SIMON COLLINS: Holly Valance was a cheap Kylie Minogue . . . this is what looking back at her songs feels like

I don’t know about you, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, but it feels like 2002.

Holly Valance is back in the news.

Twenty-two years ago, it was because the professional midriff was the latest Neighbours star to launch a music career with a racy pop single, Kiss Kiss.

The execrable reheated cover of Greek-American singer Stella Soleil’s English-language cover of Turkish singer Tarkan’s Simarik was the first cut off her debut album, Footprints.

This week, it’s because Valance — now, 40, mother-of-two and wife of billionaire property mogul Nick Candy — has become the poster girl for anti-woke, climate denialists across Gweat Bwitain.

These days Valance, who played down-to-earth Ramsay Street denizen Felicity Scully on Neighbours, is only the girl next door if you live in a seven-bedroom mansion in Oxfordshire.

Long after music lovers woke to her lack of talent, Holly Candy nee Valance (real name: Holly Rachel Vukadinovic) has woken to the woke agenda. And she hates it, threatening to never return to Australia again.

She sang of Cocktails and Parties on Footprints, an album rightly written off as a Kylie Minogue impersonation minus the charm. So, Aldi Dannii Minogue then?

Now she’s entrenched on the cocktail party circuit in the Old Dart and Australia is the embarrassing old high school mate she pretends she doesn’t know.

Critics claimed songs such as Down Boy, which would never, ever be accused of being too woke, revealed Valance’s primary purpose to disturb impressionable men, “making the album a triumph in that respect”.

She certainly has the Right and white sections of the UK’s political system — and I employ the word “system” looser than a Royal photographer uses Photoshop — all a-fluster.

HoVal has also reminded blokes back here in Woke Oz of when she was 18, hot and everywhere. Kyle Sandilands and Ben Fordham both leapt to her defence. Down boys.

In addition to labelling Australia as too woke — has she not seen Barnaby Joyce’s mad skills at late-night parkour? — the Fitzroy-born former “model and actress” (no accusation of being a singer) took aim at climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Valance described the young Swede as a “demonic little gremlin”. I suspect Thunberg, born the year after Footprints was unveiled, didn’t know what a Holly Valance was until her recent outbursts.

To be fair to Holly, her cover of the thrice-warmed-up Kiss Kiss is a superb example of recycling.

Thunberg would dig such environmental mindfulness, although perhaps not for the lack of sustainability built into a pop career on par with some of 2002’s finest one-hit wonders, including DJ Otzi of Hey! Baby shame and Perth’s own Popstars winner Scott Cain, whose debut hit I’m Moving On covers his subsequent lack of success.

I prefer the second coming of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, whose 2002 hit Murder on the Dance Floor is once again ubiquitous.

At least, after underwhelming careers as a soapie actor and pop singer, Valance did her bit for the cultural environment and removed herself from it. Until now.

Kudos, I guess, for moving from the Where Are They Now? column to the front pages, but — next time — leave the punditry to somebody who pays their taxes (or, more to the point, their filthy rich partner does).

“I said things I didn’t mean,” she warbled in Naughty Girl, another saucy track from Footprints, way back when the team formerly known as Fitzroy claimed its second consecutive AFL Premiership.

Here’s another fun fact to end on — the original Tarkan version of Kiss Kiss was called Simarik, Turkish for “spoilt”.

You CAN take Fitzroy out of the girl.