La-la-la, la-la-la-la-la

As chat-up lines go, it was crude. The first time bad-boy rock star Michael Hutchence clapped eyes on good-girl pop star Kylie Minogue, it was at an Australian Music Awards after-party in 1987. The charismatic INXS frontman slurred drunkenly, “I don’t know what we should do first—have lunch or have sex.” Then, before she could reply, he vanished into the night.

A couple of years later, his approach was a little more sophisticated. The story goes that Hutchence seduced his fellow Australian by reading aloud to her from Milan Kundera’s philosophical novel Immortality. Years later, Kylie still named the tome as her favourite book of all time. One of the things she liked about it, she explained, was its presentation of fame as a masochistic pursuit, because your reward for successfully running it to ground is invariably to become the quarry. “You are a winner, but you are a loser,” was the way she put it.

Another lesson she took away from two years with Hutchence, before he broke up with her over the phone, was that performers have to don “the ego jacket”: a blend of persona and personality, which protects them from the crowd. Kylie has worn an array of different jackets down the decades. Commenting on the Spice Girls, she once said that she had been all of them, at one time or other. It is that chameleonic quality that forms the organising theme of this delightful biographical study by the Guardian writer and Kylie super-fan Michael Cragg.

His book divides her career into ten chronological image-phases. Thus we kick off with CuteKylie in the mid-1980s, when she switched from playing spunky mechanic Charlene in the soap opera Neighbours to being a pop star. Later we get the IndieKylie of the Britpop years, when, a little rudderless, she collaborated with the Manic Street Preachers. Later still, there’s ImperialPhaseKylie, so-called to indicate the purple patch during which the diminutive singer could do no wrong, held aloft by the song from which this book takes its title—Can’t Get You Out of My Head, with its hypnotic refrain of la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la, a chorus that for my money is up there with ob-la-di, ob-la-da as an expression of the mindless majesty of pop.

These costume changes are interspersed with droll personal anecdotes from Cragg. How skilfully such authorial interventions are handled is going to be a key test, I think, of non-fiction in the age of AI. For they cannot be faked or found elsewhere. Thus we learn how Cragg accidentally came out online, owing to a Kylie-related conversation with his husband, which he impulsively posted about. And we smile as, while visiting the street where Kylie grew up in Melbourne, he has a moment of self-consciousness and pretends to be lost.

On the whole, though—and, I would argue, crucially—Cragg is unapologetic about his love for his not-always-cool subject. This celebratory brazenness sets his book apart from the slightly dour study of George Michael by Sathnam Sanghera that was released earlier this year, and makes Can’t Get You Out of My Head: In Search of Kylie very hard to resist.

All of which conceded, I had a couple of qualms about the book. The first is the surprising decision by the author, if he is really in search of Kylie, to devote so little time to her childhood. It’s dispatched in three paragraphs. Nor, oddly, do we learn if he tried to persuade the singer to contribute. If he did, and she said no, that would tell us something. If he didn’t, why not?

My second qualm or question is whether, for all Cragg’s energetic optimism, his subject can really withstand such a weight of scrutiny. Listening to her oeuvre, and notwithstanding her bruited reinventions, I was struck by how similar a lot of the songs are. There’s not that much to separate the mood of 2000’s Spinning Around, say, from 2024’s Someone For Me.

On reflection, though, I realised that this hidden consistency is evidently one of the secrets to her success. You know what you’re getting with Kylie. And, as much to the point, you know what you’re not getting. One of the many highlights of this funny and often insightful study is the section in which Cragg quotes a series of celebrities attempting to define the essence of Kylie. “She’s the anti-Madonna,” declares the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. For the pop star and actor Olly Alexander, meanwhile, Kylie is “like a friend”.

My favourite take comes from Scissor Sisters singer Jake Shears, who explains, first, her gay icon status. “She’s a showgirl at heart and gays love a good showgirl.” Then he returns to the comparison with Madonna. “If Madonna is the Wicked Witch of the West, then Kylie is Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.” On the face of it, Glinda is by far the less interesting witch. It’s no coincidence that there isn’t a spin-off musical entitled Good. Yet the goodness of Glinda and the innocence of Kylie, her essential girlishness, have their power, too.

When the planes hit the Twin Towers in 2001, Kylie happened to have a single due out. A few days later, Can’t Get You Out of My Head was released, and in the weeks that followed, her song was hailed in the press as an expression of one of our values that was worth fighting for. By this argument, the West’s best response to Allahu Akbar was la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la.

The implication is that Cragg’s decision not to delve into Kylie’s childhood was right. It was better, too, that this book wasn’t built around a series of conversations with his subject.

Is she a limited singer? There are some who say so. Is she a limited dancer? I’m in no position to judge. But like the bubble in which the Good Witch Glinda travels, Kylie’s weightlessness is what has borne her up over the past five decades, and gifted her a No 1 album in each. That is why her ego jacket is intact, and why, to this day, you can’t get her out of the charts.