Kylie's feeling the love

Few would have guessed back in the mid-Eighties that a bubble-permed soap star would still be shifting records by the million a quarter of a century later.

But that's exactly what Kylie Minogue has achieved in a career which has seen her release 11 studio albums. In that time, she's take the odd career detour – her collaborations with Nick Cave and the Manic Street Preachers among them – but it's club-friendly pure pop that she's excelled in. And her new album Aphrodite could be the best yet.

We caught up with Kylie and Aphrodite's producer Stuart Price in the studio before the new record hit record store shelves.

Western Daily Press: What was it about this album and this project that made you want to do it differently to before?

Kylie: "Well for me this was a first, to have an executive producer. It was just the best experience, and funnily enough I think it's the most cohesive album I've had since the beginning of my career, back in the PWL days. There's a lot to be said for working with different producers and trying different stuff which has worked really well for me in the past but I definitely wanted someone to tie this together as Stuart has done so beautifully. The idea (to do it differently) was at the forefront of my mind on this album because I'd had a little niggle with the previous two albums. But the added reason that all of this came around was because of our friend Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters, who was working in this very studio, as I had started recording my album in various studios around the world. He praised Stuart highly and loves me dearly, and basically pestered me and said "you've got to do this, it'll be so amazing!", so I've got much to thank Jake for."

WDP: Do you regard this album as a return to the dancefloor? Or did you never leave?

Kylie: "It's been described as a return to the dancefloor; I don't think I ever totally left but it is a return to form I'd say."

WDP: Was there any point while recording the album when you thought 'yeah, this is it'?

Stuart Price: "A lot of making any record, I think, is about staring into the abyss of nothing – and you just have ideas or you have some songs, and you look at it and you say "what is this?" or "does this mean anything yet?" and then you have a moment where all of it clicks. We had a session where we'd started writing some stuff for New York, and it's funny at the start, because there's a make or break sort of attitude to it, where I think you have to make it work. So there was definitely a significant moment there. The first song we did was about angels; and I think there was a seed of an idea of what the record could become at that point. Then I think it really suggested the direction of the record, and at that point we could start sewing everything together to use as the basis of the album. So it's like the idea of the doors swinging open at a nightclub and you come in; but you have to create this world with this talk of angels, etc.

Kylie: "That was the first song we wrote together, we had our notebooks at the ready; Stuart's was a very special one and mine was from the 99 cent store! One of the titles was Angel and Stuart asked me "have you ever had a song called Angel?" I literally had to think back because one would imagine I had done so, but no, we hadn't. So that was our first song; in a little studio in New York"

Stuart Price: "There's a difference between having songs which you just put together and songs that you mould and craft together. We had songs that were maybe just a little too far away from what the record was shaping up to be, but just by changing things or re-working things they became an integral part of the record, important songs and undoubtedly singles for the album – and I think that's really a big part of the story of the record – that everyone who worked on it was open and collaborative."

WDP: This is a much lighter album, was that some sort of reaction to the darker times that you had been through?

Kylie: "I think a lot of what I do now is, in some way, coloured by the experience I had with illness. I guess I was just feeling like expressing joy at this point, I'd written songs more about that period in my life either on or for the last album, so I didn't feel like going through those again; this was about this moment, this time, and what a happy experience this has been for me."

WDP: After speaking about a theme, what's your relationship with love at the moment?

Kylie: That's a massive question! A lot of people question why so many pop songs are about love, why operas are written, why paintings are painted, why we cry during really silly commercials. Love in all its various forms challenges us all the time and I guess you could say this was a little love affair with this album."

Stuart Price: "Love is always a great muse for writing songs, but better a muse for being up and down and not plain sailing and I think that gives you ideas, or you have things that you learn over your life that start coming back out in lyrics. I think also you realise that if you've felt something then someone else has probably felt it, too, and they may have felt it in a different way but there's a connection there. So it's a great way of exorcising demons but it's also a really great way of celebrating stuff as well; more than anything all of the songs on this record in their various guises of love are about a celebration."

WDP: What was the most fun that you had on the record?

Stuart Price: "Wwhat you probably can't see is that by mine and Kylie's feet there's a little six foot square area that was designated the 'dance zone'. That was when you knew a song was right, and you knew that it was saying what we wanted to say."

Kylie: "We'd both be listening in our own world and there'd be the point in the song when the hands would go up! Hands up = good reaction. And, of course, there was the 'Dolly Parton Litmus Test' which is soon to be trademarked and copyrighted. It's a way of, testing a song's viability as a song without production. He'd get his acoustic guitar out and we'd sing."

Stuart Price: "Well it wasn't quite singing it was more of a performance. Kylie does the best Dolly Parton impersonation there is on the planet you know. We figured out that if that worked for any song, and we could see Dolly doing it; then on top of that we could sit down with a guitar and do it like that as well – the song was probably destined for good things. It became a sort of litmus test for each song on the record."