And she’s back. Forget Billie Piper, this is the pop comeback of the year 2000. Surely one of the biggest pop comebacks of all time?
Spinning Around, by Kylie Minogue (her 5th of seven #1s)
1 week, from 25th June – 2nd July 2000
Amazingly, it has been over a decade since Kylie’s last number one (‘Tears on My Pillow’ in January 1990), and almost six years six since her last Top 10 hit (1994’s ‘Confide in Me’). Since her debut in 1988, we’ve had ‘Neighbours’ Kylie, Pop Puppet Kylie, Creative Control Kylie, Indie Kylie… and then a couple of years of silence. Was that, everyone wondered, that?
As an unashamed Kylie fan, I’m glad about what ‘Spinning Around’ did for the Princess of Pop. It brought her back, set her up for a glorious, and so far never-ending, second act. She was still only in her early-thirties here, but quite often early-thirties might as well be early-eighties for a female pop star. It was truly impressive the way she returned, with an updated yet familiar, utterly-commercial-but-critically-respected sound, as if she’d never been away. But…
As far as ‘Spinning Around’ is concerned, I’ve always found it a bit basic. A bit Radio 2. A bit hen-night in a provincial town. It’s catchy, for sure, and it’s funky bassline and sparkly synths are more proof that we’re in the midst of a disco revival. I like the middle-eight – the Baby, baby, baby… bit – but the rest of the lyrics are a whole lot of nothing, vaguely themed around this song as a comeback. I’m spinning around, Move out of my way, I know you’re feelin’ me cause you like it like this…
And let’s be honest, as reluctant as I am to reduce Queen Kylie to a mere sexual object, the one thing everyone remembers about this record are the gold hotpants she wore while writhing around on a bar top in the video. (Hotpants that were allegedly bought for fifty pence in a market, and which have since been displayed at the V&A museum.)
So the best I’ll say for ‘Spinning Around’ is that it’s a perfectly serviceable pop song which did what it had to do. Kylie was back, back, back, and free to release better songs in the coming years. Of course there’s the colossal lead single from her next album, but even the Latin-tinged ‘Please Stay’ was a better track from later in 2000, while there’s also the industrial camp of ‘Your Disco Needs You’, which really should have been a single. Still, maybe it’s just me. ‘Spinning Around’ seems to be remembered fondly, and was the first in a run of sixteen straight Top 10 hits for Australia’s highest-selling act, lasting right through until 2008. It also earned Kylie enty to a very exclusive club – the #1s in three decades club, which at the time consisted only of Elvis, Cliff, the Bee Gees, Queen, Blondie and Madonna.
The UK Number Ones Blog 
An an Australian, you cannot not be familiar with this song. It’s as much a part of our culture as “Down Under”, “Beds Are Burning” AC/DC, or INXS. Maybe not as much as Vegemite or Tim Tams. I think it’s a banger, but I love disco music (every decade seems to have hits that owe everything to disco music, especially the 2020s so far), and this is very much a then-contemporary take on disco music.
I always forgot how big Kylie is in Europe.
To be fair, I think Kylie is big everywhere apart from the US, and it’s their loss!
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Spinning Around, but it never grabs me and makes me want to rush to the dancefloor (unlike 90% of Kylie’s output). But it’s a great single for the fact that it relaunched her, and set her up for a career that is still going strong, even if it’s an injustice that her previous album’s singles failed to do much. Some Kind of Bliss is one of her best.
How many provincial town hen nights have you been to?
One! And I’m pretty sure I heard Spinning Around…
An iconic video and reinvention after her Indie years (I liked Indie Kylie, especially the amazing Nick Cave dark duet) and set her up for more global success (including the USA in 2001/2 as a one-off). Spinnin’ Around is also not my fave track from the Light Years era – I caught her on tour for the first time, and she was unexpectedly wonderful in a live setting, seen her several times since, never fails to put on a fabulous show. Light Years the album is chocablock filled with gems, not least from Robbie Williams and Guy Chambers gifted songs, Robbie was the UK’s biggest popstar of the time and also on Parlophone, so that didn’t hurt at all, especially given Kids is a rock anthem duet with Robbie, and should have been a number one (it hit 2), and Your Disco Needs You should have been a UK single, a standout gay bar anthem – written by Guy & Robbie. There’s lots of professional hit songwriters on board for the hits like On A Night Like This and shoulda-been hits like Light Years, Disco Down and the Barry White borrow Under The Influence Of Love. But two former hit songwriters and pop stars are not yet on board – but Kylie introduced a brand new song at the Bournemouth show to see what we thought of it. The world said “Yes!”.
