Whisper it, but there was a feeling as recently as 2020 that Kylie Minogue was being put out to pasture. There’d been a greatest hits collection, a Christmas album, and a legends slot at Glastonbury . She’d also released two records of nicecore dance-pop seemingly engineered for BBC Radio 2 drive time slots.
“When I go out, I wanna go out dancing,” she’d sung fatalistically on 2018’s Golden , as if she was standing over a great, big pop-music-exile abyss ready to plunge. What a difference a padam makes. The Kylie at London’s Hyde Park is not the cosy nostalgia act in sensible skirts into whom she appeared to be transforming.
Tonight, she arrives in red latex and sky-high heels, changes into silver fringe and later thigh-grazing gowns, raps and struts and keeps up with a flank of dancers dressed in Matrix leather. This is a woman who has remembered she’s still, in fact, incredibly cool. Last summer’s club smash “Padam Padam”, with its poppers-and-sweat-beads synths and chilly vocals, was a creative resuscitation for the 56-year-old, and its success is all over this punchy 90-minute greatest hits show.
Gone are the milquetoast inspirational bops. Back are the sex-fuelled earworms. Opener “Tension”, on which Minogue urges a lover to not be shy and touch her right there, sets the template.
“Red Blooded Woman”, a rare pivot into hip-hop, gets its first outing since 2009. The minimalist, carnal “Slow” is sped up into more of an erotic frenzy than o.