Kylie Minogue has done it all during her gold-dusted 45-year career. But even with two Grammys on the shelf and her mantle as the best-selling female artist ever from her native Australia, Kylie as a few “what-ifs?” in the closet.
She revealed one in a new chat with Audacy Check In, telling host Mike Adam that at one point she almost recorded one of Britney Spears’ most iconic songs. “Yeah, there’s a little song called ‘Toxic’ that was headed my way, and I was like, ‘Toxic? I don’t know if I want a song called Toxic’…,” said Minogue of the dance banger from Spears’ fourth album, 2003’s In the Zone. “As it’s turned out, it was meant to be a Britney Spears song, I can’t imagine it being anything else.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Minogue was asked to name which other vocalists she would tap if asked to put together an all-star “We Are the World”-type song. “It might be a girl group,” she said before rattling off a list that included Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Lana Del Rey, Miley Cyrus and Madonna.
Minogue also talked about pulling the set list together for her upcoming first U.S. tour in more than a dozen years, promising that she’ll hit songs from this month’s Tension II, as well as its 2023 predecessor Tension, 2002’s Disco and 2018’s Golden, and, of course, her 1987 breakthrough smash cover of “Locomotion.”
The 56-year-old singer who has tapped into a musical fountain of youth that has kept her relevant for decades — see her 2023 global dance hit “Padam Padam” — also delved into the changes she’s seen for women in the music industry.
“It’s very encouraging that I’m proof, I’m sat here. Now we bring up the age topic, but I think it’s at least with a positive spin on it,” she said. “It wasn’t that many years ago that I felt I was in quite awkward positions where people would question me to my face in an interview, ‘When are you too old to be a woman in this business?’ Firstly — rude, but secondly — I don’t know. I guess I’ve always had women in the industry that I’ve looked up to, I didn’t really think about their age at the time.”
Minogue recalled “obsessing” over fellow Aussie singer Olivia Newton-John as a grade schooler, as well well as disco diva Donna Summer, before moving on to worshipping Whitney Houston, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper as a teen. “I guess there wasn’t such an age gap between my teenage years and their years,” she said. “But I don’t know what happened where it was suddenly deemed distasteful or, I don’t know. But thankfully, it is becoming, certainly, for the younger generation… they’ve just got new minds and open minds.”
Watch Minogue on the Audacy Check In below.
