THE GOLDEN GIRL

Kylie Minogue, the queen of resilience and reinvention, returns this month with a new album, a ‘big’ birthday and a new philosophy on love (and marriage). By Charlotte Edwardes

Kylie Minogue talks love, marriage and turning 50

There’s something familiar, almost nostalgic about Kylie Minogue – ‘Kylie’ – the corn-blondeness, the coy warmth, the pure oozing Aussiness. You’d think years of being waxed and polished would’ve hardened her, but no, she’s still giggling, self-deprecating, worrying about me (that I’m comfortable, that I have a drink), worrying that, ‘it’s close to awful’ how colour co-ordinated her outfit is with the hotel décor at Blake’s, where we’ve met, round the corner from her house in South Ken. And so when she tells me that she has arctic moods that can make the room temperature drop, I assume she’s joking. She’s not. Surfaces freeze over, she explains. ‘I go deathly quiet. I don’t yell, I never yell, but the silence is loud.’ Those who know her ‘run for cover’.

And then there’s a second weapon in this dark arsenal. ‘It’s called The Look,’ she says. ‘No one wants The Look. I don’t even want The Look.’ What happens when you get The Look? ‘The Look is like being laser-sliced,’ she says. Give me The Look, I dare her. ‘You don’t want The Look,’ says Kylie. ‘Honestly, you won’t recover. It’s like death. You don’t want it. You’re not having it.’ She’s laughing while she says this, that broad toothy grin, which makes it all the harder to believe she has a killer instinct.

But then something has helped her survive so long in show business. Right now, she has a new album, Golden, released to coincide with her 50th birthday in May, and over three decades she has released 13 albums, selling more than 80 million records. She has starred in seven films, and had a TV career that included about a million episodes of the soap Neighbours plus appearances in Doctor Who and The Vicar Of Dibley. And then there’s all the fashion shoots and magazine covers.

She was as ubiquitous as wallpaper in the 1980s: Neighbours was on whenever the telly was on (it seemed), and teenage bedrooms covered in posters of her were pre-social media shrines to popular culture. As Charlene Mitchell, she was an unlikely child mechanic in improbably clean dungarees, a character who couldn’t in fact be less like Minogue, in that the highlight of her life was marrying the boy next door (Scott Robinson, played by Jason Donovan). Fresh from Neighbours,

she was transformed into a tiny, tinny pop star, a product of the derided Stock Aitken Waterman schlocky jingle-factory (even seeing the words I Should Be So Lucky triggers the catchy lyrics).

The first of her dramatic reinventions was her unveiling, cropped and coruscating, as the girlfriend of rock star Michael Hutchence, the late lead singer of INXS. The famous gold hotpants from Spinning Around were bought for 50p in Portobello Market and are now housed at the Arts Centre in Melbourne.

‘I can shapeshift really easily,’ she says. ‘I love to do it, actually, it’s part of my job. But when that goes into my private life, that’s not always good.’

She clarifies: ‘What I mean is, with a boyfriend, I go all-out. If you have a personality like mine where you like to give and a lot of that is outward, energy going out, it takes a bit of thought and time and work to say, “Wait a second, I need to get back to base camp.”’

Base camp for the last year has been the recording studio. After breaking up with her 30-year-old fiancé, the actor Joshua Sasse, in January 2017, she recorded the hell out of her feelings for her album Golden.

It’s another reinvention of sorts, she says. ‘I put everything in. It’s about me in my life at this point in time: what I’ve been through, where I am, where I am going.’

Certainly, she’s been through a lot – not least a cancer scare midway through her Showgirl tour in in 2005, when she was 37. She went for a mammogram after finding a lump and was shattered to be told it was breast cancer. She was treated in Paris, where she was living with then boyfriend Olivier Martinez, and had a partial mastectomy followed by punishing rounds of chemotherapy that left her ‘with no hair, no eyelashes, no nothing’.

More recently, she has talked about her sadness at not having children, all the more

‘I LOVE TO SHAPESHIFT. I CAN DO IT REALLY EASILY – IT’S PART OF MY JOB’

poignant after she’d said on Desert Island Discs that it would be ‘incredible’ to start a family with Sasse, who she met in 2015 on the set of the American TV show Galavant.

Despite being romantic – ‘I can get into all sorts of trouble’ – Minogue never saw herself as ‘traditional’: ‘I never thought I would get married. Just going through “being engaged” seems like an experiment, because I’d never as a girl or in all my life had a vision of getting married. It’s not something I needed or wanted. My parents never brought me up with the idea of “the big marriage”. I never had it as a goal.’

She says she became caught up with the notion that marriage suddenly wasn’t so bad. ‘I thought, “Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and I should go for it. Maybe I should do what most of the world do. It works for them.”’ With a smirk, she adds: ‘Now I’m going to stick to my previous view. I don’t think marriage is for me.’

Romance, on the other hand, falling in love, these are something else: ‘Love may be the strongest drug on earth if you think about it,’ she says. ‘The first flush of discovering someone new. That feeling that you kind of like each other: then you really like each other.’ She thumps her palm to her chest. ‘It’s what most paintings, songs, books are written about – the search for love, the loss of love, it’s everywhere you look. One half of me is a total realist, the other will definitely merrily skip down that lane again.’ Even the heartache is worth it, she says, because ‘there’s no show without Punch’.

