This was post was originally written in June. Somehow, out of some cruel act of disremembrance, I forgot to post it — UNTIL NOW.
Get a grip, I’m almost gone
There’s just too much goin’ on
Feel like I can hardly breathe…
Dannii Minogue, Queen of Clubs®, is back to making music — or, at the very least, she’s just done some (non-Pride related) gigs down undah for the first time in years, belting out all the classics — from “Love And Kisses” to “All I Wanna Do” to “I Begin To Wonder” to “Perfection” (!). And she even covered Garbage (!!!)! And Years & Years! Had I known all this was going on, I would have looked into booking a flight to Australia. Seriously.
It is no secret that Dannii was one of my first gay icons that I cherished as a newly out homogoober — yes, even before her sister, Kylie — and I hold her discography very near and dear to my heart, especially her experimental ode to underwater dolphin sex, “Everybody Changes Underwater.”
Somehow, I had a (don’t want to lose this) feeling that a seminal classic from the depths of Disco D’s collection would be marking its 10 year anniversary this month — and sure enough, I was right.
Back in 2005, Kylie was diagnosed with breast cancer. (I signed up for a Relay For Life event that year specifically in her honor.) Happily, the Mighty Aphrodite triumphed over the illness in a year’s time, and just recently celebrated her 10 year all clear.
In the time between the diagnosis and recovery, Dannii channeled her nervous energy into a song called “So Under Pressure,” written alongside longtime collaborator Terry Ronald and British dance troupe LMC.
“Obviously, the world saw that last year was a really hard year for our family. It was just kind of hard to watch someone that you love going through pain and shock, and I would have given anything to be able to take that away from my sister, so it was a hard year,” Dannii said on Rove in 2006.
“Then I found out my best friend also got cancer. It was a bit like ‘What’s going on?’ The lyrics in that are really personal to me. It’s that moment that you put your hands up to the sky and just think ‘How does this happen?'”
Although the song is still a signature Dannii club banger full of breathy, come-hither vocals and throbbing pulsations, the anxiety-riddled lyricism that certainly speak to the situation at hand.
“When I was writing the song, all these words came out…it’s better just to put it in a song,” she explained on Rove.
And then, there’s the video. What better way to visually put the needle on the pressure than with an albino python?
Straight out of the playbook of Godney, Dannii writhed and rolled alongside a rather friendly snake, serving look after look — a foreshadowing of her Target Australia Petites collection, no doubt — in a black and white swimsuits, tiny gloves and stilettos.
People work through their emotions in different ways…Dannii just happens to opt for pearl necklaces and Sapphic undertones in times of turbulence.
It is, like so much of Dannii’s discography, one of the campiest things we’re fortunate enough to be blessed with in the Internet. (In low quality, because none of Dannii’s videos seem to be available in high definition, which is an injustice too unspeakable to discuss at this time.)
Dannii fabulously took the track across British telly alongside her leggy dancers, from LK Today to T4 On The Beach.
“So Under Pressure” went on to become the lead single from one of her MANY hits collection, the Hits & Beyond collection in June of 2006, sliding in at a not-great-but-still-technically-a-Top 20-hit #20 on the UK charts and successfully notching her yet another #1 on the club charts thanks to a slew of dance floor-ready remixes by Soul Seekerz, Steve Pitron, Riffs & Rays and, of course, Thriller Jill — better known as Terry Ronald and Ian Masterson.
Luckily, all those mixes are available on Apple Music.
The scare is thankfully gone, but the pressure lives on and on.
