The Day Kylie Scared A Burglar: How The Worlds Of Kylie And A Crime Beat Reporter Collided

My Kylie reporting career peaked on April 21, 1988, with the perfect mix of Kylie and crime.

I was a second-year cadet at The Melbourne Sun, spending most of my time as the junior at police rounds, which was a great place for a young reporter. We worked out of the office, next to the St Kilda Road police complex, and The Sun was a wonderful cops ’n’ robbers paper.

But in 1987 – my first year out of high school – the paper developed a new obsession: a young soap star named Kylie Minogue. The editor, Colin Duck, realised that along with crime and Collingwood, Kylie could sell papers, so when I was not writing about the road toll and house fires, I focused on “the girl next door”.

She was “Our Kylie”.

My crime-reporting colleagues dubbed me “the Kylie Reporter”. It was not a term of endearment. I remember walking into the office one day, proud of another Kylie story in the paper, and I was met by a journalist named Brian Walsh (who ironically shared a name with the Channel 10 publicist instrumental in the rise of Neighbours).

“What are you doing?” Walshy said, shaking his head. “Roundsmen don’t write about soap stars!”

But then my two worlds collided.

I can’t recall how I got the story; it must have been a tip-off from a cop. I raced to my computer and breathlessly reported:

“Neighbours star Kylie Minogue scared off a burglar trying to raid her family’s home at the weekend. The young thief fled empty-handed when he spotted the TV star walking into the house … the incident happened on Saturday, just hours after Kylie had returned from England.

“An obviously shaken Kylie called [the] police.”

It wasn’t quite Walkley Award-winning stuff, but it was a great Sun story, and I’ll never forget the banner poster outside every Victorian newsagency the following day:

KYLIE SCARES BURGLAR EXCLUSIVE

I’m not sure when I first met Kylie. It might have been at the launch of her first book in the Mushroom Records’ boardroom on December 1, 1987. It was a 32-page, $4.95 publication. “I’m only 19,” the singer confessed, “I haven’t got enough to fill a thick book.”

The publication was launched by Gavin Wood, “the voice of Countdown”, who flipped through a few pages and said, “I now declare this book open!”

It was written by Inpress co-founder Andrew Watt, who later confessed he was Kylie’s “stooge” at press conferences. “Kylie had become fodder for the tabloids by now, and thus, any appearance she made in front of the press was a potential minefield,” Andrew later revealed. “My role was to be ready with an easy ‘Dorothy Dixer’ whenever the going got tough.

“Kylie was briefed that whenever the less charitable members of the press sought to ask her about a difficult topic, such as the publishing of topless photos, she would look to me for a less controversial question. I was always ready with a standard music-related query.

“I played this spoiler role at a couple of press conferences and was ready to do it again at another that was being held at the old Rialto Hotel in Melbourne. The difficult question was asked, and, on cue, I put up my hand. Kylie looked over to me and then almost imperceptibly shrugged and proceeded to answer the initial lascivious inquiry.

“I realised that my work here was done. The timid young lady I had met a few months earlier was hardening up.”

Indeed, she was. In 1989, Kylie declared war on her old employers, the Grundy Organisation, taking them to court to try to stop the release of a 90-minute video called Scott and Charlene: A Love Story.

“I have spent a lot of time getting away from Charlene,” Kylie told me, “so I don’t want this sort of thing stuck on the video shelves forever. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who say, ‘Neighbours made you what you are’; well, it hasn’t. In Germany and France and America, people knew me long before they knew of Neighbours. In fact, I probably helped Neighbours get sold over there.”

The artist was defiant. “With the Grundy’s case, that will go on. I won’t rest. It’s exploitation.”

These were crazy days, perhaps the start of the new celebrity journalism in Australia. In November 1988, The Truth newspaper even ran a piece headed: “Kylie, Is She An Alien?”

At the start of 1988, as Kylie was preparing to perform for Prince Charles and Princess Diana at the Bicentennial Concert, I was dispatched to Channel 10 to find out what she would be wearing on the big night. What does a young girl wear when she meets her Prince? 

The story ran on the front page.

The main focus of the press back in those days was Kylie and Jason: Are they or aren’t they?

In June 1989, I sat down with Jason Donovan for an interview to coincide with his 21st birthday and the release of his debut album, Ten Good Reasons. The UK press was running reports of a romance between Jason and Transvision Vamp singer Wendy James.

