Words & Music by Paul Morley

Author:Paul Morley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2003-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

Part Three: The journey continues

44

‘Oh,’ says Kylie, with more than a hint of sarcasm. Her sarcasm seems a little dangerous when you remember that her mind is directly connected to her driving. We are now deep into the city broken up into bits and noise, edited into a fury of beat, commerce and commotion, and I think she needs to keep her senses very much on the road, and the twists and turns she’s navigating.

‘You finally get to mention me.’ She says this in the way only a star, full of herself, full of broken bits of stars, can say it. With such aggressive emphasis on the word ‘me’ as to suggest that she loves herself, with an intensity that could easily become hate.

‘I’ve been mentioning you a lot,’ I gently reply, careful not to say anything that might provoke her further. I need to get her back with me, back on my side. ‘And think of everyone who hasn’t been mentioned, all the sights and sounds and scenes and happenings that we haven’t got space for.’

‘Yes,’ says Kylie, her voice brimming with fame, fortune and petulance, ‘but this book is meant to be all about me.’ ‘Me’ is surely her favourite word. She says it this time in a way that says her favourite sentence is ‘Me, me, me’.

‘It’s my book. My story. My journey.’

‘I’m placing you in some kind of context.’

‘But what about my life?’

‘I’m making your life fit into the story of everything. That should flatter you.’

She blinks with a crisp trace of a click, with a tough distant look space-dusted all over her face that suggests here is a girl who knows what it is to be flattered, and she doesn’t feel flattered right now. I defend myself some more, for what it’s worth.

‘I’ve put you,’ I say, ‘in a list along with Picasso, Duchamp, Welles, Kraftwerk, Berners-Lee … Musically, you come after Erik Satie, Steve Reich and New Order … pop, disco, house, Monroe, Madonna, Blondie, Princess Diana, it all leads to you.’

She is silent. The colour in her cheeks, a smart special effect floating millimetres above her flash face, seems to fade a little, as does the yellow of the car. She seems sad, like the sadness there is in her ballads, even in ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’, but without the sense of happiness that there is in the background, round the edges, etched into the rhythm.

‘There just doesn’t seem to be much information about me, about who I am.’

‘What, that you’re the missing link between Olivia Newton John and Natalie Imbruglia? That you were turned into the girl next door by the Stock Aitken & Waterman factory, more a dumb mannequin than a highly sophisticated entertainment womandroid with the physical and mental capacity to achieve image immortality? That you used to be known as the singing budgie? That your first hit was a cover of “The Locomotion”? That Michael Hutchence used to say that his hobby was “corrupting Kylie”? That

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