Kylie Minogue, pop star, serious film actress and one time Jean-Claude Van Damme paramour, has revisited the most sinister part of her entire back catalogue for an orchestra-inspired greatest hits LP called The Abbey Road Sessions. The album, a collection of 16 greatest hits reworked and recorded in the iconic London music studio, features this (somehow?) ghostlier cut of her crushingly dour mid-nineties Nick Cave duet, “Where The Wild Roses Grow”. The credibility-boosting Murder Ballads cut appears alongside other re-imagined singles spanning the entirety of her career including “Love at First Sight”, “On a Night Like This” and, yes, “The Loco-Motion”.
In a fantastic interview with The Quietus, Minogue discusses how Nick Cave’s advice helped her embrace pop music: “I was going through my whole Impossible Princess… stage. And Nick said to me– I’m really paraphrasing– he wanted to hear me sing pop music. Which is kind of odd compared to what you’d think he would say. And the big turnaround was at the Poetry Olympics at the Royal Albert Hall, reciting “I Should Be So Lucky” which he willed me into doing. I tried to find numerous excuses not to do it, but I did it, and it really set me on a different course. It was like the equivalent of going to some sort of therapy group, or sitting in a hot teepee sweat-tent. I just went, “OK, that’s it! I’m facing That Girl.” From that moment on, I learnt to embrace my past and embrace pop.”
The Abbey Road Sessions is out in November via Parlophone.