“Wendy’s great,” Jason told me, “I met her on a plane going to Germany. But, once again, it’s the press which has made it into something it isn’t … like Mandy Smith – two weeks before the wedding [to Rolling Stone Bill Wyman], the headline in London was ‘Randy Mandy Goes Handy With Jason’ … I’d spoken to her once that night!”

Of course, Jason and Kylie were playing their own games with the press. Jason looked me in the eye and said: “I have never gone out with Kylie. She has been a really close friend of mine for a long, long time. We’ve kept it friends because we didn’t want to spoil a relationship for something which might be fickle.”

Four months later, Jason was devastated when Kylie broke up with him – after nearly four years together.

Soon after, we heard rumours that Kylie was dating Michael Hutchence. The stories were coming from “reliable sources”, but I was sceptical. Musically, they were poles apart; surely, they couldn’t be together?

One of my colleagues at The Sun was a masterful TV journalist named David Baird. A dapper Englishman, David managed to insert the words “saucy” and “buxom” into just about every story he wrote.

“This is what you do,” David instructed me, “You call Michael Hutchence, and you say, ‘Here’s the deal, Michael, we’re running this story tomorrow – the headline is Michael, My Love For Kylie … what do you want to say?’”

A couple of months later, I did have an interview with Michael, but it was meant to be about Max Q, his project with Ollie Olsen – the subject of Kylie was strictly off-limits.

I started the story: “Talk to Michael Hutchence about the groups INXS and Max Q, and he’s good-humoured. Talk to him about his lover Kylie Minogue, and the Devil Inside comes out …”

After I’d exhausted my Max Q enquiries, I decided to throw in some Kylie questions.

“Can we talk about music?” was Michael’s gruff reply.

Sure, I said, will you and Kylie work together musically?

“What, Kylie and I? No, she’s got her life, and I’ve got mine.”

Will Michael Hutchence get married this year?

“I’m not planning to … Look, if you keep asking me questions about Kylie, I’m going to hang up.”

How are Kylie’s persuasive powers when it comes to convincing you to quit smoking?

“Good and bad. It’s a horrible drug. It should be illegal, it really should.”

Michael again threatened to hang up if I didn’t return to the subject of Max Q. I asked another Kylie question, and … he hung up.

Around this time, I was lucky enough to be at Kylie’s “secret” show, a warm-up for her first Australian tour. The band was advertised as “The Singing Budgies” – a reference to Kylie’s then nickname. She played 13 songs from her first two albums, as well as a cover of My Girl. At the bottom of the setlist, Kylie had scrawled three words: “Look, Dance, Enjoy”.

The story that ran in the following day’s Sun started:

“Kylie Minogue answered one of the showbusiness world’s longest-running questions in a sensational ‘secret’ show in Melbourne last night. 

“Can she sing? Yes, she can.

“After being holed up in a Richmond studio for the past week rehearsing, Kylie let loose at Carlton’s Cadillac Bar in a spectacular 90-minute show.

“In the capacity crowd at the swanky Swanston Street bar was boyfriend Michael Hutchence. But as Kylie opened with Locomotion at 10.45 pm, no engagement ring was on her finger – dampening speculation that the two are to tie the knot.

“The Singing Budgie and her 15-piece band dazzled the crowd with what was Kylie’s first totally live show in the world. The show was meant to be a secret warm-up for Kylie’s national tour.”

More than three hours before Kylie hit the stage, hundreds of people queued outside. By showtime, another few hundred jammed the road outside the club.

“Every part of Melbourne’s groovy scene is here,” a record company person yelled in my ear. Even Cliff Richard was rumoured to be there.

When I went backstage before the show, I was surprised to find that James Freud from Models was part of Kylie’s band, playing bass.

The previous year, when promoting his solo album Step Into The Heat, James had declared: “I hate Stock, Aitken and Waterman. I think they’ve set popular music back 20 years and they’ve created the situation where young kids are just buying the rubbish. I’ll be glad the day SAW disappear. It’s not going to last much longer, it really isn’t. That’s the only ray of sunshine I can see.”

But after the show, James seemed happy, though I laughed when he told me: “Everything was going perfectly until a cute girl up the front winked at me, and I totally stuffed up what I was playing.”

I’m not sure if I ever asked Kylie about the day she scared the burglar. But I wrote many more Kylie stories in 1988 and 1989. By 1990, I was struggling to come up with a fresh angle. I even thought about calling 10 random people in the phone book and asking them: “What question would you like to ask Kylie?” The girl next door had become a household name.

