Now Playing
Lucky or Manufactured? Inside the SAW Machine That Built Kylie
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
By 1988, Kylie Minogue had three UK number ones — but was any of it really hers? This chapter examines the Stock Aitken Waterman assembly line, the Neighbours phenomenon, and the cost of becoming a product before you become an artist.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
By the end of nineteen eighty-eight, Kylie Minogue had number one singles in the United Kingdom, a soap opera role that had made her a household name across two continents, and a duet with her co-star that was selling faster than almost anything else on the charts. And yet the question hovering over all of it was one that almost nobody in the music industry was asking out loud.
We left Kylie at the end of the last episode having made one of the more unlikely pivots in pop history. She was a teenage actress on a low-budget Australian soap opera who'd recorded a live version of "The Loco-Motion" at a football club fundraiser, sent it to a Melbourne radio station, and somehow found herself with a hit record.
Neighbours had done something unusual by the mid-nineteen eighties. It had crossed over.
Pete Waterman, Mike Stock, and Matt Aitken were running what amounted to an assembly line. They had a formula, and the formula worked.
Running through all of this, in parallel, was Jason Donovan. The on-screen romance between Scott and Charlene had translated, at least for a period, into something real off-screen.
Kylie left Neighbours in late nineteen eighty-eight. Her final scenes aired in July of that year.
By nineteen eighty-nine, the cracks in the SAW model were starting to show, at least for Kylie. Not commercially, not yet. "Hand on Your Heart" and "Better the Devil You Know" both performed well.
There's something that gets lost in the statistics of this period. Behind the platinum records and the sold-out tours and the tabloid coverage was a young woman from Melbourne who hadn't really planned any of this.
By the close of nineteen eighty-nine, the Ramsay Street chapter was finished. The Jason chapter was winding down.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.