KYLIE is bringing her flashy new tour home to Australia, writes Cameron Adams.
IT'S two hours until showtime in the surprisingly glamorous bowels of London's 02 arena.
The 02 is the venue where Prince played 21 shows last year, and the Spice Girls earned over $35 million for 17 comeback concerts.
It's also where Kylie Minogue is ending the European leg of her KylieX2008 tour with a seven show stint - playing to over 140,000 Londoners.
Pictures: Kylie through the years
Minogue, minus entourage and make-up, has been driven to the venue just in time for an afternoon soundcheck where she'll run through a handful of the show's most musically diverse moments for last-minute technical checks.
Thousands of Kylie balloons are being rounded up while Minogue saunters across the stage.
She's no stranger to big stages (reports suggest over $20 million went into producing this tour), but this X set-up is so immense it threatens to dwarf her.
The back of the stage is an IMAX-sized video screen; the floor is made up of similarly massive screens.
The band sit to the left and right of the main stage, giving Minogue and her dancers full rein of a hi-tech oasis.
During soundcheck Minogue conserves energy, but come showtime she finds a new way to make sure she's not lost in the floor-to-ceiling technology.
"I'm releasing my inner Freddie Mercury,'' she says backstage.
"The scale of this tour is enormous but the space is really liberating for me. That's what we wanted to do, give me some more freedom. It's hard to explain, but I'm in a different mindset. Parts of the show are so over the top, like those Freddie moments in Your Disco Needs You. Why not have fun?''
Fun was the overriding principle of X, an album many thought might focus on her battle with breast cancer, which derailed 2005's Showgirl greatest hits tour.
But Minogue is done with self-analysis, only touching on her emotions in No More Rain, the song she wrote about hoping to be in front of an audience again.
"No More Rain has had a phenomenal response,'' she says. "I don't even know if a lot of people in the audience even know that song. I have to assume a lot of people come without having heard the rest of the album.''
It's the elephant in the room.
X hasn't sold the way anyone expected.
It's provided more fodder for Minogue's next hit collection (2 Hearts, Wow, In My Arms) but something went wrong with the album's chart stamina.
"In retrospect we could definitely have bettered it, I'll say that straight up,'' Minogue admits. ``Given the time we had, it is what it is. I had a lot of fun doing it. I'm excited about bringing those songs to life on stage. Wow, In My Arms and 2 Hearts are crackers, they go off like a frog in a sock.''
2 Hearts is indeed one of the highlights of the X tour - the moment where her band get to percentage the main stage and Minogue moves from hi-NRG pop adept to stage-prowling chanteuse.
Some blame the fortunes of X on the fact 2 Hearts is non the arm-waving Europop that made Kylie an icon. Others blame the rest of the album for featuring to a fault much of the arm-waving Europop that made Kylie an icon.
As with any Kylie album, it's been interminably analysed and dissected�- first by the record company boffins wHO spend hundreds of thousands sourcing A-list and blistering underground producers and songwriters, then stopple Minogue into the mingle.
An of course the fans world Health Organization spend hours analysing what went right, or wrong, with the album; a process that began before it was even finished, let solitary released.
Her fans get adopted the same near-surgical attention to detail on the X tour.
"I've stayed a safe sufficiency distance from that,'' Minogue says of the cyber-debate.
"The internet and forums in particular, well it's not like you're face to face with people in a room and everyone raises their hands and says something. So I take a lot of that with a grain of salt.
"People want to say something and contradict each other to start conversations�- that's serious, but I have to stick to what I'm doing.
"I certainly don't do everything (on this tour) the way I might feature imagined it, but that's creativity and I love it for all of its ups and downs.''
The first few shows of the go featured triad unreleased songs from the X roger Sessions (marred by a drawing string of leaked tunes, much to Minogue's horror).
That's Why They Write Love Songs was eventually shelved, while Flower and Ruffle My Feathers remain; electrifying some fans, confusing others.
"Those deuce songs are not tied recorded,'' Minogue says, hinting that their personal lyrics didn't sit with the hedonism and brokenheartedness on X.
"They're personal moments in the live show that weren't on the album, but possibly that wasn't meant to be. This is where they've ground their moment to be expressed.''
Minogue admits some of the other rehearsals were "grim'' and that the tour has been a work in progress with a clumsy beginning (it's no stroke it wasn't filmed for DVD until the London leg).
"The setlist of the register now is pretty much as it was meant to be. A, B, C, D, E, F, G didn't work, so we had to change whole sections. It didn't flow the way it was meant to. Amidst all that I was staying pretty calm, at least one on bridge player.
