FEATURE: Stick or Twist? Kylie Minogue’s Confide in Me at Twenty-Nine

FEATURE:

 

 

Stick or Twist?

PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Boyd

 

Kylie Minogue’s Confide in Me at Twenty-Nine

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BECAUSE this song turns twenty-nine….

 PHOTO CREDIT: RANKIN

on 29th August, I wanted to highlight Kylie Minogue’s best song. That may be controversial given the other songs people could name – Can’t Get You Out of My Head for one! -, but I think that she has not eclipsed the drama, mood and impact of the 1994 hit single. Actually, as BBC Radio 2 are counting down listeners’ top forty Kylie Minogue songs on 28th August, they have declared that Can’t Get You Out of My Head is the best. Confide in Me was placed fourth. I think it is her best song. I am going to get to some reaction and reception to the incredible tracks. From her Kylie Minogue album, the album itself remains underrated. This was a more experimental and different-sounding album compared to her previous ones. I am not sure whether many people – bedside the big Kylie Minogue fans – have listened to it. Its undeniable highlight is Confide in Me. There is a lot to discuss. It is quite timely given the celebration of Minogue’s work by BBC Radio 2. Listeners voted Confide in Me her fourth-best song. Not a bad result to be fair - though, I feel it should have been the champion. It is phenomenal! I have recently covered this track for my Groovelines feature. I felt compelled to return to it because of the anniversary – and the fact it is clearly a beloved Minogue cut. A song that went to number two in the U.K. chart, it was definitely an unexpected move from Minogue. If most were pleasantly surprised by this twist and hit, some felt a little less warm towards it.

This inedible feature took a closer look at the lead up to the song’s release and where Kylie Minogue was in her career. I think it is among my favourite tracks ever. It has that epic sweep and stir of a James Bond theme, with this uniquely Kylie Minogue delivery. After twenty-nine years, Confide in Me does not sound dated at all:

“Nobody had heard from Kylie Minogue in two years.  After the release of her 1992 Greatest Hits collection, Kylie split from long-time production and songwriting partners Stock-Aitkin-Waterman.  They had given the Australian former-soap star her music career, turning what was expected to be a flash-in-the-pan novelty by an actress who fluked her way into a record deal – her breakout performance at a benefit concert for beloved Australian football team Fitzroy Football Club with her fellow Neighbours cast singing “I Got You Babe” fast-tracked into a deal with Mushroom Records and then her mega-hit cover of “The Locomotion” – into a consistent hit parade throughout the late-80s.  She was primed for crossover success in the UK, Neighbours had become a ratings juggernaut as an import and her character’s relationship with Jason Donovan’s Scott Robinson eventually culminated in a wedding episode that logged almost 20 million viewers, but it definitely didn’t hurt none that she did so off the back of tracks like “I Should Be So Lucky” and “Better the Devil You Know.”

But Kylie was becoming restless and unfulfilled.  She was growing tired of singing empty high-energy bubblegum pop and, more importantly, tired of Stock-Aitkin-Waterman not letting her have a say in the music.  In the early days, she’d go along with what they wanted because she didn’t know what kind of musician she wanted to be yet.  By 1992, she was more confident of herself and knew that the songs she was singing weren’t up to snuff after the 1991 album Let’s Get to It flopped worldwide.  S-A-W, meanwhile, had fallen on hard times and become easy punching bags for the rest of the music industry.  Their formula for hitmaking craven, their sound dated and grating, their songs interchangeable, their flashes of genuine brilliance vanishing, their hits drying up and their artists being left behind in the previous decade.  Matt Aitkin had left the trio in 1991 citing that their records had started to sound the same even to him, and Kylie’s Let’s Get to It saw Matt Stock and Pete Waterman trying extremely badly to move with the times.  Overwrought adult contemporary ballads, Janet Jackson bites, embarrassing appropriations of New Jack Swing.  None of it worked, the songs weren’t there and the duo’s production suffocated any life there might have been through dated effects and shrill tones.  The chart-conquering partnership would officially dissolve in 1993, a year after Kylie left Waterman’s label.

During her time with S-A-W, Kylie had become entranced by club music.  Kylie had always made dance music, but the cheese and teeny-bop nature of S-A-W’s typical production and songwriting meant that cooler non-commercial clubs, the kind of clubs you think of when you envision “clubs,” pretty much turned their noses up at playing her songs.  But by the time she split with S-A-W, her music wasn’t all that far removed from the trendy downtempo club grooves of the time, so long as a savvy enough pair of hands could realise and tease out that fact.

