Iconic Kylie Minogue song narrowly missed the Hottest 100 of Australian Songs
If you were wondering where the likes of Sia, Troye Sivan, Hoodoo Gurus, Christine Anu, The Triffids, Archie Roach and more wound up, then you'll find what you're hunting for in the other big countdown: the Hottest 200 to 101.
The Hottest 200 has been a triple j tradition dating back to at least 2008, satisfying curious listeners and offering a broader picture of voting trends.
The song that just missed clocking into the main countdown? It comes from the one and only Kylie Minogue.
Released June 19, 2000, the glossy Spinning Around was a reminder of what Kylie does best: a euphoric, undeniable disco-pop banger with instantly memorable hooks.
Spinning Around was voted in at #101, and is taken from the Australian pop royal's album Light Years. Her seventh studio record came after Minogue had dabbled in various reinventions, most dramatically with dance music and indie rock on 1997's Impossible Princess, to mixed success.
As the lead single, the lyrics of Spinning Around even seemed to be a self-referential wink to Minogue's return to form. "You know you like it like this," sang Minogue. "Threw away my old clothes, got myself a better wardrobe."
Indeed, the song's music video featured Minogue's now-iconic gold lamé hotpants, playfully parading her way through a club in a way that would upset the squeaky-clean sensibilities of her 1980s svengalis, Stock Aitken Waterman.
Originally bought for 50 pence ($1) at a British flea market by Minogue's long-time friend, photographer Katerina Jebb, and rumoured to be worth around $10 million, the hotpants were donated in 2014 to the Arts Centre Melbourne, where they are housed as "one of the most notable treasures" at Hamer Hall's public Australian Performing Arts Collection.
Spinning Around was originally written by Paula Abdul, who intended to record it for herself. It began as a soulful, much slower number inspired by Abdul's divorce from her second husband.
You would be hard-pressed to glean those origins from Minogue's giddy finished result.
While hunting for material for what would become Light Years, one of Minogue's New York A&R reps, Jamie Nelson, discovered the demo.
"[He] arrived home waving his arms about saying 'I've got this great song here, I think it'd be perfect for you," Minogue explained in an interview with the authors of the book 1000 UK Number One Hits.
"And we all listened to it, and loved it straightaway even in demo form, it had something."
The track went to now-prolific but then-fledgling British producer Mike Spencer, who worked up an instrumental featuring crack studio musicians such as Jamiroquai guitarist Rob Harris and Winston Blissett, a bassist whose credits include Cher, Massive Attack and Robbie Williams.
"We upped the tempo and made it into a disco record," Spencer told UK's Official Charts in 1998. "We didn't know if it was necessarily the right thing to do, but it felt like a return to where she'd come from, back to what [Minogue] does best.
"People at this point had assumed Kylie couldn't get back inside the Top 20. Obviously she's really famous and an iconic artist, but her career had gone adrift somewhat. I guess it was just one of those records that struck a chord."
That's an understatement. Spinning Around shot Minogue back to the top of the charts, debuting at number one in both the UK and Australia, and kick-starting a successful new chapter in a career that has now spanned five decades.
Beyond Spinning Around, Minogue charted two more songs in the Hottest 200 (Confide In Me at #175 and Nick Cave duet Where The Wild Roses Grow at #179) as well as reaching #27 in Saturday's Hottest 100 of Australian Songs countdown with her 2001 signature anthem Can't Get You Out Of My Head.
It follows her smashing a Hottest 100 record last year for the longest time between countdown appearances, with global comeback hit Padam Padam closing a 26-year gap since Did It Again charted in the Hottest 100 of 1997.
Coming in at #102 was another internationally renowned pop sensation, Sia, and her 2014 chart-buster Chandelier.
The lead single to her Australian and US chart-topping album 1000 Forms of Fear, Chandelier cemented the Adelaide-bred singer's transition from songwriter-to-the-stars (such as Beyoncé, Rihanna, and David Guetta) to a blockbuster solo artist in her own right.
