‘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 — SkimNews
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- Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis wrote 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' in autumn 2000 at Davis's garage studio in Surrey, demoing the track in three hours with the 'la la la' hook added by Davis and Dennis's vocals laid down by 7pm the same day.
- Kylie Minogue recorded the song in a few hours and it debuted at No. 1 on the UK chart on 23 September 2001, shifting 306,000 copies and beating Victoria Beckham's 'Not Such an Innocent Girl' (No. 6, 35,000 sales).
- The track became a post-9/11 cultural symbol, with Julie Burchill writing in the Guardian that 'Bin Laden and Kylie represent the polar opposites of human nature' and the Daily Mail captioning a photo 'Fungirl Kylie, scourge of the Taliban.'
- Dawn Shadforth's music video introduced the iconic white hooded dress and all-red, face-visor-clad dancers — a look so popular that Top of the Pops producer Chris Cowey said red gels were stolen from the set afterparty for impromptu Kylie impersonations.
- The song was initially passed on by S Club 7 and Sophie Ellis-Bextor before reaching Kylie, with Dennis recalling she initially thought 'this song isn't what Kylie does.'
- The release aligned with pop's absorption of experimental R&B production — Britney Spears' Neptunes-produced 'I'm a Slave 4 U' arrived the same month — and triggered what critic Tom Ewing called Kylie's 'imperial phase,' defined by 'command, permission, and self-definition.'
Why it matters: The track's 306,000-copy debut week and four-week UK No. 1 run crystallized Kylie's imperial phase under Tom Ewing's framework of command, permission, and self-definition, reshaping how pop measured an artist's peak era. Its September 2001 timing turned it into escapist balm during post-9/11 recalibration, with outlets framing Kylie as a cultural counterweight to bin Laden — a narrative Kylie herself called 'dumbfounding' but couldn't escape.
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