Kylie Minogue Escapes to Her Disco

by Sinéad Stubbins / The Big Issue Australia / courtesy of INSP.ngo

Kylie Minogue wants to make sure I’m okay. If I’m not okay, there is a really funny meme she saw the other day that might make me feel a bit better. “There was this great one going around early on in lockdown that was like, ‘Wake up, go to the fridge, stare at the wall,’” she says, laughing at the memory of the meme. “It’s so peculiar, isn’t it?”

Minogue is talking to me from her apartment in London, where restrictions are consistently changing to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. When she discovers I’m calling from Melbourne, she immediately starts to say the kind of upbeat and encouraging things you would usually find in, well, a Kylie Minogue song. “Just hang in there!” she says. “Obviously my family is in Melbourne and I just feel for you all so much. I’m glad that spring is coming for you. There seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel.”

Minogue is trying to be positive, but she isn’t minimizing how terrible things are – she explains that early on in the pandemic she didn’t leave the house at all for three weeks, not even to walk around the block. She has spent a lot of time inside “staring at the wall” just like the meme says. All that time at home hasn’t been entirely unproductive though. “Well,” she says. “I finished my album.”

DISCO, Kylie Minogue’s 15th album, sees the multi‐awardwinning pop princess strut back into the realm of darkened rooms and crowded dance floors chintzy with mirror balls – though she’s traded the gold hotpants for gold halter dresses. It is full of glittering optimism and familiar euphoric dance music affirmations that take on new resonance in the face of a global pandemic (“Love is love/It never ends” she coos on the single "Say Something." “Can we all be as one again?”).

She began work on the record last year, and had just started recording when the pandemic hit. “That was at the time where you could still go to work and still kind of do things normally,” she says. “Masks weren’t in operation but every time someone left the studio we were like, ‘Wash your hands!’” Then in March, London went into full lockdown. When it seemed like it was only going to last “a week or two,” Minogue and the rest of her team spent the time listening to demos at home and waiting to be allowed back into the studio. “I don’t think anyone imagined it being where we are today,” she says. “But then it was clear that it was going to be a longer situation.”

Minogue then did the only thing that made sense to her: she found an unused microphone in her cupboard, ordered sound equipment online and started teaching herself how to use recording software at home. “I do think it would have been quite funny to be a fly on the wall watching me trying to set this all up,” she says. “Wrangling all of these deliveries and ‘Where does this cable go?’” She set out to finish DISCO remotely while in lockdown. With the guidance of “some patient co-workers” who helped her with the set-up (“They would just say, ‘Okay that’s fine. Now do this and this – screw it this way’ just talking me through it all.”) Minogue built a DIY recording studio in her apartment. DISCO is the first time she has engineered her own work.

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The fact that Minogue has an engineering credit on DISCO is no small thing, particularly for a performer who, even a decade into her career, was still being questioned for her legitimacy as an artist – largely by male critics who saw her mainstream appeal and engagement with different genres as a failing. But Minogue, modestly, mainly talks about her engineering experience through the lens of how grateful she is for her production team (“My respect and admiration just went to a new level”). She says that she and her co-writers didn’t deliberately write songs in response to the pandemic – the song "Where Does the DJ Go?" about needing music as a lifeline because “the world is trying to break me” is probably the closest they get to pandemic-pop – but they did use the album as a portal to escape it. “The songs that are about escapism, I think we gave them more importance than we may have before,” she says. “We felt some escapism making the album – just inhabiting these spaces.”

In between distracting herself from the global crisis unfolding outside her door – by cleaning and “trying to grow things in the garden” – Minogue would lose herself in the album. DISCO became “somewhere to just pretend things weren’t happening for a minute” and a place to “channel anxiety and energy.” Though now that she is doing the publicity part, there are some aspects of a normal album cycle that she needs to get reacquainted with. “In lockdown, there was big participation from the trackpants and the three T-shirts that were in high rotation,” she says. “Very little glamour and possibly none at all.” Now that she has to do (socially distanced) photoshoots, the make-up, hair extensions and sequined dresses have to make a comeback, “I’ve had to remind myself that it is actually part of my job,” she says.

Kylie Minogue’s music has always been genre‐fluid, meaning that everyone has a different Kylie – a fact she lampooned in the video for "Did It Again" (1997), where four different Kylies (Sexy Kylie, Cute Kylie, Indie Kylie, Dance Kylie) get into a fight in a police line-up. Since then, we’ve met Club Kylie, through her anthem-heavy releases from the early 2000s, and Country Kylie, via her 2018 album Golden. DISCO operates in a similar galaxy to the influential Light Years (2000) and Fever (2001) albums, but think less Euro-pop and more Gloria Gaynor.

"Disco was a safe place. It was born out of difficulty and yes, it’s dripping in sequins and it’s exuberant. People are showing off and letting go... Everyone needs to have that kind of safe space.” - Kylie Minogue

She decided to do a disco album when touring for Golden, inspired by a Studio 54 section of the show where she did a remixed version of "Locomotion" wearing a shimmery gold dress that made audiences “gasp” every time they saw it. “I loved all the gold, naturally, but it was [also] like going back to what I have more traditionally done,” she says. “My main lane on my highway.”

When asked what drew her to disco music in the first place, the answer is classic Kylie: “The sparkle! And the humanity as well.” Creating a fantasy world, and sharing this spectacle with her devoted fans, have been constants in Kylie Minogue’s career – though the irony of creating a disco album in one of the few times in history when people cannot come together and dance is not lost on her. But thanks to music videos filmed after London lockdown, the spectacle is not entirely gone. If you’re looking for an escape, Kylie Minogue singing a pop song while riding a giant golden horse in space may just be the ticket. “Disco comes from darkness,” she says. “We can attest from this year that life throws its challenges [at you]. So how do you find the light within that?”

The up-tempo songs on DISCO, which are designed to inspire surging emotion, are just one way to fend off “the darkness.” Since the 1970s, disco has historically provided a safe space for groups who were often pushed to the fringes. Kylie Minogue fandom has famously been a welcoming space for the LGBTQI+ community (and just about everyone else, judging by the broad demographic on show at her concerts). “I thought about that more in lockdown,” she says. “How disco was a safe place. It was born out of difficulty and yes, it’s dripping in sequins and it’s exuberant. People are showing off and letting go, being more themselves or being someone else, depending on what worked for them. That makes sense to me. Everyone needs to have that kind of safe space.”

You can’t help but feel a bit more optimistic about things when Minogue is talking about DISCO going out into the world – she imagines certain songs eventually playing at family gatherings, at wedding receptions that “aren’t fancy, but are full of love.” There’s an inherent hope to her music, one that aims to inspire a “togetherness” in her fans, even if they can’t physically be together right now. As to how a conventional Kylie Minogue album should be consumed in an unconventional time, she has a few ideas. “I hope there’s a few kitchen discos,” she says. “I hope that in the lounge room, the coffee table can be moved – or just dance on top of it. If there are tears on the imaginary dance floor, I love that. If you can forget about everything for three-and-a-half minutes or the entirety of the album, I love that too.”

She pauses for a moment, and tells me she’s searching for the right words while looking at the cover of DISCO: an image of her with blue eyeshadow and big sparkly earrings, light shooting from her fingertips, floating in space like a planet with an atmosphere-defying perm.

“Even if we can’t go to a disco now,” she says. “I think if you put the right song on, it can transport you somehow.”

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