Instead, I wrote what I claimed was a “world exclusive”.

“It was a surprise attack, a dirty trick,” I wrote in The Sun on February 1, 1990. “I start our interview, ‘If it’s all right by you, I just want to talk about music. If we can forget the fact that you were once a huge soapie star and that you’ve just starred in a movie …’

“After a slight pause, Kylie said, ‘Oh, fantastic.’”

I explained the rationale: “Last December, Kylie pondered during an interview with The Sun, ‘It’s funny, I’ve made two records, and I’m about to tour, but no one ever wants to talk about music. They’ll make some mention of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, but then all they want to talk about is nude scenes and who I’m going out with.’”

So, I decided it was time to talk music.

Kylie revealed that Young MC was her current fave (“I’m heavily into rap at the moment”); Grease and Olivia Newton-John made her want to be a singer; Prince’s Lovesexy Tour in London at the start of 1989 was her favourite concert, and when she was at school, she’d been a fan of Leif Garrett, Sherbet, Skyhooks, the Bay City Rollers, ABBA, “and anyone that was disco. I was a disco child”.

Kylie couldn’t nominate a favourite heavy metal band, and she revealed that she’d written a couple of songs with sister Dannii.

We also had a chat about taking risks. “I always say that you can’t walk until you take a step,” she said. “But when you’re stepping, you’re on one foot, and you can easily be pushed over.” She laughed. “I have strange ways of describing things. But if you don’t make that move, you’ll never grow, and you’ll never learn, and you can only learn from your mistakes.”

Both Kylie and Dannii were a delight to deal with. Dannii is one of the few people to ever call me to express thanks for a story. “I loved every word,” she said the day in 1988 when I had an article in The Sun headed “The New Kid In Town”.

That story contained the question that the Minogue sisters were asked a million times in the ensuing years: When would they do a song together? “Dannii would like to do something with Kylie,” I reported, “but not at this point, ‘because if you do something together, people can only see you as a duo. We’ve got to establish our own solo careers first.’”

I mentioned a Minogue in most of my stories. At the end of 1988, Melbourne beat Sydney and Brisbane for the right to bid for the 1996 Olympics. I asked Dannii if she and Kylie would like to sing at the opening of the Melbourne Olympics. “That would be fantastic,” Dannii replied, and I had another story.

Then, in 1990, I managed to match the Kylie and crime mix – we put Dannii in a Collingwood jumper on the eve of the 1990 Grand Final. Even though Dannii was obviously not a footy fan – she confessed she didn’t even know the rules – I knew I was on a winner, mixing a Minogue with the Magpies. And I uncovered the fact that a guy named Dan Minogue played for Collingwood in the 1910s.

It pained me to write the story – because Collingwood was playing my beloved Bombers – but I wrote:

“Dannii Minogue hopes the title of her new single is a good omen for Collingwood: Success. She hopes the Minogue magic touch rubs off on the mighty Maggies tomorrow at the MCG.”

It was my last front-page story for the paper. The Pies beat the Bombers, and the Monday after the Grand Final, The Sun merged with its sister paper, The Herald, and I lost my job.

My Kylie reporting career didn’t resume until I joined TV Week magazine in the mid-’90s when I encountered a different Kylie. The distinct Aussie accent was long gone, and she was much more guarded.

Meanwhile, The Herald Sun’s Kylie obsession continued, with the paper’s gun music writer Cameron Adams – a devoted Kylie fan – cranking out countless Kylie and Dannii exclusives.

I returned to their pages in sad circumstances in 2005, helping Molly Meldrum pen a piece for the paper after Kylie had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Molly broke down when Michael Gudinski’s wife, Sue, told him the news. “My mind raced back to last November when I flew to London to interview Kylie for the release of her Ultimate Kylie album,” Molly wrote. “At the end of the interview, I presented Kylie with one of my hats, joking that if I ever abdicated, she could be the next Queen of Australia.

“It’s no joke to say that Kylie is Australia’s pop queen.”

Molly has always had a close connection to Kylie. In fact, he made his soapie debut in Episode 351 of Neighbours, starring alongside a young Kylie. 

The storyline was that Scott (played by Jason Donovan) and Mike (Guy Pearce) had recorded a song called I Believe, with Charlene (Kylie) on vocals. Scott and Mike delivered the demo tape to Molly and his assistant, Lynne Randell. They didn’t think much of the song but liked Charlene’s voice.

