Kylie Minogue
‘Give Me Just A Little More Time’
Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 2 on January 26, 1992
Celebrities aren’t real people.
It doesn’t matter how authentic they seem. Adele singing about her love life, Paul Rudd being an ageless everyman, Jennifer Lawrence being an adorkable ditz — none of that stuff is real.
They’re all fictional characters. They’re brands. They’re as real as a Big Mac or an iPhone.
Of course, there is a real human being behind the brand. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’re inside the brand. The brand is like a Halloween costume that the person can never remove.
(Except Dolly Parton. Apparently, when she removes her wig and makeup and the rest of the Dolly costume, she can walk around Nashville and nobody recognises her. Another reason Dolly is the greatest.)
The person behind the persona doesn’t always control it. For example, the Britney Spears brand has been a kind of prison cell for the actual Britney Spears, with first Disney and then the Spears family acting as her wardens.
So, if you want to understand any celebrity, you don’t ask “who are they, really?”
You ask, “who owns their persona?”
In the late 1980s, the whole world fell in love with a beautiful, feisty Australian teenager named Charlene Mitchell.
Two million Australians and twenty million British people tuned into Neighbours in July 1987 to watch as Charlene got married to her long-term boyfriend, Scott Robinson.
Of course, Charlene wasn’t real. She was just a character. And the person who played her, Kylie Minogue, was in the process of moving away from soap operas.
Minogue had enjoyed something of a surprise hit in Australia when her cover of ‘The Locomotion’ had hit Number One. That song caught the attention of British superproducers Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman, three guys who would do anything for a hit. SAW had already hit the charts with acts ranging from Samatha Fox to Roland Rat.
Clearly, all they saw Kylie was the opportunity for a quick cash-in. She flew out to London to meet them, and the three producers scribbled down some song lyrics in the space of ten minutes. Kylie laid down her vocal track in under an hour, and was then back on a plane to Australia.
‘I Should Be So Lucky’ exploded into the UK charts, remaining at Number One for five weeks and turning into pop sensation.
Mike Stock had a meeting with Minogue where he got on his knees and begged her to forgive them for treating her so badly. She signed a three-album deal and agreed to their strategy.
And so, a new character was born: Kylie.
Who is Kylie?
Kylie is small, bubbly, wholesome. Kylie is an unthreatening kind of pretty. Kylie is your friend’s big sister. Your parents would let Kylie babysit, and they would come home to find Kylie and the kids singing into hairbrushes.
“Kylie”, the persona, was wholly owned by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and the crown jewel of their late 80s music empire.
But then the 90s happened, and the empire started to crumble.
Bubblegum dance-pop with its synths and hi-hats began to sound stale compared to the increasingly sophisticated loops and breakbeats of the rave scene. All of the Hit Factory acts struggled in the 90s. Rick Astley quit in bitter circumstances and recorded an angry solo album. Mike Aitken quit, citing burnout.
Even Kylie faced a challenge—from her own sister. Dannii was younger, cooler, sexier, and used the hip-hop and house music beats that had made the Hit Factory sound obsolete.
Everything was changing.
And this is when there was a huge change in the direction of the Kylie brand, as Kylie Minogue herself stepped in to take control. Stock and Waterman agreed to credit her as co-writer on the new album, which is something that they refused to do for most of their other artists.
The resulting album, Let’s Get to It, is Kylie’s worst-performing record, barely scraping into the Top 20. It’s not great. There are some real low points, such as the closing track, ‘I Guess I Like It Like That’ which samples ‘No Limits’ by 2 Unlimited.
It’s beneath Kylie.
The biggest hit from the Let’s Get to It is a cover of 1970 hit ‘Give Me Just a Little More Time’ by Chairmen of the Board.
‘Give Me Just a Little More Time’ was Kylie’s last Top 10 hit for The Hit Factory, and the final Top 10 hit for the classic roster of Stock, Aitken and Waterman acts. Stock and Waterman went back to novelty acts; their next Top 10 hit was ‘Slam Jam’ by the stars of WWF.)
The Stock Aitken and Waterman era of Kylie was over. It started with a cover version; it ended with a cover version.
But, in this video, we get a glimpse of Kylie’s future.
It’s a sexy video, but sexy in a different way from videos like ‘Shocked’. Confident, womanly, mature. And there’s a sense that Minogue is the one calling the shots here.
Minogue was also calling the shots elsewhere. Little known fact, but in 1992 she released white label dance 12”s under the name Angel K. This identity allowed her to create music that DJs could play without clubbers going, “ew, is that Kylie?”
The 90s are going to be a hell of a decade for Kylie. There’s SexKylie, IndieKylie, Kylie and Nick Cave, G.A.Y. Kylie, and gold hotpants Kylie; all before she evolves Pokemon-like into her final form: National Treasure Kylie.
But right now, in 1992, only one thing matters. The Kylie brand is back in the hands of Kylie Minogue.
Related reading: Dannii vs Kylie [April 8, 1991]
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