‘You start to worry you’ll never listen to anything else’: 25 years of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the song that saw the future of pop

Around the release of Pet Shop Boys’ 1988 album Introspective, Neil Tennant coined the term “imperial phase” to describe an era when he felt the duo “understood the essence of pop music and so we felt we could do what we liked”. For his less flowery partner in pop excellence, Chris Lowe, this was typically followed “by disappearing up your backside!”.

In 2010, critic Tom Ewing fleshed out Tennant’s term by imposing three criteria: “command, permission, and self-definition”. Command related to an artist’s willingness and ability to push boundaries in a way that would reverberate through what followed. Permission, meanwhile, connected to the public and their goodwill towards an artist as they pushed things forward. Finally, self-definition, Ewing said, is the way the imperial phase defines the rest of the artist’s career. All future work will be compared with, or mentioned alongside, the output from the imperial phase.

By the time Kylie’s album Fever dropped, everything in its subsequent era represented her very own imperial phase. Everything she did in 2001 and 2002 seemed to click perfectly: every video, every choice of single, the tour, the press attention, the fashion, the cohesiveness of the vision, the way she reshaped pop and nudged it forward. And it was all led by the hypnotic weightlessness of the downright odd Can’t Get You Out of My Head.

The song was born one autumn weekend in 2000 in a garage studio in Surrey belonging to former Mud guitarist Rob Davis, who had been encouraged by manager and impresario Simon Fuller to write some songs with the excellent pop star turned songwriter Cathy Dennis.

On the Sunday, using Cubase on a Mac computer to create a drum loop before adding some guitar, the seed of Can’t Get You Out of My Head was planted. While Dennis came up with the title hook – the song, as she noted, doesn’t really conform to a typical verse-chorus structure, with each line almost acting as its own chorus melody – it was Davis who added the “‘la la la” section. The demo was finished in three hours, while Dennis’s vocals were laid down by 7pm that same day.

The demo was played to Fuller down the phone. He later played it for S Club 7, but they passed on it. The song was also presented to Sophie Ellis-Bextor, but again it was deemed unsuitable. It was Fuller’s idea to send it to Kylie. “And I was thinking: ‘But this song isn’t what Kylie does,’” remembered Dennis. “Obviously, now, none of us knows what Kylie’s going to come out with next, because she can’t be compartmentalised.” Kylie, meanwhile, “knew a few bars in that this was for me”, she wrote in 2002. “By the end of the track I wanted to know how quickly I could get into the studio.”

As promised, though much to Davis’s surprise given he’d convinced himself she wouldn’t turn up, Kylie arrived in Surrey to record Can’t Get You Out of My Head. In between some fancy salmon salad and other treats, the song was finished in a few hours. The mysterious pop alchemy of adding Kylie to a song took them all by surprise. “Even though Kylie wasn’t the first artist to be offered the song, I don’t believe it was meant to go to anyone other than Kylie,” said Dennis,“and I don’t believe anyone else would have done the incredible job she did with it, with the video, looking super-hot!”

Can’t Get You Out of My Head wasn’t just “good, for a pop song”, as joyless people were wont to say, keen to use the caveat in case their muso credentials be tarnished. As pop began to absorb the outre production styles of R&B experimentalists such as the Neptunes and Timbaland – Britney’s career-restructuring I’m a Slave 4 U, produced by the former, would arrive in the same month as Can’t Get You Out of My Head – audiences were becoming more attuned to pop that was looking to push the boundaries. This felt like dance-pop beamed in from the future, where the first time you hear it you’re like, “Huh?” then the second you’re like, “Wait!” and then the 35th time you start to worry you may never listen to anything else.

Its title becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Can’t Get You Out of My Head’s sexy futurism would also dictate the visual feel of the era: sleek lines, icy-cool silhouettes and just a hint of something darker lurking underneath. For the album’s cover, shot by Vincent Peters, Kylie’s stylist and creative director William Baker was inspired by the French artist Jean-Paul Goude’s photos of Grace Jones, which highlighted both her sexuality and her power. Baker also wanted Kylie to be attached to the tools of her trade, so on both the album cover and artwork for Can’t Get You Out of My Head, a microphone’s black power cord winds its way round Kylie’s body.

Less overt than the buttock-hugging, Carry On vibes of Kylie’s previous album, Light Years, and its lead single, Spinning Around, the Fever look was leaning more into an artful sexiness. This was highlighted in Can’t Get You Out of My Head’s video, directed by Dawn Shadforth, in which the utopia promised by the millennium was laid out in front of us via forensically manicured cityscapes and futuristic fashion: we see her dance on what looks like a rooftop garden centre and in a clean white dome, and losing herself in a dress made of purple-silver Post-it notes.

It also gave Kylie yet another iconic fashion moment, one that would be replicated at gigs and fancy-dress parties for decades to come, in the shape of the white hooded dress, split to the navel.

While the dress grabbed the attention, it was the all-in-red dancers behind Kylie, sporting matching face-covering visors, who caused a problem for Top of the Pops producer Chris Cowey. As Can’t Get You Out of My Head started to dominate, the show’s lighting department began to complain that their red gels were going missing at the show’s on-set afterparty “because everyone was taking [them] and wrapping them around their heads and doing the dance”, Cowey says. “Just kind of drunkenly doing Kylie impersonations.”

By the early 2000s, after Oasis v Blur, the UK had become mildly obsessed with chart battles, ideally those featuring attractive women. On 17 September 2001, the same day as Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham was set to release Not Such an Innocent Girl, the lead single from her self-titled debut solo album.

