Plus Supersister around the same time too!
Kylie Minogue
- Thread starter Weezerfan
- Start date
Plus Supersister around the same time too!
he / him
I agree that "Your Disco Needs You" likely would've been a hit if it had been released, but I'm glad that it wasn't because I think that it would've boxed Kylie in as an overtly camp artist. You're right that Geri was smashing it at the time with campy bops, but look at Geri's solo career's longevity or lack thereof or her chart positions outside of the UK.
"Bag It Up" had the advantage of that BRITs performance and Geri wasn't six months into relaunching her career after "years in the wilderness". She was a year into a succesful solo debut, with singles sales that absolutely dwarfed Kylie's (at that time). Virgin could afford to take a risk that the last single from Schizophonic might not connect the same. I'll bet when some of the execs saw the video they might've been on the phone to Geri's manager, but Geri would have been in a strong position by then. Parlophone were just keen aware of the danger of putting a single foot wrong and ruining what they had built with Kylie in 2000 and we know Kylie has her eye on the long game.
"It's Raining Men" might be a cover of a camp classic, but it was produced like a song that came out in 2001 and had force-of-nature Geri promoting it with every ounce of energy her dietician allowed her to. Not that it did much for her album sales or solo career afterwards. You could argue that "It's Raining Men" ultimately did put her in that same box Parlophone wanted to avoid.
"Coffee", again, camp classic, but didn't exactly sell a lot of records. Probably the first time it pop-culturally rippled out into straight world was when the Big Brother housemates sang along to it one night on E4.
And also, other 80's artists like Sheena Easton releasing disco cover albums at the back end of the year 2000 to get their own Kylie revival without understanding how the "Spinning Around" narrative was half of Kylie's comeback probably didn't help "Your Disco Needs You"'s cause.
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I’ve finally made a Kylie B-Sides playlist and I’m left wondering why this hasn’t been released yet? Her b-sides are top notch and the fact she did the Anti Tour proves she knows it.
he / him
And they had exactly one UK Top 20 single.
If that's on spotify, please share the link!
Wasn't Your Disco Needs You going to be THE comeback single initially? I remember hearing that in the spring of 2000 from my Kylie-addicted friend.
It certainly got played way more at The Club de Gays than any of the official singles.
It was the end of the night song for the LGBT nightclub I worked in for a good solid 5 years - the LP version on Friday night, Casino mix on Saturday night and the Almighty mix on a Sunday night.
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Probably just some media outlet doing that thing they do when a bunch of new song titles become known about and they can make a story out of. Likely the Sun's bizarre column: "Antipodean pop minstrel Kylie Minogue is in the studio with Robbie Williams recording her comeback single "Your Disco Needs You" with Robbie's songwriter Guy Chambers. Kylie, 31, hasn't had a number one for ten years" in a sidebar, info gleaned from someone in the EMI Publishing account department with a leaky email account and crisp twenty quid notes courtesy of Gordon Smart or whatever his name was back then.
Call me cynical but Kylie Writing Comeback With UK's Current Pop Music Superstar is a more interesting tabloid story than Kylie Picks Up Paula Abdul Scraps
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I wish they expanded a bit more on the "On A Night Like This" chill atmospheric Ibiza sound during the Light Years and Fever eras, no other song sounds like it.
On A Night Like This manages to scream both 2000 and yet timeless at the same time. Quite an feat that.
You have to remember record industry / media / radio / pluggers were literally mostly straight guys in suits. Everything basically was created with Radio 1 and Q Magazine in mind. If Radio 1 said 'nah we won't play it' Disco was off the table. Labels knew the gays were on board anyway so they tried to not scare the straights with stuff that was too camp - this was when Texas were the biggest band in the UK, Blur and Manics were hot etc etc. Was it stupid? Yes? Was it smart in that it lead to great album sales and tours? Also yes.
You're spot on here. It was a fine tightrope to walk to have "the pink pound" purse sown up but also not look like you're dining out on the "pink pound" at the same time - to use a terribly 90's turn of phrase. Kylie's team could be reasonably confident that her gays could get her into the top twenty, it was the straights they needed on board. And not the ones who bought FHM and Loaded magazine and one indie guitar band album per year, but the fans who had lapsed and weren't particularly interested in camp or pastiche and weren't likely to buy a Kylie album if they got the idea in their heads that it leaned too heavy to the "Loveboat" side of things, rather than the "Butterfly" side.
Both songs are really gay.
Sounds like there was a lot of closet homophobia in Parlophone.
Perhaps, but their job was to get a Kylie album into the hands of people of people who would never have considered it before, for whatever reason. That might not exactly have been Light Years, for a lot of people it ended up being Fever, but the Light Years singles would have set them up on the path to eventually buying a Kylie record. The clubbier songs on there cleared the way for Fever, not the camp ones.
Welcome to the music industry in the 90's through to ummmm, I don't know, now...
he / him
They are, but they're very two different brands of gay. And Parlophone wanted to present the most palatable version to mainstream audiences to ensure that Kylie's comeback was successful. Like Kylie said in that Light Years interview, she knew that she had the support of the gays—it was all about winning everyone else over again.
When I first got into Kylie, I was actually disappointed that Light Years wasn't full of "On A Night Like This" sound-a-likes. That's what I had taken from only having heard the first two singles and seeing the cover. I did grow to love it, but it wasn't what I expected on first listen.
When I came out in 2002 and started going to Manchester gay village, Your Disco Needs You was already a certified LGBT classic.
It’s Apple Music but I’m happy to share. Not everything is available on streaming but I’ve added everything else to my library.
https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/the-b-sides/pl.u-v0D0DTx9KK0