Enter: Brothers in Rhythm.  Steve Anderson, Dave Seaman and Alan Bremner were a DJ collective making waves on the underground club scene who had scored an unlikely crossover hit in September of ‘91 with “Such a Good Feeling” when they were charged with remixing Kylie’s “Finer Feelings” for the single release and their efforts demonstrate a night-and-day effect between the then-modern sound of the pop-adjacent underground and S-A-W’s clumsy efforts to replicate it for themselves.  The album version aims for Soul II Soul but can’t help crowding the mix with blaring chorus vocals, tinny compressed drums that negate the groove, and crushing the space so every aspect of the track is forced to shout over each other in an effort to be heard.  The Brothers’ remix does not fundamentally change the song, structurally it is damn-near identical, but by opening up the track – mixing the chorus harmonies significantly deeper so as not to overpower Kylie, replacing the synthetic drums with a cleaner and punchier loop, dirtying up the bass burble to create a proper groove, and giving every element of the track room to breathe – they turn a missed opportunity into one of Kylie’s most underrated treasures.  (Seriously, I’ve listened to this thing at least 20 times during the course of writing today’s piece.  It slaps.)

“Finer Feelings” stalled out at #11 and only spent four weeks total in the Top 40, but it evidently galvanised Kylie because the Brothers in Rhythm were one of her first ports of call when putting together her fifth studio album, first away from S-A-W, and her first new music in two years (having otherwise released something every few months between 1987 and 1992).  Whilst still signed to Mushroom in her native Australia, Kylie chose to shirk all major labels in the UK and make her new home DeConstruction, a house music label then best-known for K-Klass, Bassheads, M People, and Felix whose groundbreaking “Don’t You Want Me” had gone to #6 in 1992 and launched the hardbag movement.  Such a move was unheard of at the time and was undeniably a statement of intent.  The last music anyone had heard from her was an utterly lifeless cover of Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration” done up in the signature S-A-W production style and which she sounded audibly disinterested and downright miserable on.  As later revealed in her 2002 biography Kylie Naked, upon signing with DeConstruction she had a meeting with the label that laid out her career as such: “We had two choices–to record pop songs that would sell, or to experiment, let me loose in a field and see what happens.”  Over a strenuous near-two-year recording process, she went with the latter.

“Confide in Me” was released on the 29th August 1994, almost exactly two years to the day after the release of the Greatest Hits album with that “Celebration” cover on it, as both the first single from her upcoming self-titled record and the opening song on its track list.  It is five minutes and fifty-two seconds long.  For almost the first minute of that runtime, there is no beat, no lyric; instead devoted to scene-setting orchestration by Will Malone akin to that of a film score.  It took until 2004’s greatest hits compilation Ultimate Kylie for the release of an officially-labelled “Radio Edit.”  It was the first proper collaboration that Kylie would have with the Brothers in Rhythm – although they had put in remixed work on the version of “Automatic Love” that would end up on the album, a hold-over from Kylie’s aborted work with Saint Ettienne and The Rapino Brothers at the production’s outset.  It is a statement record if there ever was one, designed to be a firm line in the sand dividing Kylie’s prior frothy teeny-bop career beforehand from her new mature reinvention.

With such reinventions, the pop music story typically goes (and would go for artists like Kylie in the future) that we are now supposed to be seeing the pop star’s true self, that they have thrown off the shackles of the suits and hit-men who got them through the door and “gave” them their careers and are finally free to present themselves as they really are.  “Confide in Me…” really doesn’t do that.  In fact, if anything, the song, both musically and lyrically, sees Kylie slide further than ever into playing a character.  The ornate Middle Eastern orchestration that provides the main hook and garnishes the rest of the song with a mysticism and opulence, right down to the sitar-like guitar that occupies the fringes of the verse, combines with trip hop drum loops and a subtle underlying stop-start bassline to craft a soundscape more befitting a James Bond movie than what pop radio at the time was playing.  (In fact, I’m shocked it took until Garbage did “The World is Not Enough” for a Bond theme composer to start blatantly cribbing notes from this.)

Lyrically, Kylie is a seductress, a deceptress, a stranger on the prowl looking for men to invest themselves emotionally in her but reticent to do the same herself.  Is she a trustworthy shoulder to lean on?  A sociopathic voyeur who gets off on touristing other people’s pain?  An empty vessel dream-girl for men to dump their problems on, or is that just who she wants you to think of her as in an effort to lower your guard?  It’s all intentionally vague and unsettling.  The music is undoubtedly a major component of that effect, but Kylie’s vocals play a vital part as well.  By her own admission, she had never sung like this before – breathy, seductive, studied and restrained, even hitting a series of piercing falsettos during the final chorus run as a firm-ass rebuke to anyone who criticised her supposed lack of vocal range and ability – and the effect is extraordinary.  The bridge where she breaks off into French pop-style innuendo-laden spoken word is surprisingly unsettling when it should theoretically be theatrical”.

