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[Regina]

Interview (from which that gorgeous new photoshoot comes from I believe) that has some rather nice bits in it.

Kylie Minogue and I are discussing relationships — dating in middle age specifically. Having learned that we have both become unattached fairly recently (she after a relationship with the Spanish model Andrés Velencoso), Kylie wants to know about my adventures in the single world. Have I tried internet dating, she asks, demanding all the grisly details. Am I on Tinder or maybe Grindr? ‘I heard that someone switched on Grindr at one of my concerts and their iPhone almost exploded,’ she laughs.

She looks dateable herself, of course — tinier than ever today in jeans and Reeboks, hair scraped back into a ponytail to reveal a suspiciously ceramic forehead, partially restricting her facial expressions. A Harvey Nichols-purchased gold dual-lightning-bolts necklace hangs around her neck and a strong coffee sits in front of her. She wants to hear more. How long after I split with my wife did I wait before I got back into the game, and so on. Her enthusiasm for this subject is infectiously adolescent. ‘I may be 46,’ she says, ‘but I still behave like a teenager now and then.’

It’s also the inquisitive, incredulous tone of the celebrity lifer, of someone who has been in the public eye across four decades, wanting to get a handle on civilian life. As a national treasure she’s far too famous to try her luck on Guardian Soulmates, but Kylie has started dating again. ‘It took me about a year [after her break-up with Velencoso, who, at 36, is ten years younger than her]. For a while, I didn’t want anything or anybody. I just wanted to be on my own. And then, a few little sparks here and there. It’s fun,’ she says with a broad grin.


Does her highly sexualised stage persona put extra pressure on a new relationship? Do the men she meets expect her to be the strokeable sex kitten in hot pants all the time? ‘Well, I have had my moments, that’s for sure. But if I go on a date with anyone, I tend to take things the other way. I won’t present that hyper-sexualised side of my character; in fact, I play up to a persona that is the total opposite. And for anyone to have the remotest chance with me, they have to understand that wanting to be with that side of things — that celebrity Kylie — is not going to work. What’s the Rita Hayworth line? “They go to bed with Gilda but they wake up with me…” ’

We are on a professional lunch date at Cambio de Tercio, a slick Spanish restaurant on the Old Brompton Road, and the favoured tapas and Rioja hangout of Rafa Nadal and Piers Morgan. It’s not far from Kylie’s pad — Frank Lampard also has a house in the area and Madonna did, too, for a time. It was recently dubbed the UK’s second most expensive ’hood after Kensington Palace Gardens.

Kylie likes South Ken. She’s lived in the area for 20 years. When she was dating INXS singer Michael Hutchence back in the early 1990s, the couple would have cheeky sleepovers at Blakes hotel nearby. SW7 is where she can get locked into one of her regular Scrabble matches with her friend Salman Rushdie, where pals such as Australian actor Joel Edgerton, Ben Mendelsohn and his writer wife Emma Forrest and photographer Steve Shaw drop by to visit when they are in town. People in the street leave her alone (she turns up for our interview on foot and unchaperoned).

When ‘life took a different turn’, as she puts it, referring to the time when she was diagnosed with breast cancer (she is now in remission), part of Kylie’s new beginning was to accept that she might not be able to have children of her own (although she’s been quoted as saying that adoption remains an option). ‘There was a time when I decided it wasn’t really hip around here and that I didn’t want to be around all the yummy mummies of Chelsea,’ she says. ‘I considered moving to Notting Hill or the East End. But I stayed and I’m glad I did.’

As the waiters make a fuss of her, Kylie informs me that she particularly likes the restaurant’s gin and tonics. ‘I was actually here last night,’ she says, still buzzing 48 hours after a seven-song performance at the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony that took in ‘The Loco-Motion’, ‘Spinning Around’ and ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’. ‘I had major panics during the weeks running up to that event. The sound is notoriously bad at those things, all sorts of stuff can go wrong, but it worked out so well.’ More importantly, with a TV audience of 6.5 million, it gave her latest album, released in March, a much-needed boost.


After disappointing sales of Kiss Me Once, the internet was alive with stories that unhappy bunny Kylie was about to leave Parlophone, the label she’d been signed to since 1999. But then, with a wiggle and a singalong and a couple of costume changes, post-Glasgow the download sales of her material went through the roof. The Best of Kylie Minogue, Fever and Kiss Me Once flew up by 1,140, 800 and 669 per cent respectively. The word ‘Kylie’, it’s worth noting, is Aboriginal for ‘boomerang’.

‘People were emailing and texting, congratulating me, but really I have no idea what those figures mean any more,’ she shrugs. ‘But hey, listen. During my career I’ve lived through so many format changes — vinyl singles, minidiscs, floppy disks, DATs, CDs, iTunes downloads, Spotify streams... “cassingles”,’ she says, alluding to the long-forgotten cassette single. ‘I was huge in cassingles! But still, I don’t really know how any of it works.’

