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Pop

Melbourne, Neighbours, 1986

Kylie Minogue

Kylie Minogue was born in Melbourne in 1968 and became famous as Charlene in Neighbours, whose wedding episode drew about 20 million viewers in Britain. She signed with Stock Aitken Waterman the same year, and her first album, Kylie, was the best-selling album of the 1980s by a woman in Britain. After PWL let her go in 1992 she made two more adventurous records for Deconstruction. The second was renamed in Europe after the death of Princess Diana and only got its original title back in 2003. Parlophone signed her in 1999, and her 2001 album sold more than six million copies. She was treated for breast cancer in 2005. Disco in 2020 made her the first woman with No. 1 albums in Britain in five decades in a row, and she has won two Grammys.

Mount Kisco, New York

Laura Branigan

Laura Branigan was born in Mount Kisco, New York, in 1952. In 1972 she sang in a folk-rock band called Meadow, and in 1976 she toured Europe as a backing singer for Leonard Cohen. Ahmet Ertegun signed her to Atlantic in 1979, and her big voice made her one of the biggest pop singers of the early 1980s. Branigan 2 followed in 1983, produced by the German producer Jack White. She won the grand prix at the Tokyo Music Festival in 1984. She stepped back in the 1990s to nurse her husband through cancer, played Janis Joplin off-Broadway in 2002, and died in her sleep in 2004.

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