Posh had already been beaten, the previous year, by actually-quite-posh Sophie Ellis-Bextor, whose Rob Davis-assisted Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love) had left Beckham’s banger Out of Your Mind at No 2. This time, Victoria roared on to the battlefield with a ropey single and mildly scathing bons mots for her Australian rival. “When I first heard [Can’t Get You Out of My Head], if I’m being totally honest, I didn’t like it,” Posh mused. “And I’m being completely honest.”

For Posh, “an old-fashioned type songwriter”, Kylie’s single, while having “a very catchy melody”, didn’t resonate with her because she enjoys “a song that has a bit of emotion”. Posh was also retroactively blaming Kylie for criticisms of Out of Your Mind: “And I have to say that last year when I brought out a dance record, and I had effects on my voice, like she has on her voice, I am still getting a caning for it now.”

In the end, on the UK chart of 23 September, Can’t Get You Out of My Head crashed in at No 1, shifting an eye-watering 306,000 copies, holding off emerging talent Bob the Builder’s cover of Mambo No 5 in the process. It would stay at No 1 in the UK for a month, a feat matched in Australia. Posh’s Not Such an Innocent Girl would have to make do with a No 6 entry in the UK and sales of 35,000. The clash was such a hot topic that the BBC ran a news story with the headline: Kylie trounces Posh in chart battle. “Victoria is pleased to have a Top 10 hit,” a Posh spokeswoman was quoted as saying.

This particular pop star chart battle also served a specific escapist aim. Both singles were released shortly after 9/11, as the western world tried to recalibrate itself following a terrorist attack. The horrors seemed so overwhelming that any hint of normality was gripped tightly with both hands, and Can’t Get You Out of My Head’s futuristic escapism became a hypnotic balm.

For some journalists, the mere existence of Kylie was proof that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban could never win the “war on terror”. “Two people dominated the cultural landscape of this country in the last quarter of the year: Osama bin Laden and Kylie Minogue,” wrote Julie Burchill in the Guardian as 2001 came to an end. “I really do believe that Bin Laden and Kylie represent the polar opposites of human nature; the first all about cruelty without beauty, the second all about beauty without cruelty.”

Kylie was suddenly being held up as an emblem of western ideals – the literal face (and body) of the UK’s reaction to the global threat from a terrorist organisation. The Daily Mail printed a list of reasons to be cheerful, post-9/11, topped by Kylie. The picture they used alongside the piece was captioned “Fungirl Kylie, scourge of the Taliban”. Watching from the outside as this narrative unfolded, Kylie was “dumbfounded. I understand the way they’re seeing it as a positive thing, but no! Don’t write things like that!”

Actual human Kylie, not the projected superhero being pushed to the frontlines, was being interviewed live on local radio when the attacks took place. One of the DJs asked her on air, “So how does it feel to be a pop star in this situation?” “A two-second silence on live radio seems for ever,” Kylie remembered in the Face magazine. “I said: ‘I can’t believe you just asked me that.’ I think they swiftly cut to a record.”

Americans, at first, clung to a very different kind of superstar and song. Enrique Iglesias’s windswept ballad Hero, released on 3 September 2001, was one of the few songs played by New York City DJs after the attacks, but by the time Can’t Get You Out of My Head made its debut on the US charts in January 2002, a shift was happening. People needed something to dance to. “It was definitely at a time when people were gingerly going back [out],” remembers NYC music journalist Larry Flick. “I think [Can’t Get You Out of My Head] came at a time when we just needed Kylie, and an artist that wasn’t going to take it all too seriously. There were a few things, in New York, that got us through 9/11: there was the return of Friends, the return of David Letterman, and the Kylie record.”

Flick remembers the second time he heard it, in the Roxy, New York’s disco roller rink turned hip nightclub, which was famed as a venue that tested out new records. “I ran to the booth and I was like: ‘How about you playing Kylie?’ And the DJ goes: ‘Baby, this is the shit.’ He played it for about 20 minutes and the crowd lost their minds.”

Can’t Get You Out of My Head wasn’t just a hit; it was a smash. It didn’t just peak in all the usual places Kylie tended to, but also in places such as Belgium and Romania and Switzerland and Hungary. In the US, it quickly started to climb not just the Dance Club charts, where Kylie had been a regular, but also the main Billboard Hot 100, a chart she hadn’t been in since 1988.

“Can’t Get You Out of My Head was inescapable,” remembers US Kylie fan David Russell. “It started to get played on the radio, and then suddenly the video was on MTV. Kylie did Saturday Night Live with Ian McKellen hosting. I begged the publicist and she got me in. McKellen said: ‘You lucky, lucky people, it’s Kylie Minogue!’ He then sat on the side of the stage like a little kid watching her.”

Back in the UK, Kylie won twice at the 2002 Brit awards, scooping best international female and best international album for Fever. But it was her award-show performance that would gain instant notoriety, later becoming a mainstay of any homosexual’s post-night-out YouTube binge.

Performing a special mashup of Can’t Get You Out of My Head and New Order’s Blue Monday by then white-hot DJ and producer Erol Alkan, whose Trash club night was London’s hottest ticket, Kylie arrives on stage lying down on a giant CD – her name emblazoned on it in neon pink – seemingly holding on for dear life while wearing a Dolce & Gabbana minidress and knee-high silver boots. As the giant CD is ejected out of the player and lifts up so the crowd can see her for the first time, you’ll believe you can hear God. The performance was a perfect balancing act: audacious, spectacular, camp, sexy and silly in all the right ways.

“I feel like I’m on a wave and I actually know how to stand on the board at this point,” Kylie said as Can’t Get You Out of My Head and her imperial era kicked in. “I don’t know where it’s taking me, but everything feels really good.”

Can’t Get You Out of My Head: In Search of Kylie by Michael Cragg is published on 24 September by Faber.