Kylie Minogue @ SSE Hydro, 30 Sep

The evergreen Kylie goes country, with a little bit of David Lynch thrown in, on her tour for new album Golden

Live Review by James Hampson | 08 Oct 2018

Kylie is a strangely timeless popstar. Everyone talks about Madonna’s age, mainly to highlight her perennial dominance of the pop scene. But Kylie, thanks to her creative peak coming in the early 2000s when she had already been on the pop scene for a dozen years, occupies a strangely ageless position in the pop gynarchy. Going to see Kylie doesn’t feel like it would feel going to see, say, Blur: she isn't an ageing spectacle which you’re going to on behalf of past memories. It feels like Kylie still has something new to offer.

And so Kylie gives us a new tour, with the barely required new album, which is called Golden. It’s a country-tinged record of songs about flighty romances, and the stage set matches this. It’s all very wild west, outbackish, with dancers in cowboy hats pleading for Kylie and offering her glasses of bourbon, you know the score. There is a vague road trip theme, and a lot of the action takes place in a smokey bar with a pool table. A pre-filmed interlude during a costume change in which Kylie sings Blue Velvet in said bar obviously makes everyone think of David Lynch. And when a lengthy queue of people in various states of distress wait to use a payphone during Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ there is a certain Lynchian dimension to all this.

The new songs blend fairly seamlessly into the set, as the new album consists mostly of millennial whoops which a crowd of 15,000 Glaswegians is always going to latch on to fairly quickly and make something special out of. It’s fair to say, however, that they do linger on and the gig kicks off only when they’re left behind. The plaintive ballad Shelby 68 with its lovesick chorus is confusingly dedicated to Kylie’s dad, before Radio On follows, which sounds almost exactly the same. However, the home stretch follows this, with Slow and Kids and All the Lovers, and you realise again the range and expanse of Kylie’s work and how happy it makes people, as you look up and see 50-year-olds in short-sleeved shirts dancing their hearts out.

Dancing finishes the set, a loose-limbed, almost reflexive pop number with the refrain “when I go out I wanna go out dancing”. It’s hard to know if this is a song about death or, you know, just going out, but either works well. On an autumn night, with a supposedly autumnal album and coming from a star who is perhaps consciously entering her autumn period, it’s a fitting end. The gig was fun, obviously and almost inevitably. Kylie’s back catalogue stretches way beyond a handful of hits and there are omissions, such as I Should Be So Lucky, because the back catalogue is so strong in other areas. If you like Kylie and you want her to put on an amazing show while you belt out her hits, you would be in the right place.


Kylie's European tour continues until 24 Nov. For dates and more info, head to www.kylie.com