Padam Padam
Kylie Minogue's Pride anthem of 2023
Being Pride weekend it feels like a good day to talk about this song. Everyone involved in making the song credits the LGBTQ+ community in propelling the song and making it a hit. There’s a great article on its journey. It appeared at a lot of Pride parades last year and has been adopted as a gay anthem.
It is a little odd that I don’t know much about Kylie Minogue considering I was immersed in Australian music in the first few years of this century when she started hitting really big worldwide. Minogue is a huge star in the world outside of North America but I wasn’t really aware of her at all. I knew her 2001 big NA breakout song I Can’t Get You Out of My Head but never connected it with her. I did know about her through her acting career, specifically her appearance in the Doctor Who Christmas Special Voyage of the Damned.
Padam Padam is an onomatopoeia for the sound the heart makes. As songwriter Ina Wroldsen said, "I'm married to an Englishman and my mother-in-law from north London would always go, 'Oh my heart's going ped-ou, ped-ou, It was in my mind when I went to the studio, but 'ped-ou' doesn't sound very nice. So we created 'padam'. We being cowriter Lostboy (Pete Rycroft), who also produced the track. The song was written without anyone in particular in mind but when Minogue said she wanted to go more electropop on her next album, the track went to her A&R person and she immediately loved it, even recording the vocal in a London hotel.
The lyrics are really simple, describing the frisson of sexual attraction but the song is bouncy, incorporating an Eastern European feel to its electro-pop base. Warning - it’s an earworm.
The music video was directed by the legendary British music video director Sophie Muller.1 It was filmed in April 2023 at the Pink Motel2 (specifically one of the rooms, the Cadillac Jack’s diner, and the Junk Yard out back) as Minogue said she would prefer to film on location According to Muller, the video was inspired by the works of David Lynch and by Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth. She described the music video as conveying a sense of otherworldliness, a strangeness that mirrored the track. Personally I love the choreography, especially in the diner.
She released a second video that shows behind the scenes during the track. It highlights the choreography and the backup dancers, as well as showing a bit more of the Pink Motel.
Then there’s the video of the official remix that uses some of the dance outtakes, puts on a new background and uses a blur effect to create a very moody feel.
Enjoy your song of the day!
Besides being a long-time collaborator of Minogue’s, she is best known for her collaborations with Annie Lennox, Gwen Stefani, and Sade.
It's interesting that the song was such an anthem last year and it won a Grammy yet it never really charted on Billboard's Hot 100. Something is wrong with their methodology!