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 drivetime 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 on its original recording. “Confide in Me”, that operatic, mid-Nineties blur of ice-cold deadpan and ambiguous sexuality, is performed alongside an army of cloaked subordinates in black robes – it’s the cult of Kylie.
Only the show’s middle section gestures towards the cheese that’s often strong-armed its way into Minogue’s discography. “Spinning Around”, the disco number once credited with rescuing her from commercial oblivion in 2000, doesn’t quite pop off in the way you’d hope – likely because she’s done far better versions of it in the years since. Novelty hit “The Loco-Motion” still feels as if it should soundtrack a Butlin’s-sponsored coach trip to hell, but at least Minogue herself seems baffled by its legacy. “That was amazing but really weird,” she laughs upon the song’s completion.
Throughout the show, the passing of time seems to be on Minogue’s mind. She is, undeniably, in uncharted territory when it comes to her place in the industry, of a kind that only Madonna can truly relate to. This is a woman who has long surpassed the expected lifespan of pop fame, whose work continues to fill clubs and inspire new artists – the excitement on the faces of pop stars Anitta, Tove Lo, and Bebe Rexha, all of whom join her on stage tonight, is a sight to behold. At one point Minogue recalls being a mere “girl from the TV” who’d left the Aussie soap Neighbours to launch a music career. At another, she expresses thanks to the young people in the crowd who hadn’t yet been born when she was wearing gold hotpants around the time of the millennium. “We have history, people,” she jokes.
There is a sweet 10 minutes or so in which she takes song requests from the audience, breaking into an a cappella snippet of the not-especially-loved Goldfrapp soundalike “2 Hearts” (“half the chorus, that’s all you’re getting”), then a verse of “I Should Be So Lucky”. Minogue is open, overjoyed, and emotional from the off. Barely a quarter of the set has passed before she scrambles to the back of the stage to mop up a tear.
But these dollops of treacle are kept to a minimum, in a show that re-contextualises Minogue as a pop force still very much in her creative and performing prime. This is a woman who is famously very, very nice – in a way that sometimes gives her an air of unknowability, but more often just makes her seem human – but part of the thrill of watching her make music over the years has been when she turns off the grace and gratitude and becomes an absolute beast on stage.
Think the pin-up glamour of her “Better the Devil You Know” reinvention; the punky styling of her late-Nineties pivot into trip-hop and rock; the electropop ice queen of the Fever tour. At Hyde Park, lying astride dancers and clambering onto staircases with wind blowing in her hair, she bears a glamorous, steely ease of a kind that’s felt absent for a while.
She seems to know it, too. Notably, it’s a slinky rendition of “On a Night Like This” and a blown-out version of “Love at First Sight” that bring tonight’s show to an end – not, as some would have predicted, “Dancing”, that aforementioned track about death and oblivion, which upon its release felt pre-destined to close out a farewell tour. In fact, the song, along with the entirety of Minogue’s last two pre-“Padam Padam” albums, is absent altogether. Whisper it, but I think that might be deliberate.