Way back in the decade of big hair and (even bigger) shoulder pads, Minogue’s showbiz story didn’t actually start with music. In 1986, when she was eighteen, she was cast on the Australian soap Neighbours as Charlene – a tomboy mechanic who embarked on a romance with the soap’s boy-next-door, Scott Robinson. The storyline foreshadowed her real-life romance with Jason Donovan, which coincided with Neighbours becoming an unexpected phenomenon in the UK when it started airing on the BBC. At its peak, the soap was watched by more Brits than the entire Australian population, turning Minogue into an A-list star on the other side of the world.
In 1987, pop stardom beckoned when Minogue flew to London to meet Pete Waterman, the hitmaker behind Rick Astley and Bananarama. The story goes that his team hurriedly wrote and recorded ‘I Should Be So Lucky,’ the disturbingly catchy track that became her pop breakthrough, in just a few hours. In Minogue’s early years, pop music wasn’t regarded as highly as it is today. Many critics regarded the genre as the pursuit of untalented and uncultured wannabes who were looking to make an easy buck – music for the masses, not the classes. In the docu-series, even Waterman himself seems to play into these elitist dispersions. “It’s disposable,” he says in archival footage. “You buy it, sing it, it’s not to be taken seriously.”
Minogue tells me she’d be surprised if he still felt that way today, because so much of their work has stood the test of time. But back then, she became the face of supposedly “low art” pop, which made her a target for Britain’s notoriously brutal press, who picked apart everything from her looks to her voice. As someone who discovered Minogue at her early-aughts peak, I had no idea she spent her early career being derided in such clearly gendered terms, or that she was routinely asked inappropriate, sexual questions by male interviewers who looked old enough to be her grandfather. “The Millennials who’ve seen it, you’re all furious! You’re all riled up,” she laughs, seeming amused by my innocence. “I know what happened. I was there. I lived through it, but it was still shocking to me to see it back. Trust me, I was furious, upset and baffled at the time. But I also think it reveals something about my character, which is that I’m just going to rise above it the best I can.”
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