Charlene and her mum, Madge (Anne Charleston), visited Molly’s house and he arranged for the young mechanic to meet a “Mr Big” of the music business.

“Me?” an incredulous Charlene said to the record executive. “You want me? I could be a singer?!”

Molly wanted Michael Gudinski to play the “Mr Big”, but the music mogul wouldn’t be in it. A few months later, however, Mushroom signed Kylie, and her debut single, Locomotion, became the label’s biggest single ever.

Gudinski would later say: “Kylie is probably the greatest example of how much can be done from a weird starting point.” Pop was a dirty word at Mushroom when Kylie started her music career, and she also had to contend with the soapie-star-turned-singer stigma. “I was a bit of a joke then,” she admits.

As soon as I saw the Locomotion video – choreographed by Tania Lacy – I knew it would be a smash hit. But if I’m honest, I believed that Kylie’s music career would not amount to much more than One Hit Wonder status.

Nearly four decades later, Kylie has had more Top 40 hits in Australia than any other Aussie act.

No local artist has had more chart-topping singles. And Kylie is the only person to have won Logies, ARIAs, Brit Awards and Grammys.

She’s the Melbourne girl whose pop fantasy came true. Kylie remembers her childhood: “I would sing into my hairbrush, daydreaming that the man who lived next door would hear me sing and he would magically be a record producer.”

Back in 1989, Kylie admitted to me: “I don’t have what it takes to be arty and credible, but that doesn’t really worry me.”

But Kylie became the queen of reinvention and pop’s ultimate survivor. In 2004’s Ultimate Kylie TV special, she explained to Molly: “What they [the critics] have had to get their heads around is there are lots of different sides. I assume all people are like this; we’re all multi-faceted. I’ve had to try to break that way of thinking from day one. If you’re an actor, you can’t sing, and if you’re a singer, you can’t act ... That doesn’t sit with me; I don’t agree with that.”

Later, she added that “boredom” helped fuel the constant image changes. “I’ve always enjoyed playing with image,” she noted. “And everyone changes.”

It’s a fairy tale. But music fairy tales don’t happen by accident. You need good people around you, and Kylie has been blessed with a supportive family, great management – Terry Blamey, who looked after her career for 25 years – as well as the belief of people such as Gudinski, Molly, and Amanda Pelman – who signed Kylie to Mushroom Records. And let’s not forget Greg Petherick, the Channel 10 producer who noticed and nurtured Kylie’s singing talent and got her into the studio to record the demo that landed the Mushroom deal.

And, most importantly, Kylie has an incredible work ethic, and remarkable resilience.

When I worked on a radio special to coincide with the release of the Fever album, Kylie reflected on that “secret” show at the Cadillac Bar at the start of 1990. “I was so nervous,” she confided. “The ‘Singing Budgie’ line does define that period. It was a time of vitriol, but we managed to turn that around and make it work.”

But Kylie hasn’t totally forgotten the pain of being constantly criticised. “To this day, there’s a little tiny bit in me that can’t let go of that hurt.”

Kylie can laugh, however, about many of her early videos. “Maybe there were more hair don’ts than hair-dos, but that’s okay because we were all doing it.”

Google “Kylie”, and you’ll discover that it’s an Aboriginal word for boomerang. It’s appropriate because Kylie keeps coming back. But then, she’s never really gone away. She’s been a part of our lives since she walked into Ramsay Street in 1986, punching Scott Robinson (Jason Donovan), who would later become her on-screen husband. 

Despite her success, Kylie is still the girl from Camberwell High, the music fan who grew up loving Grease and ABBA. She can quote the line from Muriel’s Wedding when Muriel says: “When I lived in Porpoise Spit, I used to sit in my room for hours and listen to ABBA songs. But since I’ve met you and moved to Sydney, I haven’t listened to one ABBA song. That’s because my life is as good as an ABBA song. It’s as good as Dancing Queen.”

Over the summer break, I read Spinning Around, The Kylie Playlist, a book where Aussie authors write short stories inspired by Kylie songs. 

The editors had a neat summation of Kylie’s career and enduring appeal.

“She doesn’t fade,” Kirsten Krauth said. “Small, blonde, smiling, malleable. Always underestimated.”

“And radiant,” Angela Savage added. “Always radiant.”

Kylie Minogue’s Tension Tour of Australia begins this weekend in Perth. You can find last-minute tickets via the Frontier Touring website.