There is not a great deal of further features about Confide in Me. This is a very good article if you want some more detail about the track’s composition and lyrics. I am going to wrap in a second. First, Wikipedia collated some of the press reaction to one of Kylie Minogue’s most singular and enduring songs:

“Confide in Me" received universal acclaim from music critics. Sean Smith labelled the track a "classic" to Minogue's discography, as similar to how William Baker viewed it.  Larry Flick from Billboard complimented "the gorgeously atmospheric, downtempo album cut". Nick Levine from Digital Spy selected it as the standout, and commented "How can we plump for anything other than 'Confide in Me'? Fifteen years on, this sumptuous, string-swathed dance-pop epic still caresses the ears like a flirty hair stylist." Caroline Sullivan from The Guardian noted that it "has a classical violin overture that unfolds into a snake-charming Eastern melody. Kylie sounds delightfully woebegone." Mike Wass from Idolator wrote that "the Brothers In Rhythm-produced gem was the stepping stone that took her from the glorious pop of "Better The Devil You Know" to collaborating with Nick Cave on "Where The Wild Roses Grow"." He added that it was "a vehicle to showcase a then-hugely-underrated voice." Music writer James Masterton deemed it a "exotic, string-laden single". Alan Jones from Music Week gave it five out of five, noting that "a widescreen string-driven shuffle which allows her to deliver a soft and polished vocal." Tim Jeffery from the magazine's RM Dance Update said, "Very Madonna-ish, in fact, even down to the giggly chuckle thrown in occasionally. Huge.". Another editor, James Hamilton deemed it a "Madonna-ishly moaned and muttered Brothers In Rhythm creation".

IN THIS PHOTO: Kylie Minogue in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Uli Weber

Quentin Harrison from PopMatters highlighted the track from the parent album, and said "Minogue's international perspective lent her canvas precision, not iciness as witnessed with 'Confide in Me'. The cut played like a lost spy film accompaniment, its grandiose strings and rumbling groove enthralled. 'Confide in Me' let Minogue become the vocalist cynics sneered she'd never be ...". British author and critic Adrian Denning enjoyed the track and called it "truly timeless and absolutely wonderful." He declared the track "Arguably still her finest musical moment to this date," and found the production and lyrical delivery "classy". Billboard's Jason Lipshutz wrote of the track.

Deeply flirtatious and as knowingly dramatic as a James Bond theme song, "Confide in Me" continued Minogue on her path away from simplistic pop atop a swath of strings and Middle Eastern influences. The deadpanned bridge -- "Stick or twist, the choice is yours/Hit or miss, what's mine is yours" -- is delivered in a murmur that yearns for a Serious Artiste label.

Chris True at AllMusic described the song as "slicker, more stylish, and less hooky than anything she had previously recorded." He also highlighted the track as one of the album standouts. Similarly, Marc Andrews from DNA Magazine reviewed the remastered vinyl of the parent album and pointed it as the best track on the album. Mike Wass from Idolator said "the Australian diva switched labels and reemerged with a haunting Brothers in Rhythm-produced indie-pop anthem that still seethes and seduces 20 years later." Writing for the Herald Sun, Cameron Adams placed it at number two on his list of the singer's best songs, in honor of her 50th birthday, calling it: "THE one that changed everything – where Kylie became instantly cool [...] a lush, six-minute experimental epic with middle eastern vibes and modern dance beats, it automatically drew a line in the sand to reboot Kylie". Stephen Meade from The Network Forty described it as a "haunting dance-friendly sound". A negative review came from Hot Press editor Craig Fitzsimons; he criticized the "boring" production, saying "'Confide in Me' is exactly what you would expect; a boring, nothingy post-Stock Aiken Waterman piece of dance fluff enlivened only by Kylie's breathy exhortations to "Stick or twist/The choice is yours/Hit or miss/What's mine is yours”.

On 29th August, the mesmeric Confide in Me is twenty-nine. With incredible B-sides, Nothing Can Stop Us and If You Don't Love Me, Confide in Me was an amazing single that rightly was a chart success. It still elicits chills and smiles in me every time I hear it. One of her first major evolution in terms of sound and new direction, we mark the 29th anniversary of a classic, appropriately, on 29th August. If the BBC Radio 2 listeners voted Confide in Me fourth, I think that this Kylie Minogue anthem should be…

AT number one.

Sam Liddicott