A song with Chris Martin for Kylie Minogue

Netflix has dedicated a docuseries to Kylie Minogue: “Kylie” was published on the platform, a documentary in three episodes that retraces over forty years of the Australian pop star’s career, from her debut in the Australian soap opera “Neighbors” (the same one, very popular in England, which would launch Natalie Imbruglia a few years later) to her launch into pop as a teenager, to her international success, passing through the most complex moments of her private life, including her battles with cancer.

The series is directed by Michael Harte and produced by John Battsek with Ventureland: it combines personal archive material, behind-the-scenes footage and new interviews with Minogue and key people in her career and life, including sister Dannii Minogue, Jason Donovan, Pete Waterman and Nick Cave. Cave himself signs one of the most significant comments in the documentary: “Her connection with the public is not fake. For her it is something very real. It is a true form of love.” “This documentary is a series of love stories: it is a love story with my profession, with some people in my life, with my audience, my family, fans, music and much more.”

Together with the documentary, “Light up”, an unreleased song co-written with Chris Martin of Coldplay, was made available: “The song began to take shape in 2023, before evolving during the production of the series. The first phrase of the song came to mind while I was thinking about how magical it is when someone who truly loves you can see a world of possibilities in you and recognize your potential, even when you feel lost or hurt. I shared the seed of that idea with Chris Martin on the phone and ten minutes later he told me sent a voice message with some chord and melody ideas for those few lines.”

The documentary is gathering positive reviews, as is the figure of the singer, defined by the Guardian as a living and enduring oxymoron “a person who, even after all these years, appears enigmatically normal, opaquely linear, stubbornly kind and still, despite everything, an adorable dork from the suburbs of Melbourne who has become one of the most famous women in the world”. The newspaper then writes:

This splendid documentary corrects the recent crop of terrible hagiographies (“Melania”), slippery half-measures (“David Beckham”) or empty vessels (“Victoria Beckham”) that circle around their subjects, offering instead a portrait of fame that apparently took its author, Michael Harte, two years to make, and includes all the people you would hope to see.