For most of us, the idea of having a global smash hit is a pretty alien concept, let alone the accompanying fame and fortune that goes with it. For Kylie Minogue, it’s almost as though she has never known any different.
Her formidable rise from 17-year-old Australian soap star to global pop sensation was nothing short of stratospheric, in part thanks to her success with the production outfit PWL (A.K.A Stock, Aitken and Waterman) during the late 80s.
The pure-pop sensibilities of I Should Be So Lucky defined the hooky calling cards of her early career. Those cards were ultimately trumped during a writing session/collaboration between Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis.
This brisk creative surge resulted in the extraordinary Can’t Get You Out of My Head – the song that ultimately would became the biggest selling of her career, with over 6 million sales.
Even more bizarre, the pre-Kylie demo of the song was originally pitched to pop act S Club 7’s management and Sophie Ellis-Bexter, with both acts turning it down.
While we should always admire the creative force of such fine musicians, The song's quick gestation also underlines the straightforward simplicity at the heart of the song’s arrangement, which was later bolstered in the studio.
“I always feel that Can’t Get You Out of My Head shouldn’t have been the hit that it was - it was written in about two-and-a-half hours,” Dennis recalled in an interview with Music Week. “There have been lots of songs that have been easy to write over the years, but it was probably one of the quickest, if not the quickest, sessions I’ve ever done in my life.”
With influences such as Bronksi Beat and Kraftwerk ringing in their ears, the pair set about creating a basic foundation, which involved a minimal amount of equipment.
At the very heart of the track - and generating the vast majority of the sounds employed - is the Korg Triton. The drums, shaker and bass organ sounds were all supplied by the Triton, as were the strings and Wurly sounds too. Backup support was provided by an Akai sampler, which was used for a basic drum/percussion loop, while a Roland Alpha Juno-1 provided a secondary bass part.
“The whole Kylie record was done on the Triton,” he confirmed in an interview with Sound on Sound. “The hi-hats, bass drum, snare, that's all off the Triton. There's another hi-hat off the Triton, a loop which was out of the Akai [sampler], and I think the shaker was off the Triton too.”
Despite the lack of overt guitar presence on the track, guitarist Rob Davis still managed to employ some guitar-like philosophy when constructing the chords used in the song. There are plenty of extensions used throughout, albeit played on keyboards.
With the music in place, the lyrics came quickly. Following a quick loo break…
“I remember going for a wee, and it was quite an inspirational one!” Cathy told Music Week. “I came back and a lot of lyrics fell into place quite quickly. Then we worked on the second verse together and then I came up with the, ‘la, la, la’ thing just before I was leaving and that was it.”
Cathy explained to PRS for Music that the ‘la, la, la’ motif came out of a need to pepper up the developing arrangement with more hooks; “We had the “Can’t get you out of my head” bit and we had the bridge, but it needed another hook and that was the ‘la-la’s. We knew it didn’t need another lyric, so I just went ‘la, la, la…’”
Let's take a closer look at the winning combination of harmony and melody that Dennis and Davis concocted then. The introduction and verse both make use of the most simplistic form, employing just two chords.
Centred around the key of D Minor, the song begins with a chord of Dm, for 2 bars, before the dominant chord Am is used, also for two bars.
The set-up in the voicing is particularly interesting, and largely down to the dominance and use of the bass organ sound. This sound places a particular emphasis on the 5th of the chord - in a chord of Dm this is the note A, and in a chord of Am, the note E. It's a similar technique used by Kraftwerk in their song The Model, but created using synths, instead of the bass organ sound.
Given this 5th-heavy construct, you could be forgiven for thinking that the chords employed are just open chords, but it is the additional riffs and voicings around this riff that provide the extended harmony by way of arpeggiation.
These additional notes change the character of the chord, ostensibly turning them both into minor 7ths - Dm7 and Am7.
The use of extensions becomes even more exaggerated once we hit the second verse, with the entry of the Wurly. The Am7 is pivoted into an Am9, also in an arpeggiated form, which continues to be employed as the song develops.
At the end of the second verse, we hear the pre-chorus bridge for the first time, which reveals a curious collection of chords, which similarly demonstrate Davis’s guitarist tendencies.
Relying on a chord per bar, we hear a flow of Bbmaj7, A, G#dim and A.
The use of Bbmaj7 adds a degree of sweetness to proceedings, while G# diminished is well-regarded as a perfect linking chord - engineering a degree of uncertainty ahead of the chorus.
To finish this section, we hear a chord of Gm7 for 2 bars, finishing with Asus(4) which resolves to A, before heading back to the original Dm and Am sequence. Neat.
The Triton-generated rhythm is suitably four-square; the kick plays 4-to-the-floor, with the occasional dramatic stop. The snare plays on beats 2 and 4, and is emphasised further by claps on beat 4. The hi-hats and shaker subdivide in 8th notes, which is about as simplistic as a drum pattern can be!
The rhythmic side of the track also relies heavily on influences from house music - the relentless presence of the offbeat bass part is the key example. The coupling of the bass organ sound with synth bass stress that club-leaning flavour.
Subtler elements of the mix add much to to the track's glacial, otherworldly feel.
We hear both synth and Wurly arpeggiations, while a high string line glides slowly over the top. There is also the iconic resonant synth sweep, which appears in the chorus. Unlike all the other instrumentation, it does so with a quaver push. This means that it is placed an 8th note ahead of beats 1 & 3.
Those vocal ‘la, la, la’s’ act as a linking section in the introduction and also between verses one and two. The recurring motif also makes several appearances later in the song.
The ‘la’ emphasises the minor 3rd of the Dm chord, endorsing the minor tonality, but in a slight mirror image of the bass/organ arrangement, the ‘la’s’ are also performed a 5th higher, meaning that as as well as as the note F (the 3rd of Dm) we also have the note C, which enforces the 7th of Dm7.
When listening to the track, the upper part sounds very slightly behind the lower part, which suggests to us that some form of pitch-shifter may have been used to create this effect. Having said that, Dennis has mentioned in interviews, that they also sampled one of Kylie’s ‘la’s’, which was then triggered over MIDI.
“None of the sections in the song conform to the typical verse-chorus structure,” Cathy said about the arrangement to PRS. “They’re misplaced sections that somehow work together, and that’s because we didn’t try to force any structure after the event. The seeds were watered and they very quickly sprouted into something bigger than any of us.”
For the first time in many years, there was an incredible buzz around Kylie Minogue following the release of the song in September 2001. Imbued with both a greater sense of sensuality but also a more musically-conscious maturity, the track - and its iconic, futuristic video - reignited Minogue's career. It reached No 1 in upwards of 40 countries.
Kylie’s star is still burning bright to this day, with 2023’s monster hit Padam Padam and a recent spotlight Netflix documentary keeping Kylie firmly in the public eye.
Examined as a song on its own merits, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is a fine example of what can be done with a basic amount of equipment, a simple set of chords and, well, a wealth of creative talent from Dennis, Davis and Minogue.
“I have never written a song that quickly and stopped myself interfering with it later,” Cathy told The Gentlewoman. “Normally, when something comes out, you have to pick it to pieces, and… I don’t know why, but that day I just didn’t feel like pulling it apart.”
