Happy 20th Anniversary to Kylie Minogue’s seventh studio album Light Years, originally released September 25, 2000.
For two decades, the twin narratives around Light Years—Kylie Minogue’s seventh studio album—have been predicated on restoration and course correction.
Concerning the former aspect, Light Years brought Minogue back to commercial prominence with its many platinum returns and a hot streak of singles—of the eventual six it yielded, “Spinning Around” and “On a Night Like This” stood the tallest among the sextet.
Regarding the latter element, Light Years was a supposed referendum on the experimentation that anchored Kylie Minogue (1994) and Impossible Princess (1997), Minogue’s fifth and sixth sets, respectively. Taking her leave of Stock-Aitken-Waterman—the British production trio who guided the first act of her singing career—in 1992, Minogue’s post-Stock-Aitken-Waterman ambitions were boldly actioned on those two aforesaid albums which marked her transition from pre-fabricated pop vocalist to fully realized recording artist. Yet, the specter of her cherubic Smash Hits past lingered.
Consider the piece that ran in Outrage Magazine—an Australian LGBTQ publication—in their November 2000 issue at the height of the promotional blitz for Light Years. The feature was titled “Kylie’s Disco Needs You! The Comeback Queen Camps It Up in the Interview You’ve All Been Waiting For!” Although Minogue was warm throughout her exchange with the interviewer, one cannot help but notice her polite discontent at being tagged as a proxy for all things froth and fluff.
Even with all the accolades won by Minogue up through to Light Years, upon its unveiling, many critics erroneously pegged the project as some sort of retreat into non-substantive fare—they couldn’t have been more wrong. Neither a retreat nor a course correction, Light Years was a soft reset that allowed Minogue to apply everything she had learned toward the practice of generating a chart friendly collection that was also creatively centered. But additional context is required to understand the story of Light Years, which begins with its predecessor, Impossible Princess.
Embraced in Minogue’s native Australia upon its release there, Impossible Princess met with very mixed fortunes in the United Kingdom. Today, the alternative esoterica of this outing has been retrospectively—and rightfully—lionized in many of the same British publications that once derided it. Sadly, in the aftermath of its fraught reception at that moment, Minogue and deConstruction Records—the imprint she onboarded with in Britain in 1993—amicably parted ways at the top of 1999. This left Minogue without a record deal in one of her largest markets for the first time; her contract with Mushroom Records in Australia remained untouched as it had been since 1987.
Tentative blueprinting for Light Years had already commenced before an opportunity to join the ranks of Parlophone Records presented itself. As one of the most venerated majors in the U.K., it was quite a boon for Minogue to receive an invitation to sign on with them given all of the negative trade chatter that her career was on a so-called “downward spiral” in that country. The business relationship between Minogue and Parlophone was soon to be mutually beneficial for both entities; her stay there (up through to 2016) was to become her longest label residency rivaled only by her Mushroom tenure.
All parties involved decided that a lighter touch—thematically and sonically—was the order of the day for Light Years. Having had the space needed to give voice to her darker passions and ruminations on Impossible Princess, Minogue was eager to focus on a bit of flirtation, fun and romance without undercutting her previous growth as an artist. Tasking closely with Parlophone’s A&R team, Minogue petitioned them to forage for material that she would consider recording if it met her standards. This was how “Spinning Around” and “On a Night Like This”—the two eventual smash singles that propelled Light Years into the stratosphere—came about.
The first composition had been drafted by Osborne Bingham, Kara DioGuardi, Ira Shickman and Paula Abdul for Abdul’s sequel to her criminally overlooked third effort, Head Over Heels (1995). When Abdul’s comeback was aborted sometime in 1998 or 1999, “Spinning Around” languished until it was routed to Minogue by Parlophone.
The second selection had come from the collective imagination of Brian Rawling, Graham Stack, Mark Taylor and the late Steve Torch—trackmasters of international dance-pop repute from the late 1990s and early 2000s. “On a Night Like This” had renditions serviced by two singers of Swedish and Greek persuasion, Pandora and Anna Vissi, in 1999 and 2000; the songwriting/production quartet were unmoved by those iterations. They opted to solicit Parlophone to help find “On a Night Like This” a home and with Minogue it found one—her version became the definitive take.
Despite Minogue mining some pre-penned song stock, she did not abdicate her role as a writer. Her pen touched ten of the fourteen tracks to comprise Light Years in a principal or co-writer capacity. Sessions with the likes of Johnny Douglas, John Themis, Richard Stannard, Julian Gallagher, Mike Spencer, Mark Picchiotti, Guy Chambers and Robbie Williams pointed to a generous cross-section of decorated songsmiths, producers, and artists to answer Minogue’s collaborative hails. However, there was also the return of one notable figure more than ready to aid the Princess of Pop on the LP: Steve Anderson.
Anderson—along with Dave Seaman—had been Minogue’s main writing-production compeers on Kylie Minogue and Impossible Princess as Brothers in Rhythm. He not only stayed on as Minogue’s concert music producer after her departure from deConstruction, Anderson joined her to co-pen and preside over several pieces—album cuts and B-sides alike—for Light Years. It was Anderson that likely encouraged Minogue to pursue her intense interest in the disco driven pop of the 1970s, which became one of the three sonic templates employed for the long player.
Just as Minogue used Impossible Princess to take her leave of the plush R&B-pop, house and acid jazz of Kylie Minogue, she repeated this maneuver with Light Years by pivoting away from the rock, trance and electronica of Impossible Princess. In place of those elements Minogue utilizes crisp rhythm sections, melodic orchestral passages and vivid grooves, hallmarks of the architecture of the disco genre at its best.
