gullybogan

Dear Reader,

So last night i took Princess to see Kylie Minogue’s Kylie X 2008 at the Rod Laver Arena.

I went to her previous tour – Showgirl/Homecoming – alone, cos Princess wasn’t interested. This time, the ticket release coincided with me being unavoidably at work, so Princess graciously lined up to buy me a ticket, and – swept up in the enthusiasm of the line – decided to buy herself a ticket, too.

We figured out last night that it was the first concert we’d been to together since she dragged me along to the Jesus Christ Superstar Arena Spectacular, featuring John Farnham.

I went to The Cure a year or so ago, but that was completely not her cup of chai. It’s only occasionally that our musical tastes intersect.

And so it was that we found ourselves on the Gutterbank in Fed² at a place called Feddish, which i remember as a slightly posh restaurant but which is now a sort of sidewalk café. We had the sweet potato, red onion and pesto pizza and the greek salad, in case you’re writing an especially thorough biography of either of us, dear Reader. And very nice they were, too. Would have been nicer if they’d wiped the table down for us before serving the food.

It was a lovely, balmy afternoon, blending seamlessly into a lovely, balmy evening as we walked along the Gutterbank where Batman Avenue used to be, then over those skybridges they have now, and into the throng of Kylie love.

Last time, the mix was about 40/60 pre-pubescent girls/adults, and this time it was pretty much the other way around. But among the adults, the mix was more like 80/19/1 adult mums and their teendult daughters/young gay men/bogan couples.

We got there early enough for me to buy my obligatory tour t-shirt, and then to file in to our seats. The tickets said “Doors 7pm – Kylie on stage 8pm”, so we turned up (thank you, OCD) at quarter to seven, to find the doors already open.

PreShow Entertainment

The stage lacked the Showgirl runway, and was wrapped in an enormous purple bag with Kylie’s name on it, so she wouldn’t get it mixed up with the other stages wrapped up in enormous purple bags.

[I apologise, dear Reader, for the crappy quality of the photos i took with my cameraphone; rest assured there are plenty of other ppl's high quality images on Flickr of the tour for those studying it in HD]

The audience had to wait until eight thirty for the purple curtain to drop, but we kept ourselves amused. All sorts of costumes started walking in to the auditorium as eight o’clock approached, including two folks dressed as a horse and a giraffe (just the heads), and one ambitious chap who came dressed as Kylie’s gold hotpants (not “in” – “as”).

Molly Meldrum was there, too, in his trademark hat and sporting a pink shirt. He got spotted by fans, and then he had to do twenty minutes of mugging for cameras and cameraphones.

There is a strict NO CAMERAS policy, but last time Kylie actually helped a fan out by taking her camera onto stage and taking a photo of her and her friends in the audience at the Kylie concert. I only saw two ppl cautioned by security for taking snaps the whole night.

To keep us amused, the highlight cameras started doing audience close-ups. Which was hilarious, as it always is, in a daggy sort of way. At one stage, they camera-spotted an Aryan young man in a sailor’s hat, and the whole audience laughed good-humouredly at the blatant gayness of his ensemble. A Kylie concert is probably one of the main places in Melbourne where you can be openly gay and not expect to get hassled for it, which is kind of nice.

At about half past eight, Ms Minogue appeared, wafting through the stage’s intermediate-screen on an airborne (wire-suspended) frame, launching the show with Speakerphone.

The show came with a brief intermission, and, to summarise, began with large scale production numbers, a theatrical interlude, disco, some torch songs, a finale, and then an extended encore. During the show, Kylie regularly took breaks to talk one-on-one, as it were, with the audience.

I would like to comment that a Kylie audience is a much nicer place to be than a The Cure audience, as a Kylie audience is fun and excited and full of life, and a The Cure audience is all dressed in black and wishing that the misery of life was just over and/or that everyone would just leave them the haitch alone. You’d be surprised at the difference that that will make to the concert experience, for all concerned.

The Stage

A Kylie concert is essentially the Impossible Princess surrounded by tumblers, acrobats, and dancers, with a backdrop of projected and embedded images.

The stage has in its surface embedded lights, possibly neon but more likely LED, that allow it to be configured into squares of different colours, like a chess board or old-skool disco floor, and also to draw simple shapes, such as circles. Around the outside was a surface that could run “ticker” or “marquee” text, as well as colours.

The cyclorama (which is what i like to call the extreme back of the stage) had what appeared to be projection panels, and then there were these intermediate-screens, which were curtains of LEDs that could support showing full motion images.

The stage was very flexible, and reconfigured constantly. At times, the thing was a blaze of lights and images, and at others it was much more sparse.

At the end of the show, when they were making-safe, i snapped this picture, to give an indication of what it looks like with its skirt and mascara off.

