It is hard to believe anyone was ever a snob about Kylie. To stand in the screaming crowds (possibly the loudest I have ever heard) at Perth’s RAC Arena, on the first stop on what will be her biggest world tour in two decades, is a reminder of what a genius of reinvention she is. This is a show stuffed with preposterously catchy hit after preposterously catchy hit – “from, you name it, almost any decade,” Minogue herself says, before letting out that endearingly goofy laugh.
Two decades ago, she said she would never be the queen of pop, as that title went to Madonna – “I’m the princess. I’m quite happy with that”. But, surely, two monarchs can come to some kind of peaceful agreement?
“She is gay shorthand for joy,” Rufus Wainwright once said. Now 56, and in the fourth decade of her career, Kylie is also shorthand for endurance, for pluck, for sweetness, for deceptively simple hits, for music that will make you want to dance. But even the most dependable voice in pop, who has earned her spectacular entrance – appearing high above the stage on a swing in a diamond-shaped cage made of lasers – seems not to have fully grasped how loved she is.
“I’m just having a moment,” she says in her first breathless interlude, tears in her eyes. “It is so nice you see you.”
The Tension tour is an excursion through every Kylie era: the sweet innocence of her early Stock-Aitken-and-Waterman era; the flirtatious disco on Light Years and Fever; and the pulsing Eurodance of Tension, which hit like a precision strike on gay clubs around the world. But new arrangements on some of the older tracks makes them feel fresh: this is Kylie’s Version, and it gives her varied career an impressive sense of continuity.
Tracks like In Your Eyes and Spinning Around are spruced up with some EDM-beats and disco sounds that echo Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer and even Nile Rodgers. Helpfully, the eighties are back in, which helps take the edge off the cheese on tracks like The Loco-motion – but when Kylie is game enough to do a choo-choo dance, it is nothing but delightfully playful.
Some acts take an everything-at-the-wall approach to stadium shows (looking at you, Coldplay), but there is a logic to the aesthetics of the Tension tour, even if that logic came from the gayest dream Denis Villeneuve never had. Since Fever, Kylie has long loved a camp robot dystopia – and sure enough, there are dancers in shiny Tron-ish suits, sheer outfits and gold gondola hats, a very Tom of Finland sequence involving sequined capes and sequined feather caps and a laugh-out-loud moment involving some inflatable block suits that make it look like Kylie has been swarmed by sinister Gumbys. It is all very silly, very queer and very fun.
Tension is a startling reminder of just how many hits she has produced – Come Into My World, In Your Eyes, Spinning Around, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Outta My Way … and just when you think you might be about to get a reprieve from the dancing, the sexy beat of Slow begins (apparently her favourite of all her tracks – just one of many fine choices).
But what is perhaps the most amazing thing is how many of her more recent tracks hold up against the spectacular run of hits she had in the 1990s and 2000s: of course there is Padam Padam, which won her her first Grammy in 20 years and gets an enormous response in the arena, but also Things We Do For Love and Say Something, both of which could have been fantastic Hall & Oates tracks.
The show ends on the anthemic All the Lovers, before returning for a cool as sorbet-bet-bet encore with Tension and Love at First Sight. “This has been such a part of my life – pretty much my entire life,” Kylie says, leaning down to press a hand to the stage. “And it never gets old.” We can only hope it never does.
Kylie Minogue is touring Australia until 3 March, then Asia, the US and the UK