Further, Minogue’s usage of these sound structures gleefully recalls the heroes and heroines spanning the disco era for Light Years. I detailed these characters, major and minor, that Minogue referenced on her seventh outing last year in my book, Record Redux: Kylie Minogue, “The silhouettes of Cheryl Lynn, Tina Charles, The Hues Corporation, among others influences, hang closely to the compositional bones of ‘Spinning Around,’ ‘So Now Goodbye,’ and ‘Loveboat.’ Two such references—Love Unlimited and Donna Summer—announce their hold on Minogue on ‘Under the Influence of Love,’ ‘Disco Down’ and ‘Light Years.’ ‘Under the Influence of Love’ is a fetchingly dispatched cover of the R&B trio’s 1973 earworm, while ‘Disco Down’ and ‘Light Years’ are homages to Summer that cement Minogue’s lineage to her progenitor.”
Brilliantly, for the second sonic arm of Light Years, Minogue doesn’t relinquish her vintage pastiche operations, she simply adjusts the dial further back to the latter half of the 1960s. Entries drawn up during the Light Years sessions such as “Your Disco Needs You,” “Cover Me with Kisses,” “Password,” “Koocachoo,” “I’m So High,” and “Good Life” evince her way with aesthetics like show tunes, surf rock, psychedelia and bossa nova; Minogue adds just a touch of modern pop production to these treasures to avoid any overt anachronistic indulgence. Three of those cited songs—“Cover Me with Kisses,” “Good Life,” “Password”—appear as flipsides to the singles “Spinning Around,” “Please Stay” and “Your Disco Needs You.” Only “Password” surfaced on Light Years as a hidden “introductory track” at its start.
The final sound arc heard on Light Years is contemporary Eurodisco as exemplified gorgeously with “On a Night Like This” and “Butterfly.” Minogue effortlessly combines cutting edge studio tech with robust live instrumentation on that pair of tracks that also double as fantastic vehicles for her voice.
With “Butterfly,” Minogue gives a performance so rousing that it stands as one of her finest moments as a singer and, overall, signposted that Light Years was a watershed collection highlighting just how good of a vocalist she had matured into.
Her ability to engage as a singer with different types of music served her particularly well on the glam rock workout of “Kids.” Her duet with Britain’s bad boy Robbie Williams was the lone number of its kind on Light Years, standing out somewhat amid all the glossy period piece pop and the two coeval club jams. Yet, Minogue and Williams’ chemistry is infectious on the funky guitar number—repurposed from the 1973 proto-disco classic “Give Me Your Love” from the stateside R&B outfit The Sisters Love—and when it went out as a single from both Light Years and Williams’ own third album Sing When You’re Winning that same year, it made a veritable splash on the charts.
The Light Years campaign commenced on June 19th, 2000 with “Spinning Around,” its anthemic ethos of reinvention striking a chord with record buyers and radio outlets equally. It rushed to the pole position of the respective single charts in the United Kingdom and Australia, subsequent global markets also took to its charms.
By the time “On a Night Like This” was issued in early September to further prime audiences for its parent long player, anticipation for Light Years was at a fever pitch. Issued on September 25, 2000, Light Years was an instant sensation and awarded Minogue with her first number-one album in Australia. Sales were uniformly strong everywhere and matched by a seemingly endless stream of positive notices—the write-ups were pyrrhic for Minogue unfortunately.
Numerous critics raved about the escapist airs of Light Years while lazily consigning the tag of “camp” to the record too. “The key words for Light Years were “poolside,” “disco,” “cocktails,” “beach” and loveboat...,” this description of the long player came from the woman behind the tunes as documented in 2002’s La, La, La—Minogue’s second career retrospective coffee table book co-conceived with (now former) creative director William Baker. But this elucidation from Minogue laid bare a sharply drawn line between knowing kitsch and shallow novelty—that line was ignored by the press along with the actual musicality contained on Light Years due to its playful surface.
Minogue put on her best face to counter the microaggressions of the music columnists—after all, she had a lot to celebrate: Light Years elevated her sales numbers to levels not seen since her Stock-Aitken-Waterman salad days. “Kids,” “Please Stay,” “Your Disco Needs You” and “Butterfly”—the last song restricted to promotional distribution—carried Light Years up through to the incipient half of 2001 with the accompanying “On a Night Like This” Tour kicking off in March of that year; and just on the horizon, an even more unimaginable triumph awaited Minogue with her follow-up to Light Years: Fever (2001).
An integral part of Kylie Minogue’s continued stylistic strength is that there is always something more to discover than what a surface level interaction can reveal. Underneath the carefree exterior of Light Years exists an unrecognized compositional breadth and vitality that affirms Minogue’s ongoing commitment to music excellence—this key tenet to her ever-enduring appeal deserves to be formally championed.
Quentin Harrison recently published Record Redux: Kylie Minogue, the fifth book in his Record Redux series. The ambitious project traces the rise of the Australian pop vocalist from soap actress star to international pop powerhouse by examining every single and studio album in her repertoire. Record Redux: Kylie Minogue follows previous entries from the Atlanta, Georgia based author centered on Carly Simon, Donna Summer and Madonna. Order Record Redux: Kylie Minogue here (digital) and here (physical). An overhauled version of his first book Record Redux: Spice Girls will be available in early January 2021.
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