201cIndie Kylie\u201d incarnation for another spin? The evidence is strong. This week…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":533101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,32038,7241,226682,92584,15453],"class_list":["post-533100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kylie-minogue","tag-laura-slattery","tag-michael-harte","tag-nick-cave","tag-snow-patrol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533100","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=533100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/533101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}