Sometimes you have to stop for a moment to appreciate just where you've been and all you've accomplished before you can embrace the future once more. After a staggering sixteen years in the music industry, nineteen hit singles and four top selling UK albums, Dannii Minogue has finally had a chance to draw breath and reflect on her amazing career. To mark the occasion, Dannii is releasing a collection of her previous singles alongside six stunning new songs, fittingly entitled The Hits And Beyond. It's an opportunity for her long-term followers to reminisce along with her but also an eagerly awaited chance for Dannii's many new fans to find out just what they missed. Quite simply, it's a unique collection of timeless pop songs that few other artists can boast, a selection of tracks that charmed hearts, transcended musical fads and moved dance floors whatever year they were released and, best of all, a sign there is plenty more where they came from. Few artists have had as much fun and success as Dannii Minogue, the girl whose friends lovingly call 'Disco'.

Performing has always been in Dannii's blood, though even in her wildest dreams she never imagined her life would turn out the way it has. Brought up on Abba and Olivia Newton John in Melbourne, Australia, she has been singing and entertaining as long as she can remember. "There was a lot of jumping around the lounge room at home singing into a hairbrush," she laughs now. "I would see people like Abba and think that looked like a really cool thing to do but never in a million years did I think that was something possible for someone like me."

 
Few artists have
had as much fun and success as Dannii Minogue, the girl whose friends lovingly call 'Disco'.

Fate had other ideas, though. At seven, Dannii started in entertainment and soon went on to land herself a permanent role on Young Talent Time, a variety show that was Australia's answer to The Mickey Mouse Club and which demanded its young stars sang an amazing seven songs live every Saturday night. "It was a great training ground but I just loved singing and dancing so I wasn't thinking about anything else. I wasn't even really aware of the stage and the lights, I was just having fun." Six years later, Dannii moved on to continue acting, eventually landing a role in popular soap Home and Away. After a year there and with a burgeoning music career already in Australia, the 16 year old moved to London and released her debut single, Love and Kisses. Dannii hasn't looked back since.

"When I arrived in the UK, I was completely overwhelmed!" she remembers. "I was like a kid in Disneyland. There's no way in the world I thought that all these years later I'd still be living here, writing and producing records. I just remember feeling like a country bumpkin and not knowing what was going on at all. People would get excited because I was going on Blue Peter and I didn't even know what those shows were. I'd be thinking, what are you talking about? What's a Blue Peter badge?! I really had no idea where I was or what I was doing but I didn't care because I was having such a good time."

Success soon followed and Dannii found her feet as the UK's newest pop princess, scooping countless magazine awards and hosting TV shows including Top of the Pops. By the time she released her second album, Get Into You (featuring the hit singles Show You The Way To Go and This Is It), she had also discovered a new-found passion for dance music.

"I was excitedly discovering all these new sounds."
   "We didn't really have dance music on the radio in Australia," Dannii explains, "so if you were a kid and you didn't go to clubs, you weren't really aware of it.
Then I had my track, Baby Love, remixed by Steve Hurley [renowned house music producer who has worked with the likes of Madonna and Michael Jackson]. That was the first thing I did that was really cool and my love of dance music and clubbing started from there. There were so many different things to be exposed to, I loved going to specialist clubs like R&B - there was no such thing in Australia so I was excitedly discovering all these new sounds."

Even then, this new dance interest influenced the direction of Dannii's outstanding third album, Girl (featuring the hit singles All I Wanna Do and Everything I Wanted), which received rave reviews and led to a breathtaking five month run in the lead role of Esmerelda in Notre Dame de Paris at London's Dominion Theatre, a role that would win Dannii critical acclaim.

It wasn't until 2001, though, that Dannii really realised her musical potential and started to find her feet in the notoriously hard-to-crack dance world.

"Friends had been going to Ibiza for years but it wasn't until I went myself that it finally all made sense," Dannii explains. "Then I realised that it's the place where all the DJ's come together and where all the music that's going to matter over the next twelve months is tried and tested. It's an amazing place to be and I still have to go there every year because I feel like I need that contact with the DJ's because they're such style makers. It's important to me to know what they're up to and peek into their record bags!"