"I canful honestly pronounce we've changed something every night, whether it's hair's-breadth or compensate or putting a song in�- that's what I mean about freedom in this spell. It keeps everyone impudent and on their toes.''
Minogue jokes she's the "oldest person on the stage'' but her hungry youth band sure breathe spirit into X.
While her last few tours featured many of the same musicians and dancers, X has deliberately taken Minogue out of her comfort zone.
"It's a new comfort zone,'' she clarifies. "All the changes have been fantastic, in truth refreshing. With that radical I experience like we could go off piste and do a gig anywhere, they're all so enthusiastic.''
It doesn't get a lot more off-piste than Australia.
When the X circuit was first announced, an Australian leg was not on the cards.
Minogue admits it was far from a forgone determination she'd get the show home.
"No it wasn't, to be honest. Not at all. I didn't know what the show up was sledding to be. The last thing I wanted was to book (an Australian tour) a year out.''
Since her wellness battle, Minogue works at her own speed. X, like Showgirl, features an interval _- but it's as much to lease the technological crew organize the new sets as tp allow Minogue feature a break in the two-hour picture.
Insiders evoke it was only one time Minogue physically got to the halfway mark of the European leg of the X tour that talk of extending it could even be diverted.
After a break that takes her into next month, she's now booked for a quick see to Asia, her number 1 ever tour of New Zealand, and a short victory lap of Australia in December�- just shows in Sydney and Melbourne, leaving her home for Christmas.
"I couldn't in reality say last September 'I'll do a tour all year long','' Minogue says. "I had to do it in increments. That's really worked, it's been broken up into phases. We'll have our break and then everyone will be excited to see each other once again. It's a really right vibe, relaxed but real on it.''
Indeed the night before this London performance, Minogue took control of the mandatary pre-show powwow. was sincere in saying to everyone I can't believe we've come this far. It's been awesome and challenging and with a truly difficult initiate. It was all about getting to London and here we are.
"There's parts in the designate where it's emotional, simply that's the point of doing a show, all those different forms of emotion.''
The tour has been Minogue's unitary constant in an unpredictable year.
She turned 40, received both an OBE and France's highest cultural honour, endured rumours of everything from rekindled love to borrowing (on the possibility of children, she hasn't changed her idea: "It power be, it might not be''), and took some other shot at the US market.
After a advancement blitz that included playacting on America's Dancing with the Stars, X failed to crack the US Top one C. One written report claims this prompted Minogue to throw her work force in the air and say:� "That's it, never again!''
The truth was far less dramatic.
"I always go over at that place with the same attitude I've always had, which is 'If it's to happen it'll happen','' Minogue explains.
"I'm unbroken pretty much busy enough. We'll see. I'm not racing over there. I'm heading dwelling!''
For Kylie-watchers, the most interesting part of the American assault was when Minogue went off script.
It was on Ellen DeGeneres' TV verbalise show, after fellow node Hillary Clinton mentioned the issue of misdiagnosis of breast cancer the Crab, that Minogue impulsively ditched her prepared banter to reveal her cancer had initially been misdiagnosed�- she was told by British doctors she didn't have anything to worry about just weeks before a second opinion saw her undergo surgical procedure in Melbourne.
"I think it deserved to realise a handsome splash,'' Minogue says of the way the media seized on her misdiagnosis revelation.
"That's not who I am, I don't like doing stuff like that, but that's a fact of life. That happens and it happens oftentimes. One can't point the finger of blame in any particular direction just I feel better for having shared out that.
"It's a tricky one. It's not to scare mass and I know it's a banality but if one person thinks `I might see someone else, I just don't feel right', then good.''
Minogue says her health is "good'' these years.
"This circuit is unquestionably keeping me fit,'' she declares.
And there have been several chances for the star to put her feet up�- she leased out an entire film to view Mamma Mia! with her band and crew.
"We did it for Sex and the City too,'' Minogue admits sheepishly. "That was a identical cosmopolitan afternoon. When there's a day off we organise something that's manageable for everyone. That was the first time I'd been to the movies in ages.''
For the phonograph recording, she loved both movies. For some other record, she didn't spend a centime.
"Tickets to the show for tickets to the cinema,'' Minogue says. "The good old fashioned barter system.''
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X (Warner) out now.
KylieX2008, Rod Laver Arena, Dec 19, on sale Sept 8 from Ticketek.
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