History is littered with stories of actors who turned down movies that went on to be hugely successful, and it’s a similar story in the music world. Songwriters frequently pitch their wares to multiple artists, and there are many cases where a song is turned by someone only for someone else to have a hit with it.
Take Britney Spears’ Toxic, for example, which could easily have ended up being recorded by not one but two different singers. Its writers - Cathy Dennis, Christian Karlsson, Pontus Winnberg and Henrik Jonback - reportedly had Janet Jackson in mind when they were working on it, but, in the end, Toxic was initially offered to Kylie Minogue.
This was back in 2003, and by then, Dennis and fellow Brit Rob Davis had already given Minogue a huge hit with 2001’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head, so you can see why she was part of the Toxic conversation.
Remarkably, though - in hindsight, anyway - Minogue turned the song down, and she recently admitted as much in an interview with Audacy.
“Yeah, there’s a little song called Toxic that was headed my way, and I was like, ‘Toxic? I don’t know if I want a song called Toxic,” she explained. “As it’s turned out, it was meant to be a Britney Spears song, I can’t imagine it being anything else.”
Touching on Toxic in an interview with The Sun a few years ago, Kylie said: "I listened to a snippet of it in the record-company offices and decided against it. I knew that Britney was keen for it. That's cool. I wasn't at all angry when it worked for her. It's like the fish that got away. You just have to accept it."
One person who must have been relieved that Toxic was a hit was Cathy Dennis, who admitted to Songwriting Magazine in 2013 that the writing process wasn’t exactly stress free.
“That was sheer torture,” she said of the song. “I beat myself up for seven days, not sleeping. The melody came first, then I had this puzzle of trying to fit words to the right number of syllables. It was really weird. I kept writing and then re-editing myself again, and again, and again.”
Dennis wasn’t deterred, though, and would end up writing more hits. Sugababes’ About You Now and Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl, for example.
Kylie, meanwhile, just keeps on being Kylie: her 17th album Tension II was released last week.
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