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Minogue sues UK producer

By Lawrence Money
January 23, 2005
The Sun-Herald


Kylie Minogue has launched legal action in her home town of Melbourne, seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars from the millionaire British record producer who helped launch her international career.
After hiring an auditing firm to examine the books of PAL Productions, Minogue says she has been massively underpaid on royalties on her Greatest Hits album. She is seeking trial by judge alone in the Victorian Supreme Court.

PAL Productions is run by pop producer Pete Waterman, who was awarded an OBE this month. Waterman was originally a partner in Stock Aitken Waterman, the giant songwriting and producing company founded in 1984, which has pumped out some of the biggest hit singles of all time.

Stock Aitken Waterman launched Minogue's career outside Australia in 1988 after she visited their London office wanting to record a song. Pete Waterman later admitted that the song they wrote for her, I Should Be So Lucky, was poached from classical composer Pachelbel's Canon. It was recorded the same day and topped the British charts for five weeks.

Minogue and her family, trading as KDB Pty Ltd, hired the firm De La Haye Royalty Service two years ago to examine the PAL books and De La Haye reported that Minogue had been underpaid by more than 10 per cent, or more than $1.08 million.

Since then PAL has paid the Minogue company a further $645,000 but KDB has now lodged papers at the Supreme Court seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

Principal claim is over Minogue's huge-selling Greatest Hits released in 1992 and re-released in 2002. The action also mentions the Let's Get To It album, her fourth.

The relationship between Minogue and Waterman, possibly the world's most successful pop music producer, has not always been smooth. In 1996 he accused her of "selling out" by abandoning her girl-next-door image for a raunchier one, but three years later he said he had been approached to help produce her next album and announced: "I would love to work with her again - she's the greatest artist I have ever worked with."

Then in 2002 Waterman told a magazine that the pop star's first hit in 1988 almost sent the Stock Aitken Waterman company bankrupt because it had to pay her so much. "In retrospect, Kylie was the worst thing that happened to us although she is fantastic and we are all best mates."

Waterman split with his partners in the early 1990s. Stock and Aitken sued him in 1997 in a major row over rights to royalties. Stock said then that they had not spoken to Waterman for two years. Waterman is reported to have made $132 million from selling records

Minogue has said she was made to feel "out of place and unwelcome" by Waterman and his partners when she first began recording for them.

"On my first day they were like: 'Oh god, there's wotsername, that girl from Australia. Quick, write a song!' It took just 10 minutes. They would send me out of the studio so they could write another verse."

Records show KDB is based at 2 Jackson Street, Toorak, Melbourne, and its directors include Carol and Ron Minogue (Kylie's parents) and Kylie herself. Shareholders are Ron and Carol, Kylie and sister Dannii (Danielle Jane Minogue) and brother Brendan.

The court documents reveal the extraordinary pulling power of Minogue whose record and CD sales extend as far as Brazil, Israel, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Spain and Thailand.

KDB has launched its action through Riordans Lawyers. PAL Productions is being represented by Melbourne lawyer Stuart Gibson. He told The Sun-Herald yesterday that PAL would be defending the action but had no further comment.