Kylie Interview

LAST weekend's Saturday night TV special, The Kylie Show, was that most rare of things in the enigmatic world of Kylie: a revelation. Who knew, possums, that Kylie Minogue was the funniest comic actress in the showbiz cavalcade today? The show, which was half performance pizzazz and half superbly written sketches, starred Kylie playing the role of her off-duty persona. This was "Kylie" in cynical, delusional and theatrical mode, inviting her TV audience into her chaotic dressing-room.

Here, she excused the presence of an enormous prosthetic bare backside that had accidentally fallen out of a cupboard by wearing it on her head: "urr it's a fabulous hat!"; she shrieked at the horse she'd backed on the TV racing: "you're all over the place like a dingo's breakfast!", while ignoring two visiting fans who, being nuns, were aghast; and she had a spectacular send-up catfight with sister Dannii, the pair wrestling on the floor like demented Australian transvestites, only to be stumbled upon by Simon Cowell, who was then introduced to Kylie. "No introduction necessary," he said, creepily. "The family resemblance is striking, you're Danni's mother." At which Kylie, blonde wig askew and tiny fist aloft, punched him clean in the coupon.

In the final scene Kylie flung herself, exhausted from keeping up the façade, into her dressing-room chair. She bent forward to remove her wig and revealed the head of Joan Collins (and then the rest of Joan Collins), muttering, like a grand old dame must: "I can't keep this up much longer "

Rewind to a month earlier. Kylie sits in the airy wooden environs of her management company in southwest London (an extravagantly converted church) and contemplates the public's perception of her since her diagnosis with breast cancer in May 2005. People finally know, she tells me, that she was "human". There's nothing like a brush with death, of course, to humanise a distant star, and for the sometimes holographic Kylie, the beloved and enduring pure-pop "doll", now in remission, it has had a positive and ongoing side-effect. When she says, earnestly, "I'm just like any other woman", we can now almost believe her - even if she is, if anything, more beautiful than ever.

Kylie is supernaturally clear-skinned in barely any make-up, toothsome, crystal-eyed, business-prim in a crisp white shirt with enormous cuffs and grey pin-striped Stella McCartney trousers; her peroxide-blonde curls pinned into her head like some elegantly dapper switchboard operator beamed in from the 1940s. No longer, she notes, are the photographers, journalists, TV producers and video makers who reign over her promotional days, expecting her to keep on going, 24/7, until she is "shaking in the corner". Her illness has also changed her perception of herself and the way she is willing to be seen. Back in 2004, the initial promotional event for her then-latest album Body Language was a one-off, media-invited theatre performance, heavily featuring songs from Body Language and the rest was the cut of her costumes. The Kylie Show, by contrast, featured consistent mockery of the showbiz perils of vanity and megalomania plus the world's first known airing of Kylie swearing in public. "You've just lost me eighty f***ing quid!" she roared at her horse, in front of the nuns.

"I've always known that I was fallible," she says during our discussion, perched at one end of a lengthy wooden table, "but when you learn it that way, perspective does change. I still have grumpy days but there's a bigger appreciation of being alive, of course. So when did I last see you?"

It was 2004. And then, less than a year later, you were thrown right off your podium "I know," she says, wagging a finger at an imaginary plinth, "but I was Save that podium. I'll be back'."

Meeting Kylie for the eighth time, nothing and everything has changed. She remains a demure personality, light as a gosling feather, agreeably polite, conversationally vague, still a continually flustered character who says, "I'm not the best talker". For the first time, though, she looks exactly her age, 39, albeit with the kind of youthful, creamy, translucent skin which attests to a lifetime free from copious fags 'n' booze.

Since chemotherapy, her complexion has been more admired than ever, another positive side-effect alongside thicker hair and a slight, comely weight gain (although the chemo, not so positively, saw her weight sporadically "balloon"). Prone to a robo-pop professionalism in the past, she seems softer round the edges, less uptight in her tabloid-conscious way, reaching out to squeeze an arm on hearing cancer, also, is in my family with the words: "I'm really sorry to hear about that."

She is also more giggly, more bold and more likely to scold you like an outraged school mum for being deliberately rude over, for example, her Madame Tussauds waxwork; the one on all fours, backside in the air which she profoundly loathes and doesn't need informing it's officially "the most groped waxwork" in the history of Madame Tussauds. "Don't!" she squeals, "I don't even wanna know about it!"

Her new studio album, X, is her 10th. It's a radiant collection of electro-pop, five tracks co-written by Kylie with a team of hand-picked writers and producers, including Guy Chambers, Cathy Dennis and Dumfries's own Calvin Harris (who describes working with Kylie as "surreal but fun" - he needed "a few drinks" before they met). Album highlights include The One; yearning, atmospheric bliss-pop with references to Michelangelo appearing in the lyrics - when Kylie saw Michelangelo's David a few years back in Florence: "I had tears in my eyes."

Another is No More Rain, a bewitching, spectral soundscape with acutely personal lyrics. "I feel it like a wave of love coming over me," she sings, dreamily. "Got a glitter-drop fall and I'm on my knees, got the sound of you ringing in my ears/Sun coming up on another day, got a second hand chance gonna do it again, got rainbow colours and no more rain "

It is the first lyric she wrote after chemotherapy ended. During treatment, the fatigue meant she couldn't sit through a whole film, let alone be creative, "it just doesn't happen". It says a lot for her old-school the-show-must-go-on ethos that the song describes "getting back on stage", the spur she used to help her through recovery.

So what has she learned these past two years? "Well, emotions aside," she muses, privately as ever, "I can safely say it's been interesting. I've realised my intellect is still working. Because you're suddenly on a crash course of learning so much. You're totally speaking a different language, medically. And then I was in France so I was speaking medical French. Not that well, but you just need to learn.

