Goldern Girl

A new love, a calmer life perspective and her first Australian tour since 2015 are helping to make this year Kylie’s best yet. Alexandra Carlton chats to our reigning Princess of Pop.

- Alexandra Carlton

Kylie Minogue sounds tired. She’s just finished the European leg of her Golden tour – a whopping 26 shows in less than four months. She’s not afraid to admit that this run nearly got the best of her, thanks to a few bouts of flu and even a security threat at her concert in Cologne, Germany, in November, which thankfully passed without incident. “I’ll be forever grateful for 2018, but it has been a struggle as well,” says the 50-year-old pop princess from her London home. “My struggle has been keeping up the pace. I’ve been under the weather a bit and I had to cancel a couple of gigs. With my show in Hamburg [on November 24], people said, ‘Oh you just crawled over the finish line at the end.’ I said, ‘I was crawling to get over [it] from the very beginning.’”

But don’t be fooled. By the next breath, Kylie is insisting that she wouldn’t have changed a thing. “Imagine if I hadn’t done this album?” she asks rhetorically. “How much would I not have experienced and ... learned? Making this album and doing these shows has been a revelation for me,” the chart-topper casually explains.