REVIEW: The big reveal in Kylie, the excellent three-part documentary about Kylie Minogue from the team behind Beckham, comes right at the end. In 2021, the cancer she had first battled 16 years earlier came back.
The first time round, her health crisis played out in the full glare of the world’s media while she was camped out at her parents’ house in Melbourne, before retreating to the relative anonymity of Paris for chemo. The second time, Minogue kept the news very much to herself – until now.
“I don’t feel obliged to tell the world,” she says in a teary session with her songwriting collaborators in London in the final episode of the series. “And actually, I couldn’t at the time because I was just a shell of a person.”
She reveals that even while she was basking in the renewed visibility and success spawned by Padam Padam in 2023 – the song went on to win her a Grammy and set up a Las Vegas residency – she was struggling to find the words to talk about what she was going through, “so I can let go of it”.
It was only when she sat down with her songwriting partners Gez O’Connell, Biff Stannard and Duck Blackwell and wrote Story, the final track on her 2023 album Tension, that she was able to give her sorrow form.
