Hindsight is always 20/20, which is why it seems impossible to imagine not associating Kylie Minogue with her chart-topping hit that embedded itself into everyone’s brain in the early 2000s. True to the song’s title, the track was a perfectly infectious pop hit, featuring lyrics that are easy to remember and a melody that’s easy to sing.
But for a brief moment in the metallic, bubblegum pop fever dream that was Y2K, Minogue wasn’t the first pick for what is now considered her signature song. In fact, she wasn’t even the second pick.
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Kylie Minogue Wasn’t the First Pick for This Chart-Topping Hit
Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue released “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” on September 8, 2001. And indeed, the song’s title couldn’t have been more accurate. The song fits all the requirements to be a pop hit. Excellent vocal delivery, catchy beat, fun lyrics, and, just for good measure, plenty of “la, la, la”s to sing along to. Unsurprisingly, the earworm topped the charts around the world, including the U.S. (on Billboard’s Dance Club Songs chart), the U.K., Minogue’s native Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and elsewhere.
The song’s ubiquity has inextricably linked it to Minogue and her musical legacy as a pop star. But she wasn’t the first pick for the track. Songwriters Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis originally pitched “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” to S Club 7 and Sophie Ellis-Bextor. Both British pop acts turned it down. Fortunately for Minogue, her A&R representatives Miles Leonard and Jamie Nelson were on the case. In a 2012 interview with The Quietus, Minogue recalled getting a call from Leonard and Nelson inviting her to the office to play her something.
“About 20 seconds in…I couldn’t even fathom what I was hearing,” Minogue said. “It just…did something. I was beside myself. Then, at the end of the song, panic set in. I was saying, ‘Are you sure we’ve got this song? Don’t tell me that we don’t! Is it secured? Can we have it?’ And we did! And that kick-started a whole different phase in my career.”
In the End, She Was the Right Pop Star for the Job
Songwriting duo Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis wrote the international hit, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”, in about three and a half hours. “It does annoy me, as it will annoy others,” Dennis admitted in a 2011 interview with M Magazine. But as they say, when you know, you know, and the songwriters knew they had something special on their hands. Kylie Minogue obviously did too when she demanded her A&R representatives to secure the song for her before she even hit the minute mark of the playback.
When Minogue recorded her chart-topping version of the hit song, she kept her rendition true to the demo. “The Kylie version is basically the demo, same key and everything,” Davis explained. “It wasn’t mixed and mastered, but the parts were all there. I think I added a little bit of guitar and strings when we mixed it.” Although the song didn’t fit the typical pop structure of verse-chorus-verse-chorus, that’s part of what makes the song so addicting. The unexpected structure of the track makes our ears perk up. Thus, the song gets played and played and played again.
In the end, Dennis doesn’t think the song was meant for anyone but Minogue. “Even though Kylie wasn’t the first artist to be offered the song, I don’t believe it was meant to go to anyone other than Kylie. And I don’t believe anyone else would have done the incredible job she did with it, with the video, looking super-hot.”
Photo by Jon Super/Redferns