TIMELESS Aussie musical icon Kylie Minogue is the latest in a long string of international artists to grace the studios of daft talk show El Hormiguero – where she was forced to admit she and fellow Stock Aitken & Waterman singer Rick Astley may, in fact, be the same person.
Unlike other English-speaking celebrities before her, such as Charlize Theron, and Justin Bieber and Will Smith who have been on it at least three times each, Kylie, 52, did not travel to Spain for her slot on the programme, due to the pandemic, but took part via video conference from her home in London.
The singer and dancer from Melbourne – who started out in the public eye in the 1980s in the city's world-famous soap opera Neighbours, as stroppy teen motor mechanic Charlene Mitchell – talked about her forthcoming album which seeks a return to her roots.
Disco is 'dance music for grown-ups with rhythms from the '70s and '80s', according to the artist behind catchy ear-worms such as Spinning Around and Can't Get You Out Of My Head.
Chatting to El Hormiguero's presenter, Valencia-born comedian Pablo Motos – a self-confessed fan of the blonde legend from down under – Kylie said practically the whole of Disco was compiled during lockdown.
Motos played her first single from the album, Magic, and declared that dancing was 'medicinal', whilst the singer herself bopped away in her house in the UK capital.
Lockdown in London is 'not as severe as it was in March', she said, but she 'really misses dancing'.
And it's been a weird year for record-producing, Kylie admits.
She started working on Disco at the end of 2019, but once the UK went into lockdown – a week after Spain did so – she turned part of her house into a studio and got her team working with her online.
Microphones and 'all their components' were fitted in her home, and 'if there had been a CCTV camera', it would have been a 'black comedy', the pop diva admits.
“But I managed it, and I'm available if anyone wants to commission me to set up a home studio,” she said.
Even more strange, for the former soap star who played Jason Donovan's high-school sweetheart, was that she was 'performing', 'dancing' and producing with people she still has not met in person.
Some of the band members she 'only knows from the waist up', Kylie reveals, and one of her producers, who works in Finland, she only knows in 'two-dimensional format' despite their having 'spent hours and hours together'.
Although Kylie has almost never stopped churning out albums since her début with I Should Be So Lucky in 1987 – except over 2005 and 2006 when she was battling breast cancer and undergoing chemotherapy – fans who have followed her entire career still tend to associate her with her earliest songs, the soundtrack of the Stock Aitken & Waterman generation.
And those who remember performing all the set movements to Locomotion after studying Kylie doing so in her frilly red dress on the video may also remember one of the English-language pop world's quirkiest rumours.
“They said if you speed up a Rick Astley song, he sounds like Kylie, and if you slow down a Kylie song, she sounds like Rick,” said Motos.
“Are you quite sure you and Rick Astley are not actually the same person?”
Kylie says she remembers the rumour well.
“I'd love to have his voice, because it's amazing, but we're not the same person. In fact, we were seen together in the same place, so we couldn't be, but the story still continued,” the singer said initially.
But Pablo Motos gave his TV audience a demonstration, with a slowed-down Kylie song and a sped-up Rick Astley song, so they could draw their own conclusions.
Afterwards, even Kylie said she had her doubts.
“You could be right, maybe it's true and we are the same person,” she admitted.
El Hormiguero, which translates as 'The Ants' Nest', is an off-the-wall, free-for-all chat show where celebrities are invited onto the set and can, as South African actress Charlize Theron admitted she was told, 'do and say whatever they like and just go crazy'.
She appeared once alongside co-star Kristen Stewart, although had to pull out at the last minute before her second appearance in 2018 due to a sudden 'emergency', which may have been related to her work schedule but has not been confirmed.
Pablo Motos rarely beats around the bush and asks questions that everyone else has long been intrigued to know the answers to, often leading to anecdotes and fascinating facts about his guests being voiced for the first time.
Opera divo and one-third of the 'Three Tenors', Plácido Domingo, admitted on the show that it was best not to make love the day before performing, as you need to 'conserve every bit of your energy' – singing on stage 'wipes you out', he said – and, more intriguingly, confessed that he loves Reggaeton music but 'would never dare to sing it' as he did not think he would be very good at it.