After forging a friendship with Pete Tong, the superstar DJ asked Dannii to sing on the track Who Do You Love Now? The single went on to sell a phenomenal 200,000 copies and enter the UK charts at number 3. It was all the encouragement Dannii needed to start writing properly and she retired to Sweden to pen her fourth album, Neon Nights (featuring the hit singles Put The Needle On It and I Begin To Wonder).

"I took everything I'd seen and heard in London and just went away from it all and focused. I'd done writing before, but nothing like this. I knew I could fall flat on my face but I'm an all or nothing person. I had to give it a go rather than regret not trying it so I hung around studios, learnt from other people and then had a stab at it myself.

  
"Writing
and producing
is the biggest
part of what I do."
Thankfully, that album got a whole different kind of attention and respect and great sales too. It was pretty terrifying but it made me realise it was ok to be in control and have an opinion on every aspect of the creative process. Now writing and producing is the biggest part of what I do."

The results wowed the music world, including America. Who Do You Love Now? kept Justin Timberlake and Beyonce off the top of the dance charts there for a staggering seventeen weeks, while Dannii was considered to be the stunning face of European dance music abroad. Back in Ibiza, a dance track she'd written the lyrics to called You Won't Forget About Me was fast becoming the hit of the summer. Dannii had finally been accepted as the international queen of the dance floor, elevated from keen clubber herself to the voice behind the very tracks getting people into clubs.

"It's a dream come true and I could never have planned all this," she smiles. "It's strange that it's taken so long but now I've found a place where I feel comfortable and where the audience is on the same wavelength too. I guess I've finally found that special ingredient in me that means I can put my stamp on tracks and make them individual. I don't want to lose that but I don't want to rely on sticking to a formula either, so my new tracks will be the big test for me."

Opening
her heart
in the lyrics
and sharing her most intimate thoughts and
feelings
   The Hits and Beyond gives Dannii and her fans the chance to start this new, exciting journey into the future together. Rightly proud of her past, it offers one last look over her shoulder but, crucially, also a beginning of something even more interesting to come.
The album's new songs reveal a creative maturity that proves just how at home Dannii feels in the studio now. Combining her love of unforgettable, upbeat melodies with the pounding dance rhythms she knows gets people's feet moving, Dannii has also focused on each song's emotional resonance this time, opening her heart in the lyrics and sharing her most intimate thoughts and feelings. On forthcoming single, So Under Pressure, for example, we glimpse her private struggles over the last difficult year when her sister was diagnosed with breast cancer.

"It's a real achievement for me that I was brave enough to put all that into words," Dannii reflects. "I'd spent all year saying, everything's going to be fine, we're all strong, but then you hear in the song that some days I actually felt like I was in quicksand. I didn't want to go into work at all the day I wrote that but then I realised that is what a songwriter is supposed to do, to write about what you're feeling and experiencing. It's funny that when you write about anything regarding a struggle, you find peace in it and that's where you get the uplifting, anthemic, euphoric feel to the music from."

Never one to take the easy option, Dannii also came up with a particularly challenging video to accompany the single which involves her being wrapped in a cream python twice her size, drilled into a claustrophobic Perspex box and being spun around until she couldn't take it any more.

  
"I definitely have that Australian tomboy side to me"
"I tried to put different things in the video that made me feel under pressure and it really did!" she laughs. "It was the hardest video I've ever done so I kept thinking, why on earth did I come up with this concept? Actually the one thing people tell me they couldn't do is be that close to a snake but that didn't bother me at all. It was beautiful. People don't realise but I definitely have that Australian tomboy side to me. I love snakes and sharks and jumping out of planes and stuff. Growing up, I was closer in age to my brother so it never occurred to me that it wasn't a girly thing to ride a bike, covered in mud holding frogs and collecting lizards!"

2006 looks set to be Dannii's best
   Always full of surprises, 2006 looks set to be Dannii's best and most creative yet. She is bursting with ideas and excitement at the prospect of, at 34, finally realising all she is capable of.
A huge fan of visually entertaining acts like Goldfrapp, she's keen to test her new material out live, possibly write for other artists and film her lead role in a Sixth Sense-style psychological thriller due to be filmed in Australia.

"There's still a long way to go and a lot to unfold," Dannii promises. "I don't know why I'm still around and still having hits but I'm taking it day by day and hoping more things pop up, things that I would never even have thought of doing. That's the thrill and the challenge for me and that's what I love."