The Daily Tonic: Good Minogue / Bad Minogue

Today marks 19 years since the release of the Kylie Minogue classic Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. The song wasn’t really an obvious pop hit but Kylie has always had good form with risky singles.

When she recorded her first version of The Locomotion in Australia (not the Stock Aitken Waterman-produced version that came later) her record company wasn’t entirely convinced they had a hit on their hands. So they got deodorant company Impulse to pay for the making of the video. That way, they thought, if the song bombed Impulse could simply re-cut the footage into an ad and the whole thing wouldn’t have been a total write-off.

Which is why, if you watch the original Australian version of the video, you’ll see quick shots of Kylie reaching for a can of Impulse every so often.

[Watch here]

Thanks for all your stories of celebrity classmates. In keeping with the educational thrust of things, today we’re interested to find out the most impressive, interesting or important things you’ve ever been taught by the rich and famous.

Today’s Question: What is the best lesson you’ve learned from a celebrity?

Email us at hello@popbitch.com to tell us what you know, and we’ll send some sort of goody bundle to the best ones.

One reader emailed to tell us that they had been at school with former Sugababe and original Atomic Kitten, Heidi Range. A decent brag, but the more interesting bit of their email was about the uniform.

The uniform of their school (Maricourt Catholic High) ended up being copied – almost stitch for stitch, right down to the school insignia on the blazer pocket – for the fictional high school in Hollyoaks.

According to the rumour that went round the school at the time, Hollyoaks producers had been looking to use the school as a filming location but the nuns who ran it didn’t approve.

FYI: Tom from Gomez’s dad used to be Head of French there, though he wasn’t (as far as anyone knew) a nun.

J writes:
“I went to Camberwell Primary School in Melbourne with Dannii Minogue. I was a few years below Dannii and was only seven years old when she was about 11.

“She used to hang out with this really geeky girl with long reddish blonde pigtails and thick glasses. They both ganged up on me one day and stole my skipping rope, threw it high up in a tree and made me cry.”

KoS writes:
“I was at school with Chris Morris. He was always entertaining classmates with impersonations of staff members. Teachers would normally sit at desks at the front of the classroom that were raised quite high and, between lessons, Chris was prone to clambering on to the raised platform to the accompaniment of The Who’s Baba O’Riley, clutching a broomstick, leaping from the dais with legs spread wide, while windmilling wildly.”

E writes:
“I was at college in Brighton at the same time as Gwendoline Christie. She was bang into indie music and was generally known as the Girl From Mars – thanks to her height and the Ash song.”

S writes:
“I went to uni with Iain Rougvie before he became known as Iain Lee. At one of my earliest student parties, he hypnotised me into thinking I was JR Hartley (off of the Yellow Pages ad). And later, that my hands were glued to the back of a chair.”

capedmarauder writes:
“The BBC’s Robin Hood, Jonas Armstrong, was at my school. He used to try and flick people’s balls and penises while they used the urinal. I don’t think it was sexual. We were only about nine years old.”

Continuing the theme, the tracks for today’s audio quiz come from a similar school-based compilation series. Today: the four-CD boxset of School Disco dot com.

You get one point for each track you correctly identify and another for every artist. Ten songs gives you a total of twenty points.

[Here you go]

Was Osama Bin Laden sending coded messages through porn?
[Read on Daily Beast]

Further to yesterday’s mention of Method Man’s high school lacrosse career: he recorded a new song about lacrosse just last month…
[Hear ‘Boom’ on YouTube]