From soap to wax: Britain's five decade love affair with Kylie Minogue

We just can’t get Kylie Minogue out of our heads. This week, the 52-year-old singer made history by becoming the first female artist to top the UK album charts for five decades running. It’s an extraordinary achievement – and it is fitting that she should do so with Disco, a collection of downbeat bangers that recall early gems such as I Should Be So Lucky while also drawing a bright marker circle around Kylie's advancement as an artist through the intervening years.

And yet, if you think about it, she is an unlikely British favourite. Kylie, the daughter of an accountant and a ballet dancer, was born and raised in Melbourne and is as Australian as vegemite on toast. Her big start, moreover, was in soap opera Neighbours – which in 1987 was not an obvious preamble to a lifetime in pop.

So what’s the secret to her success? It probably has something to do with her ability to be two very different things at once. She’s a dance floor diva in the tradition of Madonna and Lady Gaga (who was clearly watching Kylie’s career from afar and scribbling down notes). But, along with that, she has pioneered the concept of pop star as everybody’s best friend (a mantle subsequently taken up by Adele).

So while it is impossible to picture Madonna doing the dishes or Lady Gaga sitting down to Strictly with a mug of tea, it is no leap to imagine Kylie doing either. She has through her life in the spotlight maintained a humanity and a vulnerability that is enormously appealing and has encouraged her audience to stick with her no matter what.

That’s never been truer than in the most recent phase of her career. Two years ago, after splitting from her fiancé Joshua Sasse, she laid out her troubles on the country-flavoured Golden record. Pop stars going “country” has become a bit of a cliche – Lady Gaga did it, as did Miley Cyrus. But with Kylie it was different: you felt she was following her heart, not chasing a trend.

The same holds true of her new LP, which argues that there is no more lonely place in the world than in the middle of a crowded dance-floor. Disco is a serious and very melancholic electro record and part of a 2020 wave of thoughtful pop that includes Dua Lipa, Róisín Murphy and Jessie Ware.

Nobody, though, could accuse Kylie of getting on a bandwagon. That’s because she’s the one who built it, when, in the late Eighties, she left Melbourne aged 19 and took a chance on working with pop wholesalers Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

They didn’t necessarily see her potential. Before the hit-making trio’s first meeting with Kylie they left her waiting more than an hour. And then knocked out I Should Be So Lucky “in about 40 minutes”. At one level, the tune was rudimentary chart escapism. Yet, despite her lack of Mariah Carey-level vocal superpower, something about the way Kylie sang the song made it unique. That same mix of optimism and humility shimmers through her latest record – and ensures Disco is the equal of anything Dua Lipa or her generation are doing.

She is a survivor, too, literally – Kylie overcame breast cancer in 2005 – but also in her personal life and career arc. There was her tempestuous relationship in the early Nineties with fellow Aussie musician Michael Hutchence, which opened her eyes to the darker side of fame (“Sex, love, food, drugs, music, travel, books, you name it, he wanted to experience it”.)

Then there was her treacherous progression from teen star to serious artist. Having parted from Stock, Aiken and Waterman after a series of classic singles – arguably culminating in the timeless Better the Devil You Know – she knew she needed to evolve.

To that end, she signed to trendy dance label Deconstruction (which also worked with M People, Death In Vegas and Saint Etienne) and collaborated with the Manic Street Preachers and Nick Cave (Cave seemed to learn more from the experience than her, judging by subsequent interviews).

Chart-wise, not much came from these collaborations, with the exception of her October 1995 Cave-duet, Where The Wild Roses Grow. But they introduced Kylie to a different side of the music business. And so when she got back into the pop star game – launching her “comeback” at the age of 32 with Spinning Around – she was an artist renewed, rebooted and ready for whatever came next.

Kylie has continued to grow ever since. In 2001 she released arguably the greatest pop song of the decade in Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, accompanied by one of the classic modern pop videos. Directed by Dawn Shadforth – one of the few women filmmakers working in pop – it features Kylie ripping it up as a cyborg queen and dancing against a variety of future-shock backdrops, as that irresistible  “la-la-la” hook swoops in. The white jumpsuit with a Jedi knight hood that she wears became a fashion sensation in its own right (just like her hot pants from the Spinning Around promo).

But despite her evolution, she has, in a way, always remained herself. In that respect, she’s like that best friend from school who you catch up now and then. They’ve changed, you’ve changed. And yet, after just a little time together, it’s exactly like the old days.

That will be clear if you’ve ever seen her in concert. Kylie loves to put on a show – in her 2011 Aphrodite: Les Folies Tour she was carted around arenas in a full-sized Greek chariot. These performances are full-on love-ins as she and her huge gay fanbase bask in mutual appreciation. And she is never precious about giving audiences what they want: every Kylie gig features a nostalgia section where she rewinds to the glory days.

She’s also a trooper. When the first lockdown threatened to derail her latest album, Kylie did what any serious artist would and installed a home studio and taught herself how to programme in the Logic music software language – and then finished the record.

She also spoke frankly about the challenges of living through the pandemic. These are sentiments with which the rest of us can empathise. And they are lightyears away from the forced jollity of Bono and Chris Martin, pretending they are having the best time in their off-duty woolly hats and annoying live-streams from their vast home studios.

“I’ve had my own mini roller coaster,” she told BBC Breakfast recently. “Thinking back to the start of lockdown.. [I was] feeling adrift and anxious and lost and confused. That eerie silence outside. I was asked to do so many things that I would have loved to do but in all honesty I was like: 'I can't pretend to be happy right now. I can't pretend to be solid and be that person. I really was finding my way to deal with it.”

Thirty-three years ago, when she was starting out, the idea of a pop star finishing their own record would have struck most people as ludicrous. Pop stars were supposed to be empty-eyed poppets – there to be shaped and manipulated by producers and songwriters.

Kylie, then, has helped advance our standing of what a pop star can be. And in doing so she has truly become a national treasure. Madame Tussauds unveiled its first Kylie waxwork in 1989; today, only the Queen has more. And when in September, she popped up on Jessie Ware’s Table Manners podcast – every millennial’s favourite –  the host could hardly contain herself. “Kylie was the first concert I ever went to and we named our guinea pigs after her (and Jason) so who can blame me for the fangirl situation,” she gushed.

She has naturally conquered Glastonbury, too. Glasto’s Legends slot is often given over to artists who are fondly regarded but a little past their sell-by-date (we all adore Lionel Richie – none of us would buy his latest record). That wasn’t the case with Kylie in 2019, however, as she shattered the viewing record set by Adele with an estimated 3.2 million tuned in to the BBC coverage of her performance. This confirmed what we already knew: she is the nation’s favourite pop star and it's a love affair is set to run for some time yet.