"In the beginning I had a notebook and I'd write down medication. My mum picked up the pen and I said, No, I have to do that'. And once I got into treatment I had my calendar. You have to be organised. You really do. You're not totally with it, but I think taking that kind of control helps. Or maybe that's just my type." She picks up imaginary objects from the table and places them in systematic lines, adding: "It's like lining up your little toy soldiers."

Throughout the treatment, which induced full hair loss, including eyelashes, her boyfriend of four years - preposterously handsome French actor Olivier Martinez - was a much-reported support. The couple then split up this February amid a tabloid typhoon over Martinez's supposed "love cheat" ways.

"And he's so not," says Kylie, with an extensive frown, so distraught at the time over the continuous conjecture, she defended him on her own website. "We split up amicably and that was that. I've seen him in Paris and he's as adorable as ever. Going through something like that together, I really don't care what anyone has to say, all of that absolute well, there's a word. Just nonsense. Because he and I know the truth of that. And I'm sure it will stay with us forever. He's a good guy. And they constantly wrote nonsense."

Next year Kylie turns 40, an age she is sure she will find "liberating". She is finally thinking about children, "in the manner and the time that's right for me", she notes, cryptically. And she is now looking for a home in the country.

Has she ever felt romantically doomed? "Well, you probably remember me saying years ago that I'm a fatalist," she says. "I think these things are pretty much pre-determined. Although part of that is to question why, when we don't know the answers - which is both challenging and frustrating!"

Exactly 10 years ago, Kylie sat with me in the swish restaurant of Blake's Hotel in Chelsea (near where she lived) with tears in her enormous crystalline eyes. These were the "IndieKylie" years, the era when she wondered "am I just pretend?", when her self-belief had crumbled, when - even as her most guitar-led album was about to be released - she wailed: "I'm just not built for indie!" She was ashamed of what she called "my past", the years she was creatively "knee-deep in concrete" at Pete Waterman's PWL label, "afraid of saying anything at all", unaware that she was, to some, a burgeoning kitsch-pop icon. All she could see were the newspapers persistently calling her "an alien", resulting in "a little breakdown" which she amazingly managed to hide from the tabloids.

In 1997 she was collaborating with the pop-loving Manic Street Preachers, and the tears brimmed in her eyes after hearing that bassist Nicky Wire used to wear a Neighbours-era "PermKylie" badge on the lapel of his leather jacket. "I was supposed to be a one-hit wonder," she said. "Let's face it, one smash hit and be gone, like the Reynolds Girls, Big Fun. That's where I came from. So now to still be here after 10 years and have someone like him I'm just touched."

Ten years on from there, as The Kylie Show also demonstrates, reworkings of those now-classic pure-pop PWL singles - Tears On My Pillow, Got To Be Certain, Better The Devil You Know - are central to any contemporary Kylie performance. It evidently took other people - from the Manics to art-goth collaborator Nick Cave and, most influentially, her stylist and creative director since 1994, William Baker, her "gay husband" - to show Kylie what she actually always was: the podium-perched Showgirl she remains today.

"I wasn't born successful or famous or a celebrity, or any of those things," she says reflectively during our latest meeting. "I started working and then when I had seemingly instant success and then suffered the backlash of that, that's when I think my gay audience came on board - and kind of decided to protect me. As someone who is declared camp as I sometimes am, I mean, I can't speak for gay society but the thing I think they related to with me was just, You are who you are'. And you don't wanna be attacked for that. No-one should be."

Kylie still lives in the same Chelsea home, described 10 years ago as having a blinding white interior and negligible personality. "There's not much in there," she said back then, "there's no indication of it being my place whatsoever. Well, there's x amount of glamour shoes."

Today, she says, the interior décor is complete, "at last!", a stylised art-deco vision of high-camp frivolity and French sophistication, speaking many volumes on how people's identity unfolds and fortifies during their 30s. Kylie's home highlights now include a sweeping staircase with custom-made carpet, a brass 1950s hand-made floor lamp (featuring three huge brass flowers) several disco balls, an enormous, heavy, golden floor lamp shipped from Shanghai and featuring a spinning golden orb on top, a spectrum of antique French furniture including two sideboards from the famous original Hotel Martinez in Cannes and several classic black-and-white photographs including the iconic image of a young Jane Fonda nude and cross-legged on a beach. Lights, it turns out, are Kylie's greatest interior obsession and today she's still on the hunt.

"If I could find an actual crystal glitter-ball," she says, "I'd really love that!"

In 2007, Kylie knows exactly who she is and so should everyone else. She is as old-school glamorous now as the dames of a bygone era, as Joan Collins's appearance on The Kylie Show so gamely suggested; she is uber-camp, ever-fabulous, swathed in feather boas, with her adoring public permanently locked outside and peering upwards at her 100-foot-high privet hedges of privacy. She has far more in common with Dame Shirley Bassey than Daft Britney Spears, even if, where Dame Shirley's lungs are a pair of ornate bellows the size of two Albert Halls, Kylie's are two friendly neon kazoos. Perhaps we should give up looking, after 20 years, for those elusive Kylie revelations, surely so elusive because they barely exist.

Maybe Kylie's permanently closed closet, whose contents are buried beneath a towering feathery headdress, is simply beautifully spick-and-span. "Perhaps people think there's more than there is to know about me," she said back in 2002, as astute a summation of her enigmatic appeal as any. "There's definitely a lot that I do keep to myself. But I don't think it's terrible things I have to hide."

Kylie Minogue's latest album, X, is released on Parlophone on November 26