How Kylie Minogue’s Music Career Got Off To A Rocky Start

She is one of the most successful recording artists in Australian music history, but Kylie Minogue’s career may have turned out very differently. A new episode of podcast A Journey Through Stock Aitken Waterman delves into the stories behind her first two singles, Locomotion and I Should Be So Lucky, and hears from people who were instrumental in them both becoming massive successes.

In 1987, producer Mike Duffy was working for Mushroom Records on secondment from PWL – the home of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman (SAW), who had already been responsible for worldwide hits by Dead Or Alive, Bananarama, Princess and Mel & Kim at this stage. Handed Minogue’s demo recording of Locomotion by Mushroom’s Michael Gudinski and Gary Ashley, Duffy was tasked with turning the big band track into something more pop. But the first attempt did not turn out well, with Duffy saying that “everybody wanted to get involved” due to Minogue’s popularity from her role on Neighbours.

“Gudinski came to me and said, ‘Look, I’m going to give you this amount of money, no one’s going to get involved, it’s your baby,’” Duffy told the podcast. “I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ and [decided] hi-NRG, Dead Or Alive was where I wanted to take it. Kylie was on holiday in Hawaii, so I took all the vocals off her original multi-track. When Kylie got back from overseas, she heard it and was happy with it.”

After Locomotion became a massive success in Australia, it was decided Minogue would fly to London to work directly with SAW on the follow-up. Problem was: Waterman omitted to tell songwriters and producers Stock and Aitken. Minogue was infamously kept waiting until the day she was due to leave London. David Howells, the managing director of PWL Records, and Waterman had signed Minogue to a joint development deal with Gudinski and Ashley, and it was left to Howells to sort out the mess so the singer didn’t leave without a song.

“I was very, very frustrated," Howells told the podcast. “My sympathy was with Kylie and her manager, Terry Blamey. We’d extended this invitation to them, we’d discussed it internally. It was tap dancing of a high order to keep them busy and very, very annoying. Terry was about to explode because he’d had every diversion possible in the history of music.”

Ultimately, Howells broke with tradition and spoke to Stock and Aitken directly – normally the domain of Waterman, who was absent from the studios.

“Pete hadn't talked about it with them, so on Kylie's last day in Britain, I went and told them, we have a predicament here,” Howells recalled.

Stock and Aitken rose to the occasion, writing I Should Be So Lucky on the fly and feeding it to Minogue line by line, verse by verse. It was recorded in less than an hour.

"We were furious, Matt and me," Stock told the podcast. "It wasn’t like we weren't up to our eyes in work. That particular day, I was probably working on three different acts. I didn’t want to insult her or just turn her away, so we had to come up with something."

For the full story of Locomotion and I Should Be So Lucky, listen to A Journey Through Stock Aitken Waterman on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and all major podcast platforms or at chartbeats.com.au/saw