Kylie looks back on her ‘Golden’ days

The Australian pop star picks out her favourite songs of a 30-year career, leading up to her new album, ‘Golden’

You can look at Kylie Minogue’s career in terms of statistics — seven UK No 1 singles, 34 Top 10 singles, 118 weeks in the Top 10, plus five No 1 albums and seven more in the Top 10 — and those figures are impressive. But they don’t truly measure the love that people hold for a singer who has been part of the fabric of pop for 30 years.

To launch her latest album, Golden, the singer, who turned 50 yesterday, played a handful of tiny club shows, including one at the Cafe de Paris in London. She says she was terrified. “I thought: ‘People only know one song ...’” She need not have been: there was an air of hysteria from her fans at seeing her return in such intimate surroundings. Frankly, she could have read a phone book while someone dug up the stage with a pneumatic drill and people would still have swooned. She laughs at this, adding: “With a banjo!”

Maybe the moment where Kylie — Jenner notwithstanding, it somehow feels wrong to use her surname — transmuted from aspirant pop star to someone people really invested in was Better the Devil You Know ,a sudden leap from her previous singles with the Stock Aitken and Waterman (SAW) writing and production team.

ON THE SAW YEARS

“It was the first time Pete Waterman had said: ‘All right, kiddo, what are you listening to? What kind of record do you want to make?’ And I was really into Cathy Dennis and D-Mob’s

C’Mon On and Get My Love...” Minogue starts singing the hook that crops up in both songs.

“It really does mark a turning point for me, sonically and visually. I still don’t know that I had a clue what I was doing, but I was doing something that was different for me,” she said.

CONFIDE IN ME (1994)

In 1993, Minogue made a definitive break with the past, signing to Deconstruction, with Confide in Me becoming her debut single for the label. “All I had known for five years was PWL,” she says of Waterman’s company, “so this was certainly different. And I was aware that it was being perceived as a bit of a radical move, which I loved.” Confide in Me was a bold statement: a stripped-back single, coloured with sitar and strings, sounding unlike anything she had done before. “It was the first time I had sung like that,” she says, referring to her breathy, seductive vocal, “because PWL songs all had a particular sound.”

SPINNING AROUND (2000)

And so we enter Minogue’s imperial phase, though it did not come easily. In fact, she had recorded

Spinning Around and no one at Parlophone, her third UK label, thought it sounded like a hit, Minogue included. But A&R executive Jamie Nelson, who had found the song as a demo in New York, was sure there was a smash in there somewhere.

“He was like a dog with a bone and kept chipping away and having different mixes done,” she says. “He didn’t give up and he was right not to.”

SLOW (2003)

In which the often maximalist Minogue embraced minimal techno, with a ghostly, stripped-down recording that, as well as being a hit, became a smash and a club success, topping the US Billboard dance chart. Back then, she was still making the effort to stay up with club trends.

NO MORE RAIN (2007)

Minogue’s 10th album, X, had been prefigured by a breast cancer diagnosis. There were some people, she says, who were expecting X to be her dark-night-of-the-soul record, and they “were disappointed that it wasn’t about that experience.” No More

Rain, however — a song of redemption — did seem to symbolise her survival.

CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD (2001)

Even before she had finished hearing Can’t Get You Out of

My Head for the first time, Minogue knew she needed to record it. “I was thrown into a panic, going: ‘Have we got it? Are you sure we’ve got it? Please tell me we’ve got this song.’” Of course, she did get it — and a No 1 in every European country except Finland, as well as in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, plus a Top 10 placing in the US. At this point, Kylie was one of the biggest pop stars in the world. “It was weird,” she says. “When you have an amazing time like that, you’re so busy you can’t get out of it. You’re in a bubble and you work, work, work, but things are going so well that hard work doesn’t seem so hard. If you’re trying to push a record up the hill — I also know that feeling — it does feels hard. You’re doing the same amount of work, but it feels harder.”

The actual business of being famous, she says, is harder now, because everyone has a camera everywhere, not just the paparazzi. “There’s no rhyme or reason,” she says of the hassles of being Minogue in public. “I’m going: ‘What’s the story? There’s no story, why are you here?’ It almost makes the old days feel romantic, when a paparazzo would have to make the decision: ‘Do I click that off? I’ve only got two rolls of film in my bag.’ But, at the time, I’d be running down the street to get away from them.”