‘You start to worry you’ll never listen to anything else’: 25 years of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the song that saw the future of pop

Rejected by Sophie Ellis-Bextor, the minimalist dance-pop opus would become the defining song of Kylie’s career. And, a quarter of a century later, it hasn’t lost its capacity to burrow its way into your brain. La la la …

Around the release of Pet Shop Boys’ 1988 album Introspective, Neil Tennant coined the term “imperial phase” to describe an era when he felt the duo “understood the essence of pop music and so we felt we could do what we liked”. For his less flowery partner in pop excellence, Chris Lowe, this was typically followed “by disappearing up your backside! ”. In 2010, critic Tom Ewing fleshed out Tennant’s term by imposing three criteria : “command, permission, and self-definition”. Command related to an artist’s willingness and ability to push boundaries in a way that would reverberate through what…