In a grey world, you can always rely on Kylie to bring the glitter.
Australia’s favourite tinsel fairy returned to Sydney on Tuesday night with a show filled with fun, confetti cannons and oodles of adoration from all involved.
It’s Kylie Minogue’s first show in Australian in about four years, and will be followed by shows in Adelaide and Melbourne later this month. She’s touring her latest album Golden, her 14th and so named because recently Our Kylie turned 50. In case you needed a time check, she’s been cranking out the hits for more than 30 years, shifting her persona from girl-next-door to Impossible Princess to techno queen and the Showgirl, and tonight she’s happy to bring most of them out for a dance.
The show opens with title track Golden and Minogue, in a short and sparkly red caftan dress, enters stage left through rhinestoned doors to take her place among a posse of dancing cowboys and girls. Golden is her “Nashville” album, albeit more Dolly Parton than Garth Brooks, and the songs adhere to the principle tenets of country music: wear your heart on your fringed sleeve but serve it up with a brave smile. Having been through her fair share of well-documented heartbreaks, from caddish boyfriends to health scares, this is a curiously natural fit for Minogue.
That said, this audience will love whatever she does and by the second song, everyone is on their feet bopping along to Get Outta My Way. Then we settle in for a rush through her jukebox of hits: Better the Devil You Know, Confide in Me and In Your Eyes to begin with. Being the pro that she is, she paces the show well – dropping in her Nick Cave collaboration Where the Wild Roses Grow, before Wow, Can’t Get you Out of My Head and a leather-bar version of Slow. A particular highlight is a romping-stomping version of Kids, her 2000 hit with Robbie Williams, and while her co-singer wasn’t in attendance, the crowd happily fills in for him.
Minogue doesn’t shy away from her (dare we say) slightly cringeworthy early hits, and Especially for You, her duet with fellow Neighbours alumnus, Jason Donovan, stirs up the nostalgic crowd.
I last saw Minogue in 2006 on her Showgirl: Homecoming Tour, the year after she’d been diagnosed with and undergone treatment for breast cancer. That show had a fragile but determined show-must-go-on feel to it. Now, all these years later, she’s more relaxed, more willing to let the dancers do the heavy lifting. There are few lines on that perma-frozen forehead, the costumes are more forgiving and there’s more swaying and hair flicking than robot dancing.
The classics keep coming – The One, Wouldn’t Change a Thing and All the Lovers – and the Golden tunes fit in seamlessly. She lost me and probably other less-than-obsessive fans some time around her Body Language, X and Aphrodite albums, but Golden is a welcome return to form. Stop Me from Falling, Dancing, A Lifetime to Repair, Low Blow and Shelby ‘68 are all classic Kylie.
The show skips along at a cracking pace, interrupted only by costume changes. There are five in total during the two-hour show and she probably could have skipped the home-girl-in-flannel shirt look. The last but one outfit is a sparkly gold dress, perfect for the Studio 54 disco section of the show as she pumps out New York City and The Locomotion under a rainstorm of glitter. She finishes up with Spinning Around, happy to give that famous bottom a moment in the spotlight.
Of course she’s back for an encore – this time a sparkly blue short playsuit and thigh-high boots – with Love at First Sight. Then, after she bids the crowd a very heartfelt farewell, she closes the show with her latest hit Dancing. With its irresistible chorus of “When I go out, I wanna go out dancing”, I’m betting this will be her closer for years to come.
After yet another storm of confetti, she finishes up at 11pm on the nose, stopping for just a minute to surf the waves of adulation. Then she disappears through the rhinestoned doors, leaving her adoring fans to head out into the dark night, humming along to one of her many hits and sprinkled with a final dusting of Kylie glitter.
Kylie Minogue is performing in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne, and at A Day on the Green Festival