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Why I Love Kylie

By Julie Burchill


Once in a while, a sex symbol breaks through the 'sex' barrier and becomes a bona fide love thing. You'll always know them, because we always call them by their first name - as if we know them.

Kylie. Like the Aboriginal boomerang she's named after, she bounces back to us time and again.

In Kylie's back pages are the suicide of her first great love and family cancer. But - uniquely of her tribe - she never feels the need to turn a drama into a crisis. A natural-born queen bee who chose to be a worker, the only thing Kylie allegedly demands in her dressing room at Top Of The Pops is a kettle so she can make herself a cup of tea.

A mistake that divas make is to imagine that being endlessly dramatic/demanding is to be interesting. In fact, drama on demand gets older faster than anything (we feel we know J.Lo and Mariah Carey inside out, like particularly wearing sisters who we would miss any family function in order to avoid).

Kylie, though, due to her devilish discretion, becomes more of an enigma as the decades go by. And the more Kylie takes off kit-wise, the more patently 'decent' she reveals herself to be. She literally has nothing to hide - but, at the same time, she shows nothing.

Maybe this is why we're not anywhere near being bored with Kylie. Now 36 years old, her 2005 calendar outsold all challengers - including Jordan, Beckham and Manchester United - while her recent collaboration with the Scissor Sisters bore witness to her endless credibility.

Is Kylie Bored With Us?

Those lovely eyes look a mite glazed in the latest video: her impeccable sense of what is appropriate may be telling her that a woman of substance, approaching 40, could soon look somewhat inappropriate getting her kit off and her freak on.

Her uncharacteristically ungracious and somewhat hypocritical condemnations of both sexy videos and ambitious young pop starlets may indicate a growing unease with her sex object status, even though that mass star-lust is accompanied by real affection.

But what else can she do except what she does? Showgirl, Christmas fairy, baby angel, nation's sweetheart and, above all, trouper. For all her glitter, Kylie is both a woman of actual working-class stock and a daughter of the most stubbornly, self-consciously blue-collar nation in the Western world - Australia.

Not to work for her living would perhaps be the only thing that could make Kylie feel bad about her vast wealth. So long as she keeps on slogging away on vast tours and exhausting promotional gigs, she remains a worker and her money stays clean.

Commentators may tut-tut about her workaholism, her determination to stay in control and her 'failed' love life (by this, bizarrely, they mean that she's enjoyed her pick of the world's top male totty, rather than tie herself down to the first sad-sack who asked her), but whatever Kylie's doing seems to work.

The Antidote to a World of Wealthy Whiners

In her two decades in the spotlight, there have been no rehab horror headlines, no public navel-gazing or breast-beating, no desperate grabs at religion as a comfort blanket. Kylie knows how lucky (lucky, lucky, lucky!) she has been and, in return, she pays us the courtesy of never complaining about her lot. She is the anti-Robbie, the anti-Geri, the antidote to a world of wealthy whiners.


The reason why we never tire of Kylie is that, despite her modishness and her ongoing ability to effortlessly hitch her sparkly wagon to the latest trend, she is, at heart, an old-fashioned trouper of the best-foot-forward, chin-up breed.

Modern entertainers, on the contrary, become their private lives - to the extent that Geri's bulimia and Posh's marriage make up 99 per cent of their public persona. Kylie puts on her costume, shimmers into the spotlight, entertains, then goes away until the next perfect pop moment. She doesn't hang around to spill her guts and wear out her welcome.

'A Crashing Bore'

Kylie's brightness, her 'musn't grumble' refusal to inflict her personal troubles on us is taken as proof of emptiness and stupidity by some. But nothing makes an otherwise intelligent person look so dumb so quickly as criticising her does.

"Kylie is a crashing bore," says Morrissey, a man whose songs increasingly become more Pooterish as they resemble the entries from The Diary Of A Nobody, detailing the petty feuds and hissy fits of a staggeringly small-minded man.

Despite her tiny frame and rinky-dink voice, Kylie is that rare thing - a proper grown-up in a vast playpen full of inspired, incontinent infants, screaming for their sex and drugs and bowlfuls of M&Ms with all the brown ones taken out. Whatever she may choose to do in the future, we know that Kylie will never show us up or let us down.

Best of all, she will only ever let us love her just enough - she will never provoke emotions or actions that would harm either us or her. In public or in private, she will never be surprised in shame or compromise and, because of this, neither will we for liking her. In a world full of minefields and eggshells and endlessly complex conflicting interests, there is always that one thing we will never, ever have to worry about - Kylie.