The Music

Some cruel ppl have commented to me that you don’t go to a Kylie concert for the music; you go for the spectacle.

Meh.

To me, the music – albeit pop music – still has some resonance in its own right.

The best thing about Kylie concerts is that they take songs you know and know well, and then give them a twist, transforming them into something new.

Last tour, they turned Come Into My World into a beautifully fragile balladic musicbox number. This time, most notably, they transformed I Believe In You from an electrohula piece into an uplifting anthem.

She also did a cover of Barry Manilow’s At The Copa (Copacabana), which was theatrical piece i mentioned earlier. It was fully acted out, with gunshots, a dead Tony, and plenty of swoons. It was a bit perplexing why she might have chosen that song, out of the millions available, to cover, and then she sang (well, we all sang) the line, “She was a showgirl/Now it’s a disco…”, and we understood.

It should be noted, dear Reader, that in the extended encore (yeah, don’t leave until the house lights come on, OK?), she performed some of the catchier numbers, and – coaxed by a huge banner some fans held up at the top of the auditorium – did an a capella version of Locomotion. Yay!

She also did I Should Be So Lucky, just for the chaperoning mums who’d not heard anything of hers since, what, 1987?

Oh, yes, she’s had a long career so far, our Kylie, way longer than most pop singers, and made all the more interesting by that interruption a couple of years ago.

The Interruption

As you know, dear Reader, Kylie nearly died of breast cancer.

Last tour, when she was still too ill to do much beyond sing and parade in feathers, she was a different girl to the one we saw last night.

Then, she was almost apologetic to us; gentle, fragile, a child-woman who’d realised her mortality and was still a little spooked by it.

This time, she was a lot more confident, and a lot more energetic. She was participating a great deal more in the dance numbers, and doing things that she couldn’t have attempted last time, being as she was still in her recovery phase back last tour.

Sure, she still took breaks to have little sips of water, and she had fans (the blowing kind) at the front corners of the stage, but it looked like she was Better, had Moved On, had Put It All Behind Her.

And then she came out riding on an enormous mirror skull, a demonic parody of a disco mirror ball.

She sang Like A Drug for the ride in, but then, once she’d alighted, she sang Slow, from Ultimate Kylie (which literally translates as “final Kylie – the end”).

With Death’s Head hanging behind her, that changes the song, completely.

Slow down and dance with me
Yeah
Slow
Skip a beat and move with my body
Yeah
Slow

It’s still a seduction number, but you realise that the other person in the seduction need not be a man, but could be Death itself.

There are some very dark moments in the show, if you care to look, the sort of moments that a forty-year-old who has faced death would feel inclined to have in her pop music feel good stage show.

Listen to Like A Drug and Slow back-to-back and you may get a taste of it.

She slowed No More Rain right down, too, and spoke the chorus through for us, to show us that it, too, is a survivor song.

I feel it like a
Wave of love coming over me
Got a glitter-drop fall
And i’m on my knees
Got the sound of you
Ringing in my ears

Sun comin’ up on another day
Got a secondhand chance,
Gunna do it again,
Got rainbow colours
And no more rain.

The Shoes

The costumes were what you would expect, except possibly for the areolae stitched to the flesh coloured body suits of the girl dancers for the sexy numbers, which went down a treat with the under-ten crowd. The costumes were great, and all, without the OTT flamboyance of the feathery Showgirl outfits.

The shoes, though, were occasionally surprising.

In the cheerleader segment of the big production section, Kylie came out wearing a sort of vamped up sports outfit. Her shoes were high heeled sports shoes, complete with velcro straps.

In the Japanese section (e.g. Nu-di-ty, where the cyc projections showed footage of a naked CGI geisha walking along a Tokyo street with censor blocks over her tits and a flashing X over her vag) she wore heels that were… well, imagine those old “clogs” the hippy girls used to wear (each shoe a single piece of cork about six inches high), but made of steel and hollowed out. She had to do little geisha-style tippy-tap steps in those.

All Kylie’s shoes were impossibly tall, on account of the fact that she herself is only about four feet tall.

When a segment finished and she went off to change outfits, she had to pause at the edge of the rear of the stage in the dark, sit on the top step leading down to the understage, and, assisted by a stagemanager with a torch, take off the heels before attempting the stairs.

Please, Fly With Us Again

Kylie has one or two more shows to go, and then she’s Finished, and – not coincidentally – at home for excessmas. This seems to be a pattern: she tours the world, and ends up in Melbourne just before solstice, to be with her family (the true meaning of excessmas).

I hope this pattern continues for the foreseeable future.

I enjoy spending time with Kylie. Turns out, Princess (my Possible Princess, that is) does, too.

So that’s something we can share, now. Cool.

Yours,
Gullybogan