“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’”: Kylie Minogue on the Britney Spears hit that she turned down

Kylie Minogue Britney Spears.

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.