Kylie has been very famous for a very long time. Born in Melbourne in 1968, she’s the eldest of three children — former X Factor judge Dannii is, of course, her little sister. She played Charlene Mitchell opposite Jason Donovan as Scott Robinson in the Australian soap Neighbours before signing to the London-based ‘hit factory’ PWL, run by producers Stock Aitken Waterman. Her first UK single, 1987’s ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, held the number one spot for five weeks, and more than 20 consecutive UK top-ten hits followed. Her UK tours sold out faster than mega-gigs by Elton John. Last year her 2001 hit ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ was confirmed as one of the best-selling singles of all time by NME. Even now, gay icon Kylie’s 1990 classic ‘Better The Devil You Know’ is played at 12.30am every Saturday night at London’s G-A-Y nightclub.

She’s a cultural and altruistic force as well. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, doctors reported that the number of mammograms performed in Australia rose by 40 per cent, a phenomenon they called ‘the Kylie effect’. In 2008 she was awarded an OBE for services to music and was made a member of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural honour.

She split from her long-term manager Terry Blamey last year after a partnership of more than 25 years (2012 was dubbed by Blamey ‘K25’) and an estimated 65 million record sales. Rumours spread that there had been tensions between Blamey and Kylie’s dad, Ron Minogue, an accountant who has been his daughter’s financial adviser since her Neighbours days. When the news was confirmed in January 2013, Blamey announced to the press that Kylie had ‘decided to pull back slightly from the pressures of her career and devote more time to herself and her acting. This is not to say she will be retiring from music, just taking a bit of a break.’ Well, he was wrong about that.

Last February, at 44, Kylie signed to Jay-Z’s US-based Roc Nation management stable. The outfit has a hungry, fast-moving, drip-feeding philosophy. ‘Kids want new material all the time,’ explains president and co-founder Jay Brown. ‘You become disposable when you put out an album every three years.’ (It’s worth noting that there were three- and four-year gaps between the releases of Kylie’s Body Language, X, Aphrodite and Kiss Me Once albums.) Roc Nation hooked Kylie up with a hip roster of collaborators — Stargate, Darkchild, Brooke Candy, MNDR, Will.i.am and Pharrell Williams. Its family includes Shakira, Rihanna, Kanye and Calvin Harris, while its management division looks after the careers of mostly very young artists including Grimes, Santigold and Rita Ora. Kylie is, by some distance, Roc Nation’s matriarch.


‘OK. So how is old is Jay-Z?’ she responds, bullishly. ‘Like, 43? I had this conversation with Jay Brown. He told me that there was a time when it was deemed that Jay-Z was too old to be a rapper. So [Jay-Z] went back to touring colleges, reconnected with his fans and look at him now. He’s still got things to say, still got records to make, right? The Roc Nation people are aware that I’m no spring chicken and a different generation from many of their other artists, but rather than focus on that, we’ve spoken about the fact that I have a loyal fanbase.’ Is she famous in the US? ‘No,’ she says flatly, despite having a prestigious Grammy award. ‘But people in LA and New York know me.’

The Americanisation of Kylie hasn’t been 100 per cent successful. The 2013 internet-only ‘buzz single’ release ‘Skirt’ was, for some die-hard fans, cold, camp-free and unsettlingly dubsteppy, while some of Kiss Me Once sounds generically, uneventfully Rihanna-ish. The Pharrell-penned ‘I Was Gonna Cancel’, released as the album’s second single (with an oddly bromide, kooky soccer-mom video clip), peaked at 59 in the UK charts. ‘Americanised? I guess so. To an extent. It was fun to dip my toe into their way of doing things. I love trying all the new stuff. It keeps it interesting for me and the fans. It shows that I’m alive. But it’s good to come back, do a show like the Commonwealth Games and say, “This is what I do.” ’

With a major UK tour coming up this month (including three nights at London’s O2 and one at the Roundhouse), there will, she says, be no letting up in terms of performance and costume. She tells me that Miley Cyrus, visiting her and Pharrell in their LA studio last year, turned up with an iPhone full of photos depicting her early twerking adventures. ‘She was like, “You should try it.” “Mmm,” I said, “I’m not sure that’s for me.” ’ Otherwise, it’s business as usual with the wiggles and the thigh-high boots. ‘There isn’t a cut-off point for that stuff. Certainly no cut-off point for a woman to feel like a woman. I certainly hope not, anyway,’ she says. ‘That onstage persona is a magnified representation of who you are. Of who I am.’ Her naughty, sexy schtick, she explains, ‘is like Cher’s farewell tour. I just keep coming back with it.’

To get in shape for touring, Kylie doesn’t have a personal trainer, doesn’t go to the gym or do what she calls ‘regular’ things. ‘I’ve always fantasised that I’d be that kind of person, but I’ve finally realised that I am not. People always presume that when you’ve survived a serious illness you’ll have a strict health regime and ritual, but I’m not obsessively healthy.’


As a chronic hypoglycaemic, she sticks to low-GI food. Lots of fish and vegetables. Breakfast is toasted Poilâne bread, with goat’s-milk butter and almond paste. ‘I run around so much that my nervous system is always on edge. Workouts? I don’t bother; rehearsing for shows is enough exercise for me.’ Her vices are coffee and G&Ts. ‘I like to go wild every now and then,’ she adds. Her weight hasn’t yo-yo’d since coming out of her illness. ‘I look back at myself from that time and I barely recognise myself. But during the past couple of years — only in the last year or so, in fact — I can finally see myself in the mirror again. Right now I feel like I’m back in myself, back in my own body.’