Life, death and dancing
Am I the only one who cries when I'm listening to Kylie?
This morning I sat in the car after the school run and cried listening to Kylie singing Dancing. You know the one – feel-good, upbeat country-pop – not your traditional tearjerker.
Obviously I felt like a prize plum, scrabbling around for tissues in the glove compartment, but my heart was being squeezed so hard by this total bop of a tune that of course tears were coming out of my eyes. This is not unusual for me, I often cry when I listen to music. Musical theatre, one of my obsessions, is the fulcrum of this phenomenon. I go to see a show to feel something, and if I don’t leave the theatre blowing snot bubbles, it’s usually a sign of disappointment.
Kylie released Dancing in 2018, around the time when I was in conversations with consultants about being added to the waiting list for a donor liver. Oh, did I mention I had a liver transplant? I'm afraid it does come up quite a lot in my writing because it was an experience that acts like a dart in the timeline of my life, pulling on everything that came before and after it. You know the way you divide life into sections around big events, like before we had a dog and since we got the dog. When I hoped I wouldn't die, and now I’m relieved I didn’t die.
Back in the car, Kylie remains insistent “when I go out, I wanna go out dancing” and I remain in the driving seat, snivelling and imagining her as my best friend, until the song ends. The double meaning is not lost on me. Yes, Kylie and I will always be first on the dance floor (you coming?), but she’s singing about more than next Saturday night. It’s an anthem for living our best life, and dancing as well as we can until the day we die, whenever that may be. Diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 36, Kylie has spoken about finding positive ways to process the trauma of that experience. I think dancing is the perfect place to start.
The act of dancing, for me, is physical and also a state of mind. This time two years ago I was in hospital recovering from my transplant surgery and I could barely move. I started by rotating my hands and feet while I lay in bed, because that’s all I could do. The desire to move was really strong, not to go anywhere or do anything, I was too exhausted for that. But my body was calling for me to sway, weave, circle to an internal music. Very early one morning when the lights on the ward were just going on, I heard one of the nurses singing in the corridor outside my room. To hear live music felt healing. When she came in to see me, I asked her to sing again, and I whispered along. “It’s a new dawn, it's a new day, it’s a new life for me, and I'm feeling good”. I danced with my hands and feet, and we laughed together and I did feel good.
I’d lived for years with many fears, but the biggest was the fear that I would die in surgery and never see my children again. It is the type of fear so huge that it will swallow you whole if you look it in the eye, so you simply have to pretend it doesn't exist. I am good at squishing down big emotions and I think that's why music is so important to me. I sing and dance to feel the things I need to feel, in nice safe three-to-four minute spaces where it feels fucking amazing to shut out the real world and dig around tits-deep in my own gloop. Or in the darkness of a theatre, where live instruments and voices vibrate in my bones, loosening the calcified pain so it can flow out in tears.
Dancing is fundamentally a happy song with a positive message, and research shows that upbeat music triggers feel-good serotonin and dopamine in the brain. But Kylie goes deep on the lyrics of this one to serve up a bittersweet floor-filler that brings us face-to-face with the inevitability of our own mortality. Yikes. No wonder the emotion spilled over. I was crying because I am happy and sad, scared and relieved, exhausted and yet still desperate to always keep on dancing.
DANCING (Extract)
by Kylie Minogue
Everybody's got a story
Let it be your blaze of glory
Burning bright, never fade away
And when the final curtain falls, we could say we did it all
The never ending of a perfect day
Can't stand still (Can't stand still)
I won't slow down (Won't slow down)
When I go out, I wanna go out dancing
Ah ah ah ah, ah ah ah ah
When I go out, I wanna go out dancing
Ah ah ah ah, ah ah ah ah
I wanna go out dancing
I wanna go out
I wanna go out
(I wanna go out dancing)
I wanna go out
I wanna go out
(I wanna go out dancing)
Songwriters: Kylie Ann Minogue / Nathan Paul Chapman / Steve McEwan
Dancing lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner Chappell Music, Inc