I'd say, unlikely as it sounds, I'd never really listened to the song Better the Devil You Know properly until the last couple of weeks. I didn't hear it when it came out in 1990 but remember seeing its title, and, not knowing the expression, thinking "how the hell is that the name of a pop song?" (of course, the same title was used in quite an unwieldy fashion a couple of years later on Sonia's Eurovision second placer - I suppose, since for most of the 90s, that was the only one of the two I knew, that barely adequate tune of a Better the Devil You Know was better the Better the Devil You Know I knew.)
Strangely, the first I gave any significant thought to Kylie's Better the Devil You Know was several years later, without actually hearing it. I bought Nick Cave's The Secret Life of the Love Song lecture on CD in around 1999. I'd already bought The Boatman's Call by then, but I do think it was The Secret Life of the Love Song that made me a Cave acolyte (speluncaphile?). Solo renditions of People Ain't No Good and the as-yet-unreleased Love Letter, all his trademark humour, learning, biblical allusions, the first time I'd heard the words duende and saudade, and, perhaps most notably, his breakdown of the harrowing lyrics to Better the Devil You Know, his description of the song as a message ""to God that cries out into the yawning void, in anguish and self-loathing, for deliverance".
At the time, being merely a narrow-minded indie kid, I mistook Cave's words as as an ironic take on a cheap song (which I still hadn't listened to!), rather than a slightly grandiloquent take on an excellent song.
Not that I thought, even at the time, that Kylie was not capable of good songs or good singing. I definitely liked Confide in Me and Put Yourself in My Place. Of course, Where the Wild Roses Grow. I was stung by the negative reaction to the James Dean Bradfield-written Some Kind of Bliss. I'd seen her perform Rescue Me in 1994 on Don't Forget Your Toothbrush and, for the first time, thought "she's really a pretty good singer" (although I also distinctly remember thinking that this was a singer who was no longer young and no longer a frontline star .... good one Dave). I also remember, a few years earlier in Our Price Ealing, almost buying the debut album Kylie with my £10 Christmas voucher, but chickening out at the last minute because I thought it was uncool, and buying an album of Andrew Lloyd Webber instrumentals instead ...
How readily we kill our darlings. I was a true original old-school Neighbours kid. I'd owned not just Especially for You but also Angry Anderson's Suddenly (still a banger!). But I did, like a hurt child, turn against Kylie when Spinning Around came out, in 2000, with a big campaign of "I'm a pop girl at heart, I shouldn't have done all that indie rubbish". Well, fine, have it your way, popKylie, did the Manics write Little Baby Nothing especially for you in vain?
Even then, had I listened to Better the Devil You Know? I did hear it as some point, at some point in the 2000s before this last month, but I'm not sure I could have hummed it or sung much more than the title.
Look, I wouldn't say Kylie has been of massive interest to me one way or another throughout most of this century - beyond that brief chagrin at the anti-indie turn of Spinning Around, I've certainly never felt any negativity to her, but broadly, over the last couple of decades, felt only a distant respect for the admirable pleasantness and normality she has clearly maintained, for the knack of still finding a pop hit when most of her peers have only got nostalgia left. Still, we decided to watch the recent documentary together, hearing it was well made and interesting.
The main non-Kylie figures in it are Danni Minogue, Cave, an extremely poignant and raw Jason Donovan, an extremely full-of-shit Pete Waterman, and, in footage, Michael Hutchence.
We reach Better the Devil You Know in the first episode, and it is described as a career turning point, a sign of Kylie wanting to have more control of her music, while still being written and produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. There is some connection made between the song and her then-new-partner, the roving international heartthrob and bounder Michael Hutchence, I think both by Kylie and Waterman - that, for all his faults, at that time, Hutchence was "the devil she knew" - I have since read that Mike Stock, the song's main writer, has denied knowing the slightest thing about Kylie's romantic life at the time. But still, of Pete Waterman said it, it must be true ...
