In a candid interview with Chrissy Iley, the singer reveals how she is still waiting for the all-clear from breast cancer, why she stopped using Botox and how, at 42, she is in love – again.
Talking to Kylie Minogue, I can’t help but feel that I know her. Not just from the many interviews over time, but because she’s allowing herself to be known – something that’s new for her. In the past, she didn’t really want people to get her. These days, she’s friends with vulnerability, sees its point, its strength even.
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Before – certainly before the cancer and even coming out of it – she didn’t want to be known. That was just too invasive. She was too shy. The cancer forced her to let people in, in a way that she had not welcomed before because she’s always been guarded, perfectionist, ambiguous. Comfortable being an equation in people’s heads that was something like Neighbours plus I Should Be So Lucky, Michael Hutchence, hotpants, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, cancer survivor, icon, equals Kylie.
Gradually, there was a point where Kylie thought that it was okay to be herself. I talked to Stuart Price, who was the executive producer on her new album, Aphrodite. “Early on, I said this should be 100 per cent you singing about the things that people had a feeling that went on for you in your life, that you’ve never spoken about,” he said. “It’s good to reveal ups and downs on record and what she brought to the studio was a combination of joy, sadness and confusion. You can connect to what she’s been through.”
While the UK was gripped by its post-election stand-off, only one thing knocked politics off the front pages – and that was Kylie’s bum. Wearing hotpants in a shot taken at a video shoot for the single All The Lovers.
“I was not expecting to be wearing that kind of outfit ever again,” she says, laughing. “In fact, the brief for the video, pardon the pun, was long, flowing dresses. But when I got there, the director said, ‘I think of you and I think hotpants’. And then the long dresses wouldn’t work, so I thought I would go with it. But some paparazzi were outside and that’s how those shots happened. But I survived.”
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Kylie more than survived. It turned out to be a celebration. “Now it gets written about because I’m in that age group: ‘She’s in her 40s and she’s still got it’,” Kylie says. “I’m suddenly in that age range where you’re spoken about like that and I’m like, ‘Shut up!’, because at some point it won’t be.”
Weirdly, in all the times I’ve met Kylie, I’ve never heard her moan. Even when all her hair fell out and I suggested she might have been depressed, she said, “When you put it in perspective, it’s a sign your treatment is doing what it’s supposed to do”.
When she broke up with French actor Olivier Martinez, she never bitched about him or was bitter. “I’m a fatalist. I always feel that a relationship runs for the duration it’s meant to.”
She certainly doesn’t complain about her current inamorato, Spanish model Andres Velencoso. The couple met about 18 months ago, at a party for the burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese.
“He just left this morning,” she says. “We had takeaway Spanish last night because I’m very good friends with the Spanish restaurant. I liked it before I met him.”
Do you speak Spanish? “No, but I’ve started to understand it a little and I recorded a version of All The Lovers in Spanish. Andres and I were in Spain, driving in the car, listening to mixes, and I can’t remember if it was him or me who said I wonder what this would sound like in Spanish. So I thought, ‘Let’s try it’, and he did a translation for me.”
Interesting that she doesn’t remember who it was. It shows that she’s close to him. “Yes,” she says, smiling. Is there a lot of separation involved? “We try not to leave it too long between seeing each other. But he’s used to travelling. I’m used to travelling. That’s how the relationship started. It works for me and I think it works for him.”
Do you prefer it? “In a way, to have time to do your own thing, to be compartmentalised like that, yes, I think you’re right. When I try to do everything at once, that’s when I have a meltdown.”
Your say: Why do you love Kylie? Are you looking forward to hearing her new album Aphrodite? Share your thoughts below.
Read more of our exclusive chat with Kylie Minogue in the July issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Out now with our Silvers Sirens on the cover.
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