Kylie (dir. Michael Harte) — Strictly Soundtracks radio episode

Recently on the Strictly Soundtracks show on Joy 94.9, we discussed the buzzy three-part documentary series Kylie. I mean, can you blame us? Kylie Minogue doesn't lend her music to too many projects so we don't often get to play her—"This Wheel's On Fire" from Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is maybe one of the only few?—and who's going to say no to playing some of the best pop tunes of the last four decades on an LGBTIQA+ radio station? Listen to the show below or through the Joy Media app.

I am not usually too enthusiastic about musician biographies in this day and age. Documentary or otherwise. Certainly not so those produced by streaming platforms as a means of merely boosting catalogues, typically guided by estates with the goal of amplifying album sales and little else. But I was actually very impressed by Michael Harte's three-parter Kylie for Netflix about the "Princess of Pop", Kylie Minogue. There really is something to be said about a film like this that makes you feel so many things and not necessarily just because of one's affinity for the artist in question.

Instead of just letting the film be a Wikipedia profile in motion, Harte (and, presumably considering the tight reign she keeps on her image, Minogue herself) constructs a narrative of perseverance and joy in an often cruel industry. At first, one of self-discovery out of the oppressive shadow of virulent international press and condescending music Svengalis of Stock Aitken and Waterman (musical geniuses, but often personally cruel) and then also the loss of her first love, Michael Hutchence (also detailed in Richard Lowenstein's excellent Mystify: Michael Hutchence). All of which helped her produce some of the finest work. And then one of industry recognition, aided in large part by Nick Cave, for one of Australia's greatest musical exports in an industry that has seen so many of her contemporaries come and go. Her career has seen her ride the waves of so much in the industry, coming out the other side as somebody that is embraced because she is a popstar, not in spite of it.

Some will likely be frustrated by its (even at three hours) truncation of Minogue's career (many of my favourite songs barely get a mention if at all), but Kylie works as well as it does because of the way it strategically chooses what it keeps in and what it excises. The film allows just enough of her major life moments—a very public cancer battle in 2005; a very un-public second cancer battle in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic—to make Kylie feel less like a career post-mortem and more like a genuine celebration of the spirit that so many of her fans embrace her for. While I bristled at how UK-focused it is throughout, and I very quickly grew frustrated with its use of such a wide frame for the interviews when much of the content is in 4:3. But I found myself very happy to have spent this time with her and I suspect those who have not spent their entire lives with Minogue as a cultural totem like most Australians and Brits have will have some newfound admiration for somebody who spent so much of her career not being given a second look.

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