Kylie Minogue, Version 1.0: Australia's Answer To ... Rick Astley?

By 1987, Stock Aitken Waterman had everything they could have ever wanted ... except their very own Madonna. I guess Hazell Dean wasn't going to cut it? Putting their mind-numbingly repetitive stamp on established veterans like Bananarama was all well and good, but they needed someone more fresh, more green, more pliable - someone they could mold into their own tacky Hi-NRG image. But where, oh where, were they going to find her?

She came from Down Under.

Kylie Minogue was a star on the Australian soap opera Neighbours, where, per Wikipedia, she played a "schoolgirl turned mechanic." Oh, one of those. After an early version of "The Loco-Motion" (not the better known, re-recorded version) became a #1 Australian hit, she headed to England to seek fame, fortune, and, as fate would have it, Stock Aitken Waterman. Little did the trio anticipate the magnitude of the moment. From Wikipedia:

After the success of her debut single "Locomotion" in Australia, Minogue traveled to London to work with Stock Aitken Waterman, a successful British writing and production team. They knew little of Minogue and had forgotten that she was arriving; as a result, they wrote "I Should Be So Lucky" in forty minutes while she waited outside the recording studio. Mike Stock wrote the lyrics for the song in response to what he had learned about Minogue prior to her arrival. He believed that although she was a successful soap star in Australia and very talented, there must be something wrong with her and figured that she must be unlucky in love.

Something wrong with her? What the hell dude? She was 19! Yeah, I'll tell you what was wrong with her: choosing to work with Stock Aitken Waterman, the guys who brought the world Rick Freaking Astley, had one lousy production formula that they ran into the ground, and who were known to pass brutally harsh judgment on 19-year-old Aussie soap stars they barely even knew! Well, you better believe that after the single became a UK #1 hit, they didn't think there was anything wrong with her then. Although most Americans probably assume that "The Loco-Motion" was Kylie Minogue's only US Top 40 hit until "Can't Get You Out of My Head" crossed over more than twenty years later, "I Should Be So Lucky" actually peaked at #28 over here - which ain't too bad for a single from an entirely unknown quantity that reeked from top to bottom of glitzy Eurotrash. The verses kinda sound like the bridge of Astley's "Together Forever," but I'll be honest, I'd rather stare at Kylie Minogue in a music video than Rick Astley.

The clip features footage of our Aussie ingenue prancing around in a credulity-stretching apartment (Q: Who has a bathtub just ... sitting in the middle of the room like that?), interspersed with shots of Kylie in some sort of strapless prom dress standing in front of several images that appear to have been blown up far beyond the point of quality resolution, their pixels having made me question the YouTube video bit rate until I realized that Kylie's face is perfectly high-res. At 2:51, her poor nail file gets some particularly violent treatment.

Goffin/King's "The Loco-Motion" had already been a hit twice over: first in 1962 for Little Eva at the crest of both the girl group and dance crazes, and then again in 1974 for Grand Funk Railroad under the glam-inflected thumb of producer Todd Rundgren, but clearly Kylie Minogue's version had one thing those other versions didn't:

Stock Aitken Waterman.

Boy, people must have gone for anything in 1988. Its popularity assisted by its appearance in Arthur 2: On the Rocks, this version peaked at #3 in the U.S., which may have seemed to augur a promising stateside career for Minogue, but in retrospect, may have convinced Americans that this was a recording artist whose subsequent work would not be worth following in any way, shape, or form. And who would have blamed them? Kylie spends part of the video dancing in front of what appears to be genuine New York subway graffiti. Yeah, you know Kylie, tagging those Bronx underpasses with her gang signs at 3:00 a.m. These days, she performs the song in a slightly more "adult" fashion.

If the U.S. had seen enough of Kylie, the U.K., Australia, and Europe were settling in for the long haul. "Got to Be Certain" and "Je Ne Sais Pas Porquoi" both hit #2 in Britain, the latter boasting a cinematic, Parisian-flavored video that, in a rare '80s reversal, feels less dated to me than the song it was promoting. C'est la vie, as they say.

Q: Was it possible to be less successful in the U.S. than Kylie Minogue? A: If you were fellow Australian soap star Jason Donovan, it was. While Britain went bonkers over their squeaky-clean duet "Especially For You" (the song being the biggest UK hit of 1989), America was instead treated to one last single from Kylie, "It's No Secret," which petered out at #37, but at least featured a video of Kylie running around the majestic mountains and windswept beaches of her homeland wearing a strapless rainbow top (with some sort of "aborigine" design on it?) that I imagine needed to be peeled off delicately, lest her breasts be accidentally ripped off with it.