ARTIST

Kylie Minogue

To most Americans, Kylie Minogue is an '80s footnote artist currently making a remarkable millennial comeback after a nearly 15-year absence from the pop charts. But the Australian ingénue, now a seasoned showbiz veteran yet still only 34 years old, has hardly been resting on her well-toned laurels since her remake of Little Eva's "Locomotion" dented the U.S. pop charts in 1987. In fact, the former soap starlet and onetime paramour of INXS's Michael Hutchence was Europe's biggest-selling female pop singer throughout the '90s (yes, that's right, even bigger than Madonna), and now that she finally has an album out in the U.S. again (2002's Fever, released in 2001 in Europe), America is finally catching up with the rest of the world. Kylie Fever has now reached global epidemic proportions.

The Melbourne-born Kylie first rose to U.K. superstardom as a teen via her regular role on Neighbours, the Australian soap opera that would later serve as a career springboard for singer/actress Natalie Imbruglia. The show was so wildly popular in Britain that her performance of "Locomotion" at a charity benefit (which went to number one in Australia and England, and went top 10 in America, once it was released as a single) led to a partnership with the British hitmaking team Stock, Aitken, & Waterman. While "Locomotion" was her only big hit in America ("I Should Be So Lucky" was a minor follow-up), she continued to rack up smash singles overseas with SAW's help.

In the mid-to-late '90s, Minogue left Stock, Aitken, & Waterman--who had written/produced her records and carefully crafted her public persona--and tried to revamp her goody-goody, girl-next-door image. She sang a dark and disturbing duet with Nick Cave, "Where The Wild Roses Grow," on his Murder Ballads album and put in a memorable performance as a floating corpse in the accompanying video, she worked with several electronic music producers, and for 1997's Impossible Princess (later retitled simply Kylie Minogue after Princess Diana's death), she recruited the members of the Manic Street Preachers to pen songs for her.

While these collaborations were critically hailed as the start of a new, more credible phase in Kylie's career, they were not commercial successes abroad. So Kylie reinvented herself as a dance diva yet again, this time with more fantastic results than ever before. Her 2000 single "Spinning Around" was yet another number-one hit in England and Australia, and the first single from Fever, the insanely catchy and appropriately titled "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" (co-written by ex-pop tart Cathy Dennis, best known for singing on D-Mob's "C'mon And Get My Love") was a positively massive international smash (even the indie-leaning British rock mag NME put it at number two on its list of the top singles of 2001, second only to Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On"). This led to a new stateside record deal with Capitol for Kylie, and when Fever was finally released in America in spring 2002, it debuted on the Billboard Top 200 at number three. But don't call it a comeback - Kylie's been here for years.

Written by Lyndsey Parker