Kylie Minogue

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2015

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is Kylie Minogue.

With seven number ones and ten million singles sold in the UK, she is the third-biggest selling female artist in Britain and has sold around 70 million records worldwide.

Born in Melbourne in 1968, Kylie and her sister Dannii began their careers as child actors on Australian television. At 17, Kylie landed the role of Charlene Mitchell in the soap opera Neighbours and her on-screen wedding to Jason Donovan's character Scott Robinson was watched by twenty million people in the UK alone.

Her recording career began after she was spotted singing at a charity event in 1987. Within months she had released a cover version of "Locomotion" which became the biggest-selling Australian single of the decade. Following the single's success, her first hit with record producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman was "I Should Be So Lucky": her debut album sold seven million copies.

At the age of 21, a romance with INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence led to a change in her image. In 2000, inspired by 1970s disco and assisted by gold hot pants, her single "Spinning Around" became her first British number one for a decade. She also sang to an estimated global audience of 3.7 billion at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics.

In May 2005 she was diagnosed with breast cancer: following treatment she resumed the tour 18 months later.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My cast away the away the Mya castaway this week is Kylie, as in Manogue. She favors the word
0:38.6	performer to describe herself and that seems about right, the very personification of pop glamour, she's not just a pretty face and a pert behind, but a non-stop graft or two.
0:49.0	Her 30-odd year career has been a bedazzling confection of TV shows pop hits
0:53.8	dance spectaculars and sellout tours liberally sprinkled with worldwide fan
0:58.8	worship three Brits and a Grammy. Where lesser mortals have seen their early showbiz success fritter away on the fickle window
1:05.4	fashion, she has stayed the course and even played her part in shaping pop culture,
1:11.1	building an enduring brand in the process.
1:13.7	The Victoria and Albert Museum once devoted an entire exhibition to her image, costumes and career.
1:19.7	She started very young as a child actress going on to be a teen sensation as tomboy mechanic
1:25.1	charlene in the soap opera neighbours. 20 million Brits watched her character
1:29.4	get married. Most of them cried. So many fans have had their picture taken with her Madam Two Swords wax work
1:35.6	that she's had to be replaced four times a number bettered only by Her Majesty the Queen. She says,
1:41.8	I'll never stop being a show off.
1:43.0	When I'm in the retirement home, I'll still be getting out my old costumes and feathers and
1:47.3	putting on a show.
1:48.8	It's what I've been doing my entire life.
1:50.4	Ever since I was a little girl, singing and dancing has been as natural to me as breathing.
1:56.4	So welcome, Kylie.
1:57.7	You were once captured on film just before you were going on stage and you were sort of muttering
	...

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