1988 Kylie Minogue: I Should Be So Lucky

In 1988, Kylie 'Charlene' Minogue and Jason 'Scott' Donovan ruled the UK's teatimes in 'The Sullivans as directed by the Farelly Brothers' Australian import 'Neighbours' like the ancient gods of Valhalla made flesh. They were everywhere. Everywhere. And with an salivating audience ranging from excitable pre-schoolers to dotty pensioners fixated on their every move, a trip to a recording studio by our favourite stars was as inevitable as night following day. All of which means 'I Should Be So Lucky' is almost an irrelevance in itself; it's the concept that's important. Not so much the song on the disc but the fact that there's a disc in the first place. Kylie could have sung anything on her debut and it would have mattered not one iota. It's product, and as long as Kylie's name and face was on the cover of a single in the shops then any other consideration was minor.

'I Should Be So Lucky' comes piped down both barrels of the Minogue nose in a flat and strangled staccato whine with a diction that suggests she's reciting the lyrics phonetically. It's a horrible vocal, truly horrible and a more self conscious recording you couldn't imagine. But again, it didn't matter. It was Kylie, and that was enough. What more did you want and what more did you expect?

The Stock, Aitken and Waterman 'hit factory' was in full production by now and, true to form, the relentless music churns factory-like behind her throughout, though it's the one key musical box noise you'd expect to hear from the Chigley biscuit factory rather than any heavy industry producing something substantial and lasting. And that about sums up the song in total, from the tune to the lyrics ("I should be so lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky. I should be so lucky in love") to the vocal; it's a flimsy, lacklustre effort that annoys and grates more in it's three minutes than would a primary school assembly singing down 'One Thousand Green Bottles' to zero.

But as SAW apparently knocked this up in forty minutes while Kylie waited in the next room then you can't expect a lot more, and now in summing up I shall show the song the same contempt it showed it's listeners by not bothering to draw my own conclusions and instead quote the 'Efficiency Song' from Chigley that described a typical day in that biscuit factory:

"Nicely precisely and all untouched by hand.
Efficiency our motto, by which we proudly stand.
Cooked, cartoned, checked and crated, labelled and dispatched.
Efficiency efficiency at which we can't be matched".

A far better set of lyrics than SAW managed here and one that nicely sums up everything about 'I Should Be So Lucky' from start to finish.