‘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
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Rob Davis and Cathy Dennis wrote "Can't Get You Out of My Head" in autumn 2000 in a Surrey garage studio on Simon Fuller's encouragement, finishing the demo in three hours; Dennis contributed the title hook while Davis added the "la la la" section.
- Kylie Minogue arrived in Surrey to record the track in a few hours and said she "knew a few bars in that this was for me"; the song had already been passed on by S Club 7 and Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
- "Can't Get You Out of My Head" debuted at No. 1 in the UK on September 23, 2001, shifting 306,000 copies and holding off Bob the Builder's "Mambo No 5" cover for a month-long chart reign.
- Victoria Beckham released "Not Such an Innocent Girl" the same week, but it entered at No. 6 with just 35,000 sales — prompting a BBC headline reading "Kylie trounces Posh in chart battle."
- The song's futuristic visual era, including Dawn Shadforth's video with its white hooded dress and red-visored dancers, anchored Kylie's imperial phase on her album Fever; Top of the Pops lighting gels were reportedly stolen as costume accessories.
- Released weeks after 9/11, the track became an escapist balm; Julie Burchill wrote that year that "Bin Laden and Kylie represent the polar opposites of human nature," while the Daily Mail captioned a Kylie photo "Fungirl Kylie, scourge of the Taliban."
Why it matters: The song reframes a hit once dismissed by musos as mere pop confection as the artifact that crystallized Kylie's imperial phase and gave post-9/11 Britain a unifying soundtrack — 306,000 first-week copies, a month-long UK No. 1, and a cultural moment so loaded that the Daily Mail cast her as a literal counterweight to the Taliban.
Ask SkimNews
