Kylie Minogue for Perfect Issue 11.<\/p>\n
Photographer: Willy Vanderperre
Fashion Editor: Katie Grand
Writer: Paul Flynn<\/p>\n
It is the day after Willy Vanderperre has shot Kylie Minogue in Paris for the cover of the magazine (hair references: the \u2018Confide in Me\u2019 video curls and the Impossible Princess pixie cut) and Perfect\u2019s 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\u2019d surprised himself to find quite so nerve-wracking. \u2018The first issue of Perfect I worked on was issue five, with the first Kylie cover shot by Willy,\u2019 he notes. \u2018A 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.\u2019<\/p>\n
Like many of his Gen Z counterparts, Kylie Minogue comprises one of the luminescent fame constants defining Sid\u2019s life cycle. \u2018Of course, she was always there before I started here,\u2019 he says, \u2018but 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, \u201cYou\u2019re gay, give me some good Kylie questions!\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n
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 \u2018Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2018Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head\u2019 which interpolated elements of New Order\u2019s doleful Mancunian mirror-ball classic, \u2018Blue Monday\u2019. \u2018\u201cCan\u2019t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head\u201d is my favourite Kylie song,\u2019 confesses Sid. His disposition is a little more New Order than Kylie.<\/p>\n
Yet there is a sweet reason he\u2019s so attached to this version of the song. One morning, piled back at a friend\u2019s flat, long before he\u2019d started working for Perfect, Sid was recovering with some friends, \u2018massively hungover\u2019 (his note) from a night out, when somebody played the Kylie 2002 Brits performance. \u2018We\u2019d been talking about our teenage crushes,\u2019 he says. The young lads sat, transfixed, processing some pop emotions that perhaps they hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In real life, she didn\u2019t disappoint. \u2018I could not believe how great she was on set,\u2019 says Sid. \u2018The way she moves, I\u2019ve just never seen anything like it. She performs the shoot. A Ronettes song would come on the stereo, and she\u2019d dance from the camera to hair and make-up, just gliding off. That pure confidence. It\u2019s amazing to watch. It\u2019s beyond modelling.\u2019 Such was the good humour of the shoot, Ms Minogue suggested a group shot at the end. \u2018I\u2019m crouching down at the front with her stiletto on my head.\u2019 How to break the ice. At the end of recording his video interview, \u2018everyone started clapping. She was just amazing.\u2019<\/p>\n
There was one final touch, rounding off this pretty Perfect Kylie Minogue story. \u2018She signed a pair of Stan Smiths for me,\u2019 says Sid. \u2018One trainer was dedicated to me and the other was to Lucas, my friend who\u2019d put that video on that morning, hungover, starting one of my best mates\u2019 rituals.\u2019 He hasn\u2019t given Lucas the shoe yet. He\u2019s biding his time, choosing his moment. \u2018Because he will not fucking believe it.\u2019<\/p>\n
Three weeks later, we catch up with Kylie Minogue, to talk Fever\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d been through the whole PWL era, the Deconstruction years, \u2018Spinning Around\u2019 got us back on. Then it was like riding a spaceship, this juggernaut\u201d<\/p>\n
So this year is the 25th anniversary of Fever.<\/p>\n
It is.<\/p>\n
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 \u2018Can\u2019t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head\u2019.<\/p>\n
Oh, but I love Sid. We all need a Sid on our teams. He\u2019s genuinely special.<\/p>\n
What does their ritual tell you about the longevity and resilience of Fever?<\/p>\n
You know what? It\u2019s just so beautiful it\u2019s mind-blowing. You can do so much \u2013 due diligence, best efforts to try and make something a thing, not something that\u2019s just self-propelling in the moment. When it gets these fresh injections of love and life, coming from a completely different mindset\u2026 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\u2026 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 \u2018Can\u2019t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head\u2019 moment 11.30pm or is it 3am? That\u2019s all I need to know.<\/p>\n
Where did the \u2018Blue Monday\u2019 idea come from?<\/p>\n
Very possibly from Miles Leonard [her then label boss] or Jamie Nelson [her A&R]. It\u2019s such a clever idea you just wouldn\u2019t 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 \u2013 especially now that I know that story. Not only of Sid himself, but the culture around it. When he told me, I was like, \u2018What are you talking about?\u2019 I\u2019m just going to roll with it.<\/p>\n
Was \u2018Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head\u2019 the first great global pop hit of the 21st century?<\/p>\n
I\u2019d have to look at what else came out then. Maybe something slipped out of 2000? I couldn\u2019t definitively say that. But I do believe that it has its place in that realm. I\u2019d have to sit with you and look at the charts and jog my memory, but it definitely\u2026 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\u2019d been through the whole PWL era, the Deconstruction years. \u2018Spinning Around\u2019 got us back on. Then it was like riding a spaceship, this juggernaut.<\/p>\n
Were you at your most confident during \u2018Fever\u2019?<\/p>\n
A lot was simplified. It\u2019s quite streamlined and then, in time, it got really busy again and by the time you\u2019ve got to [her 2011 album] Aphrodite, it\u2019s full-on over the top again. I think that when you can get to achieve so much with fewer elements, that\u2019s when pop music is at its most incredible.<\/p>\n
Tell me about the importance of the female gaze to the project. Dawn Shadforth directing the video for \u2018Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head\u2019 lent it this very specific angle. We knew you had that in you, but it took that direction\u2026<\/p>\n
Sorry to interrupt you, but I hadn\u2019t actually thought of this before \u2013 that thing that \u2018we knew you had it in you but we hadn\u2019t seen it before\u2019. 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\u2019ve been a very different video, a very different treatment. The female gaze of the director is it. And also, Dawn is just\u2026 She is cool. So she is only going to do cool stuff.<\/p>\n
She also recognised the cool in you.<\/p>\n
Oh, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kylie Minogue for Perfect Issue 11. Photographer: Willy VanderperreFashion Editor: Katie GrandWriter: Paul Flynn It is the day…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589721,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-589720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}