I would love to see Kylie live. I’m not in the UK for her upcoming tour and the Asia/Australia dates didn’t work for me…. : (
I only recently found out that Your Disco… was written by Robbie and Guy. Which sort of makes sense, because it is so aggressively ‘gay’ that it simply had to be written by straight men! (Well, Robbie is famously apparently 51% straight…)
HUGE Kylie fan here from the US! I heard of her around the time of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, which led me to looking up the rest of her stuff. I kept hearing about how she was big outside the US, so I looked into it. Had to get her stuff on import, I remember, because it was hard to get her music here.
It’s always puzzled me why she’s never been big here, but I can tell you: she has a fanbase in the US who will come see her, and they have! I saw her live in 2009 for her Aphrodite Tour and the place was PACKED! And was also one of the most fun shows I’ve ever been to 🙂
I feel about Spinning Around the same way you do. It’s really not favorite of mine. I’ve never connected with it like I have with Kylie’s other songs. But I do acknowledge how important it was in reestablishing her. For what it’s worth, the album before this one, Impossible Princess, is MY favorite Kylie album. Those songs should’ve done better.
Oh I’m sure she has her fans in the US! Especially among a certain community… : ) But yeah, why she’s never broken through to the mainstream there is interesting. Maybe because she’s always been dance-pop, where R&B/hip-hop – pop tends to do better stateside? Maybe because the US already had Madonna and Cyndi Lauper around the time Kylie came out? Maybe because you didn’t have ‘Neighbours’ bringing her to your living rooms twice a day ahead of her pop career…?
Lol so I’m pretty sure every gay man within a one hundred mile radius was there at the Kylie show I went to! I was one of the few women in the audience! I still count it as one of my top 5 concerts. It was SO MUCH FUN.
Also, I was a baby gay at the time so it was fun to be around other LGBT folks 🙂
Incidentally, I saw Kylie a few months before I saw Lady Gaga for the first time, and while both of them had fun shows, I thought Kylie’s was the more FUN one.
As for why she never got big here, I think it’s a lot of what you were suggesting. Neighbours wasn’t shown in the US, so we didn’t get to know Kylie in her pre-pop star stage.
Also, and I think this is the big thing, R&B/hip-hop does better here. Kylie attempted a more R&B album after Fever, probably in an attempt to break the US market a little more, and it just didn’t really feel like her. I don’t listen to it very much at all. Her music is pure dance-pop, and that’s not really mainstream in the US. She’s charted well on the dance charts, but not so much mainstream.
Though she did hit it a little bigger last year with Padam Padam. It was a joy to hear her on the Top 40 radio! 🙂
Hey I don’t know why but this comment went to spam, which is why I’m only seeing it now. Sorry!
I’ve never seen her live… But everyone who does says she’s great. As much as I love Gaga, Madonna etc., Kylie succeeds just by being really, really nice. There’s no pretention there, no artifice. If you bumped into her in the street she’d be lovely (I hope!), and it’s not easy to keep that attitude after the best part of 40 years in showbusiness. I think being Australian helps, as they tend to be quite down to earth.
Totally missed this one in 2000, solid hit song for sure.
Great number one, especially considering all the boy and girl band cover crap that infested the millennial chart. Fresh and original. Never understood the hoo-hah about her arse though, I mean granted I’m gay so I prefer men’s, but it was just a petite pooper.
Fresh, yeah okay… Original, I’m not so sure. Just a fairly basic disco retread to my ears. Making at all about her arse feels very 2000s. Wouldn’t get away with it these days!
“to a mere sexual object” …yea you don’t have to…she did but I didn’t mind lol. I do like the seventies vibe in this.