In any case, I really listened to the song. I listened to it on the TV, and then I listened to it that evening and the next day. I heard, for the first time, that it truly was a good song - the melody of the verse, the melody of the chorus, the relationship between the two, the stretch of the vocal performance, the sound - still SAW but just with more oomph, the sense of unexpected depth, and, indeed, the lyrics, this "message to God that cries out into the yawning void, in anguish and self-loathing, for deliverance", which may or may not be about Michael Hutchence.
What do I know or care about Michael Hutchence, this - clearly - impossibly alluring man who died in his mid-30s at a time of having becoming one of the most notorious cads in the world?
I remember the day his death was announced, in November 1997. There were, I recall, parallels drawn with the death of Diana a couple of months previously - two people around the same age, the horrifying post-rationalised inevitability of the sudden ending. I remember that it was quite commonly dismissed/joked about as a case of autoerotic asphyxiation - I think until recently I'd thought there was considerable likelihood that was the case. But no, it seems the simple truth is it was a horrible, desperate suicide.
I really remember that day well, and associate Hutchence with it. At university in St Andrews, I travelled in a car down from Pollock Halls in Edinburgh, listening to regular bulletins about Hutchence on the radio, to a place called Ilam Hall in the Peak District - it was for a reunion/celebration of the organisation I'd taken my gap year with, in the first half of that same year. It's notable to me for a handful of reasons. At that time, I was very good friends with three of the people I travelled down with - via that previous year, and seeing them in Edinburgh often. I was friends with a lot of people from my gap year, but most of them I never saw at all after that reunion, and even the ones I was particularly close to at the time, I haven't seen now for a long long time. So that disconnection feels a bit strange.
But also, there's a connection that feels strange. This place, Ilam Hall - chosen, typically for that fkn organisation, rather boneheadedly, because it was in the middle of England, while actually not at all easy for anyone to get to - was, coincidentally, somewhere I'd been twice before.
A teacher took us on walking holidays in successive summers - 1988 and 1989 (prime Kylie time!) - where we stayed at Ilam, a fine Victorian manor with huge grounds which was, incongruously, a YHA hostel.
There's an innocence and joy in my recollection of the first trip which there isn't in my recollection of the second, much more ill-tempered, trip, and there are complex thoughts about the teacher who took us, who I found out committed suicide when charged, a few years ago, with accusastions related to grooming and abuse. Every thing I remember gets examined and reexamined. And, weirdly, that's all there when I think about Michael Hutchence.
I can't say I like, or have ever liked, the music of INXS. Some of their most well known songs, like Never Tear Us Apart, are almost there, but not quite there, for me, a bit like, say Purple Rain and other songs by Prince. In 1996, I liked Britpop but, even then, when Noel Gallagher, presented with an award by Hutchence at the Brits, said "Has-beens shouldn't be presenting awards to gonna-bes", I knew what revolting behaviour by a fundamentally unpleasant human being looked like. That's near the top of the vast Gallagher hall of shittiness.
There's something else about Hutchence that is ... well, I'm going to change the metaphor I was going to use here, as it's too literally true. I've recently read about Stuart Sutcliffe, Tammi Terrell and Michael Hutchence, and in all three cases, they received violent blows to the head while being assaulted which, possibly, in different ways, significantly later, led to their deaths - Hutchence was assaulted by a paparazzo in 1993 and apparently that was when depression and mood swings first took hold of him.
There's so much tragedy in these people's worlds - the Hutchence/Yates/Geldof world, the world of Cave, who sang Into My Arms at Hutchence's funeral, and Rainy Night in Soho at MacGowan's funeral. If Better the Devil You Know was written with Hutchence in mind, it contends with the only U2 song I unambiguously love, Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of, for being the best song about him.
And so here it is, me listening to a dance-pop song from 1990 and really hearing it properly for the first time in 2026 - making me thinking about 1988 and 1997, about Nick Cave, Bob Geldof and the Manic Street Preachers, about old friends and old haunts.
As with so many things, turns out the tall man was right - this really is a love song with a secret life of its own.
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