She has admitted being ‘broken’ by the break-up with Sasse for reasons she describes to me as ‘a bit murky’ (there were rumours he was unfaithful). Earlier this year she said that her whole physical being was ‘compromised. I think it’s called a nervous breakdown.’ But after escaping to Thailand with two girlfriends for six days, she returned and knuckled down to work.

Gosh, 2017 sounds like a nightmare, I say. She looks at me astonished. ‘But it was a great year.’

What about the agony, the breakdown? ‘Unless two people are completely on the same page going, “This is how I’m feeling today, how are you feeling today?” You can’t negotiate the downfall of your relationship carefully. No, once we’d fully determined that we’d gone our separate ways, life kind of…’ She pauses.

Went on? ‘Well, I did have to rebuild myself, physically and mentally a bit. But no, 2017 was a great year. I loved it. I actually loved it. Because I knew where I stood. I knew what work I had to do and I did it.’

She doesn’t say that the 20-year age gap between them was a problem exactly, but embracing 50 has been a big step. ‘I can’t change, I can’t become 35. I am this age, I’m accepting of it, I’m trying to be more loving of myself.’

Her 40th birthday was in Paris in the George V hotel and she celebrated with family, grateful because ‘not long before that I’d been ill’. Friends have insisted she have a big party for her 50th and she sounds reticent. ‘Obviously, they can’t stand me,’ she jokes. ‘I whine: “Can’t the three of us just go out and do something together?”’

Actually, she’s quite looking forward to it. ‘I’m going to try to be a grown-up and book it in advance and everything. I’m sure that’s going to happen, and I might even turn up! Ha!’

Her friends have clearly inspired her: ‘My girlfriends who’ve turned 50 care more about what is important and care less about other things; they seem to inhabit themselves more, in a way I feel is happening to me. It’s pretty cool. If you can’t fight it, feel it. It takes some work to do that, but feels good.’

Suddenly she smiles. ‘This is the thought I just had: Comedy is tragedy plus time. I already look at that time, we [she and Sasse] were together for just over a year, so it was quite a succinct journey, and I’m appreciative. Honestly, I am. I know I turned a corner and learnt a lot about myself. Sometimes it takes something like stepping out of your comfort zone, some drama like that, to shake things up. Now being on my own again and reclaiming myself and just asking myself harder questions, like: “What do you really want, how did you get here, how do you feel, how are you going to move on?”’

She sets her hands in her lap. ‘Now I have enough drama in my life.’

‘I’D NEVER HAD A VISION OF GETTING MARRIED. IT’S NOT SOMETHING I WANTED’

The drama in her life is perhaps part of the reason why the world loves Kylie. She inspires protectiveness in us while providing almost a role model for dealing with the ‘crap’ (in her words) life throws, dusting herself off and getting on with it.

She’s an engaged conversationalist and a perfectionist, judging by the effort she takes to answer every question properly (‘Am I taking the questions too seriously?’). But she’s funny, too, saying, for instance, that if she could change one thing in the world it would be the high-resolution digital cameras used by the paparazzi. ‘Don’t get me wrong, you can do a lot with it. It’s great if you want to study the wings of a Christmas beetle. Go for it. Zoom in, get closer. But actually, that’s my face. That’s my body on that screen. I don’t need to see that detail. I can’t unsee it. Thanks.’

She doesn’t cook – ‘No.’ But she is fairly good at looking after her body after her cancer battle. ‘I’ve always been pretty careful. I was ahead of the curve with all the low GI stuff because, although I haven’t been told by a doctor, I know I am hypoglycaemic. Sugar is not my friend. I don’t crave it. I’d rather have slow-burning fuel.’

She also knows the importance of breaks, of not cramming it all in, and so when she is sent a back-to-back work schedule that doesn’t include downtime, she calls them up and tells them straight: ‘No. Debunk time has to be factored in.’

‘Debunk time’ entails showering off hair make-up, body make-up and normal make-up before a soak in the bath. Then further decompressing is done on the phone to Australia to her parents, Ron and Carol, or sister Dannii, 46, or brother Brendan, 47. ‘I love to call home. I can easily chat to them for 30-40 minutes. I like to hear about their day.’

Her family sound rather wonderful, I say, to have instilled such confidence in her and her sister (Dannii is also a successful singer). Minogue demurs. ‘Um… yessah.’ She is keen to impress that they were not ‘showbiz parents’. ‘It wasn’t that story of pushing the kids into anything, although we’ve all ended up in the business. My brother was a cameraman.’

Her abiding memories of childhood are sweetly suburban, almost disappointingly normal. ‘We had a house with an above-ground pool in the back yard – like Neighbours.

I had a bike and roller skates. Every second house had two or three kids. You’d all be in the street cycling around or playing cricket, or playing hopscotch. My girlfriend across the street, her dad had a CB radio. We’d say: “Breaker, breaker, come in. This is Big Baby.” And then some voice would appear. If I could teleport myself back to a point in childhood, it would be summer in that house in Wantirna South.’

In some respects, she was sad to be separated from that life – but ultimately she feels she hasn’t changed that much from the girl growing up in a Melbourne suburb. ‘I’m just an older version of who I was.

The main difference is experience. Wisdom and experience. I am still a total clown half the time, which most people don’t see, but my friends and family see the whole time and say, “Oh God.” And

I still have drive and determination and guts to try different things.

For better or worse, I’ll always try it. So yes, I’m still the same. I am just happy that I’m still here.’

Kylieʼs new album, Golden, is out on 6th April on BMG

‘I STILL HAVE GUTS TO TRY DIFFERENT THINGS’