Kylie goes slow after earning her stripes

By REBECCA BARRY

The woman, 35, switched on the telly to watch music videos and was bombarded with near-naked pop stars. "I was shocked!" she says. "I thought, oh my god, there's flesh everywhere."

It's hard to believe Kylie Minogue's alarm. But the iconic pop star, who modelled her lingerie range on a bucking bronco and made a certain pair of hotpants the most potent item to grace a bartop, is relishing the novelty of putting her clothes back on. Er, in Kylie-style, that is. "Put it this way," she smirks down the line from London. "If I'm in knickers and a bra it's because it's my lingerie. But it will be a very subtle change. I'm not suddenly going to be wearing anoraks and ski boots."

This week the pint-sized Aussie stripped Madonna's prestige as the most enduring female solo artist in British history. This week Minogue's new single, Slow, became her seventh British number one, 15 years and nine months after I Should Be So Lucky became a chart-topper there. So there will be no need to wiggle a certain British national treasure to publicise her ninth studio album, Body Language.

Promotion will be as coquettish as her new Brigitte Bardot-biker chick image. During this short phone interview, for instance, her friendly conversation is so slow and full of pauses, it's hard to tell if it's the result of fatigue or a canny technique to limit the number of questions asked.

Tonight she will follow Mrs Ritchie's brilliant marketing nous and play a free, invite-only gig at London's Hammersmith Apollo theatre to a mere 4000 fans. Minogue's Money Can't Buy performance means she only has to perform once, but footage is likely to be picked up by nearly two million fans in Europe via internet webcasts alone.

Subsequent webcasts and TV specials are likely to broaden the global audience to something in the region of eight million viewers.

But as the inevitable Kyliemania takes hold, the star says she'll be chilling out in her trackpants with her boyfriend, "being as big a dag as everyone else on the block".

That she has trackies in her bottom drawer is hard to believe, but Minogue insists she'll be taking it easier these days.

When the news of her breakup to model James Gooding broke last year, British tabloids screamed headlines that it was the result of a nervous breakdown. There was no breakdown, she says, but the papers did contain a seed of truth that imbues the sultry Slow with meaning.

In a recent BBC radio interview Minogue revealed that when she first hit the big-time in the late 80s, she almost reached breaking point. Her father sat her down and warned her against saying "yes" to everything. Then there was the breathtaking stint in the studio while recording Body Language.

"Chocolate was such a breathy track and you have to layer up so many stacks of vocals. We couldn't have the air-conditioning on," she giggles. "I'd just gently start to sway in the recording booth, and as usual will go as long as I can to the point where something serious is going to happen. I'd be like, 'Um, excuse me, I'm not being funny but I really think that I might faint in here, so could I just step out for a minute?"

Despite the fact it's not in her nature to say no, Minogue will be heeding her dad's advice and spending more time with French actor boyfriend Olivier Martinez and relaxing with friends.

"It's become painfully clear to everyone around me how much I've worked, in fact how much my team worked. The build-up on [her first record with Parlophone] Light Years and really working it on Fever just isn't necessary, and it might be overkill to do the same amount. Now there's that much more interest I can't possibly do everything for everyone. I've earned my three little stripes. This is my third album with Parlophone and I really enjoy working with them. But you do have to earn those stripes. All the work we had to do back on Light Years was entirely necessary so there's a good sense of satisfaction."

While Minogue's longevity has broken the rules of pop stardom - her last album, Fever has now sold more than six million copies worldwide, two million in Britain alone - for years Kylie existed below the commercial radar. There were several troubled attempts to update the "singing budgie", such as 1997's Impossible Princesson BMG.

Parlophone Records were faced with the task of bringing her sound into the new millennium. So not surprisingly, on her third album with the label she and her A&R team have taken a cue from her stylist and best friend William Baker, the man who has transformed Minogue's outfits and reinvented her dance moves countless times.

"There's no point in repeating ourselves. You might think that because [the albums] come in fairly close succession you could do something that's the same, but I've just realised that pop years are like dog years - they go really fast.

"I'm feeling quietly confident. I'm not jumping up and down crying out how amazing it is, it just feels like I've done the right thing at the right time and that can only be good. Also, I would be bored. I need to have the right stimulation and to feel I'm challenging myself in new ways."

Adding a hint of rap to the album proved the first challenge, a feat even Madonna couldn't get away with. Accentuating the music with sleazy street synths and minimal retro beats was the second, a smart move that not only cashes in on the electro-trash phenomenon sweeping Europe but opens up a goldmine of reference points. Songs such as Someday, Secret and Promises borrow heavily from the fruity synth-kitsch of Prince, Scritti Politti, the Jackson Five, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam and take her back - ironically - to her pre-spiral-permed, spanner-wielding days playing Charlene on Neighbours.

"I'm the biggest Prince fan ever," she says. "I had to have been the biggest Prince fan in the world. So hearing [the album] did take me back to my 15-year-old bedroom, yeah."

On Sweet Music she sings "I'm looking for a new sensation", a possible ode to her ingenuous romance with the late INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, who encouraged her to play up her sex kitten seduction of the media.

His influence helped Minogue transform from singing budgie to pop vixen, and now, just five years from official middle-age, her career is still going strong. Which is not to say she takes it for granted.

"I reach the point where sometimes I'm out and I'm not sure why people are looking at me because I am able to completely forget my life. I'll be thinking, 'Why are they looking at me? Have I got something on my face?"'

You can bet that if she did, the tabloid would have a field day.

When her two-and-a-half-year relationship broke up with Gooding last year, paparazzi booked hotel rooms opposite hers and waited like hungry cats, hoping to capture her in post-break-up distress.

Reports behind the split ranged from her dumping him because he was a two-timing rat to him dumping her because she's boring and work-obsessed. Neither, she says, was true. And in a very un-Kylie way, she rang British tabloid The Sun to set the record straight: her ex was not a philanderer and that, "It's very hard being Kylie, perhaps it's even harder to be Kylie's boyfriend".

"I'm flummoxed sometimes," she says. "It used to be there was a story once in a while and now it's more like once a week. It might only be something small but so much of it just isn't true. It's mind-boggling. I feel like my public persona, part of her anyway, is becoming more and more distanced from who I am because a lot of what they write about has no relevance to my life.

"I still believe that somehow I have this connection with my audience where they understand me even though I really don't give that much away about my private life at all.

"I do have the choice to stop, but I don't think that would change too much in the near future anyway. It's part of what I continually strive to deal with and keep my head high and try and see the light side of it as much as possible. I'd rather not cry, I'd rather laugh."

Which she does - as much as possible. "I'll never forget the day I went [to New Zealand] for 48 hours and - very Antipodean sense of humour - when I went through immigration the guy looks at my passport and says, 'You've taken your time, haven't you?"'



* Body Language is released on November 24.