Grinspoon ranked at #103 with their brief, brilliant Just Ace, Ben Lee's mid-2000s radio staple Catch My Disease was #104, followed by Spiderbait at #105 with Buy Me A Pony — the first-ever Australian song to reach number one in the Hottest 100, back in 1996.
Parkway Drive repped the homegrown heavy music scene with Carrion at #106; Savage Garden's tender ballad Truly Madly Deeply reached #107, followed by Birds Of Tokyo's Lanterns at #108, The Middle East's beloved breakout Blood at #109, and Pete Murray's Better Days at #110.
We have run the numbers to bring you some juicy stats (another Hottest 100 tradition) to whip out at the pub and ponder over.
A stack of artists reappeared from the Hottest 100 (24 to be exact), but more than half of the 200–101 comprised artists that did not appear in Saturday's countdown.
Of those 53 acts, quite a few scored more than one song in the Hottest 200. Kylie Minogue had the most, with three, but you have got to feel for these artists who all had two songs in the 200 but none in the main countdown: Sia, Birds of Tokyo, Pete Murray, Boy & Bear, Jebediah, and John Butler Trio.
There have been 19 Australian songs to go number one in a Hottest 100 over the years: 12 of them featured in the main countdown, and four more appeared in the Hottest 200.
Namely, Spiderbait's Buy Me A Pony at #105 (number one in 1996); Alex Lloyd's Amazing (2001) at #112; The Rubens — Hoops (2015) at #135, and Flume's Say Nothing ft. MAY-A (2022) at #176.
Five First Nations acts appeared in the 200 — Christine Anu, Archie Roach, A.B. Original, Xavier Rudd and Warumpi Band — while 31 songs featured female representation.
Sixteen songs came from solo female artists (namely Kylie Minogue, Sia, Christine Anu, Missy Higgins, Amy Shark, Vanessa Amorosi, Nikki Webster, Mallrat, Angie McMahon, Tina Arena, Olivia Newton-John, Ruby Fields, Helen Reddy and Kate Miller-Heidke).
Fifteen songs featured women as part of a band or as guest vocalist (Spiderbait, The Middle East, The Triffids, Divinyls, Something For Kate, Cub Sport, Sneaky Sound System, Amyl & The Sniffers, Ball Park Music, Killing Heidi, Middle Kids, The Go-Betweens and Giselle — vocalist on Crave by Flight Facilities).
The shortest song was at #196 — Hot Potato by The Wiggles, running at 1 minute 21 seconds, 30 seconds less than the shortest song in the Hottest 100 list (Spiderbait's Calypso).
The longest song was at #114 — To The Moon & Back by Savage Garden, running at 5m41s, almost half the length of the Hottest 100's longest song: Stevie Wright's Evie (Parts 1, 2 & 3), running at 11m8s.
The oldest track to chart in the Hottest 200 was at #186 — Helen Reddy's 1975 anthem I Am Woman — and the newest was at #165 — Amyl & The Sniffers' 2024 single U Should Not Be Doing That. The Melbourne pub-punks were also the newest entry in the main countdown, with their 2021 track Hertz.
The most popular decade in the main countdown was the 2000s, which also performed well in the Hottest 200, with 31 song entries. But the most popular was the 2010s, at 34 songs, followed by the 1990s (16 songs), 1980s (9), 2020s (7), and 1970s (3).
Historically, the Hottest 100 is quite a menagerie, and this Hottest 200 was no exception, with tracks like Zebra, Songbird, Oysters In My Pocket, Dinosaurs, Spiderbait's Buy Me A Pony, Tame Impala's Elephant, and acts like Boy & Bear, Birds of Tokyo, Cub Sport, Mallrat, and Amy Shark.
Feeling hungry? A few tracks focused on food and drink, titled Feeding The Family, Strawberry Kisses, Rum Rage, Feeding Line, and Hot Potato.
With a whole history of excellent homegrown music to fill our voting ballots with, we could do a Hottest 300 of Australian Songs full of classics… or how about the Hottest 1,000?
The takeaway being that this country has produced so much beloved music, and ranking it all in a list is not the point as much as reigniting passionate conversations about the quality and quantity of Australian music, and making noise to ensure that the future can sound as good as our past.
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