Daily Mail.

KYLIE’S HIGHLY SPECTACULAR

She should be so lavish. Kylie Minogue began her British arena tour last night with the most ambitious show pf her roller coaster career. Singing, indulging in some pre-scripted banter and frenetically spinning around in front of 5,000 adoring fans for 2 hours, the singer proved herself to be one of the hardest working women in show business.

Other pop divas have stronger, more distinctive voices and a greater emotional range, but few can perform with as much infectious energy and visually stunning style of Kylie. Featuring nine costume changes, a troupe of robotic dancers and an array of hi-tech effects, the former soap star’s latest traveling extravaganza has been substantially upgraded following last year’s more modest theatre shows. With the production costs of her sold-out 25 date tour said to be £4million, Minogue fans are certainly offered good value for their £25 tickets.

Her entrance was nothing if not theatrical. With the arena bathed in purple spotlights and the theme from The Sound of Music booming out, the pigtailed singer peeled away the layers of a suit of armour to reveal herself in a skimpy silver D & G mini skirt, top and thigh high boots. It was kitsch, it was camp but it was typical Kylie. ‘Welcome to our humble show’ said the singer, before mischievously inquiring if there were any Joneses in the audience.

The Australian singer has enjoyed a stunning renaissance since returning to the top of the singles chart with Spinning Around in 2000 and there is no doubt that she is now in control of her own artistic destiny. Her last two albums, Light Years and Fever have brought out the best in her flirtatious personality by adding a contemporary production machine and some top quality pop songwriting. The songs played in this show spanned Kylie’s entire career. The European influenced house and disco sounds of her recent albums was evident early in the show as the singer, backed by live musicians, sang Fever and Spinning Around. But the hits of yesteryear, including Better the Devil You Know and The Locomotion also featured prominently.

There were times during the 120 minute show when the tempi and the entertainment value waned. A leaden medley of ballads only reiterated the sometimes slender quality of Kylie’s vocals, a short coming accentuated by the singer having just recovered from a cold. However, as high octane pop entertainment, the concert was hard to fault.

The Times.

NO EXPENSE SPARED, NOT A BUM NOTE

KYLIE MINOGUE may have the best-known bum in Britain, but there was surprisingly little of it on show last night, when she began the biggest tour of her career at Cardiff Arena. Still, fans of the tiny Aussie with the pert posterior were not disappointed. Seven stage sets, dozens of dances, a dazzling array of costumes specially designed by Dolce & Gabbana and choreography by Ballet Rambert’s Rafael Bonachela combined to make the two-hour concert a truly spectacular event.

In the past Kylie has carried her shows with a mix of camp humour and sheer charisma. Fourteen years after she launched her pop career she has finally been given a budget to rival Madonna and, boy, did she use it. With a knowing wink to her legion of gay fans, she opened the show with a blast of The Sound of Music. From there on in, it was high-tech theatre. As four gymnasts in silver, latex suits and sculpted crash helmets spun around on ropes above the stage, Kylie made a dramatic entrance from below the floor. She rose up in the middle of a stairway, encased in an armoured suit that opened to reveal the sexy, 5ft-nothing singer in a Barbarella-style of sparkly mini-skirt, thigh-high boots and a bikini top so full you wondered if it wasn’t just her rear end that might have been to see a plastic surgeon.

After a revamped rendition of her old single Shocked and the new song Love At First Sight, it was all change for Fever, the title-track from Kylie’s current album. Pop-art visuals of big lips and love hearts flashed up on the six huge video screens, three beds emerged from the floor, and Kylie covered her bum with a white, hooded robe before writhing around with dancers in Afro wigs.

In the next 90 minutes she would shimmy through tightly choreographed routines in a Clockwork Orange-inspired outfit that had more than a hint of S and M, a policeman’s uniform that made her look like one of the Village People, a classy black dress, and a string vest emblazoned “Slim Lady”. There was a disco section that began with a warped cover of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, an Eighties hip-hop bit that ripped off Malcolm McLaren’s Buffalo Gals, a blast of techno accompanied by gymnasts and a great version of Robbie Williams’s duet Kids that got the sell-out crowd singing along. Oddly, Kylie only got raunchy again in Locomotion, when she was joined by men in fishnet tights, high heels and leopardskin print pants. An audience largely made up of young girls loved it and even their parents didn’t complain. Kylie is just too cute to be dangerous — no matter how hard she tries.

The Western Mail.

A SPARKLING SHOW FROM QUEEN OF POP


STANDING in the middle of the stage, dressed in silver thigh-high boots, sparkling bikini top and micro-mini, Kylie Minogue peered into the audience and purred, "Welcome to our humble little show." After months of hype, the current princess of pop finally launched her sell-out British tour in Wales last night - and a humble little show it was not. With stunning stage sets including five huge video screens, eclectic visual effects, fabulous costumes and a selection of dancers, this is Kylie's most ambitious tour yet.

As she ascended on to the stage through a hidden door she launched into the first song of the night, Come Into My World from the Fever album. For the rest of the evening we were transfixed. Kylie flirted, danced and jiggled her now-famous bottom as she sang her little heart out. We had Kylie the cop teasing a bare-chested man for Confide In Me. Kylie rising on a bed for Fever and sophisticated Kylie for The Crying Game. She told fans she was delighted to be launching her tour in Cardiff as her mother is Welsh.

Daily Telegraph

BASQUES, FISHNETS AND A SHOW TO RIVAL MADONNA'S

It was the first night of a sold-out 25 date British tour. Ever since Kylie bounced back to chart success with Spinning Around in 2000, Minogue and her creative mentor William Baker have dreamed of putting on a show to rival those of Madonna in terms of ambition and scale. With last year's million selling CGYOMH and her Fever album, Kylie could have sung her hits on a set made from used washing up liquid bottles and still sold out Britain's arena circuit five times over.

Perhaps bravely though, she and Baker have used that logic to present many of her best known songs in a radically different style, to an audience more wide ranging than ever before. Her sizeable gay core of fans has been joined by today's under 10's, those who were under 10 during her original hey day, and trendy couples who no longer feel embarrassed to be seen buying her records. Everyone, in fact, except the grumpy teens who prefer Limp Bizkit to anything with a tune.

Cardiff's pop pickers welcomed back their half-Welsh heroine with rapture as she beckoned them into a futuristic world in which she and six dancers performed 1991's Shocked with what can only be described as sex robotics in front of five video screens showing footage by avant-garde filmmaker John Maybury. It's possible thay were disappointed to find that Spinning Around was now now set in Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, with Kylie sporting a bowler rather than her legendary gold hot pants, but they hid it well. Only an extended medley of slow songs including the Crying Game and Finer Feelings seemed a little dran out, but that was followed by an inspired interpretation of Confide In Me which set Kylie against a somersaulting recidivist whose moves were awarded with a standing ovation.

The Sun.

KYLIE MINOGUE pulled on her sexiest boots and kicked off her £4million UK tour in spectacular style last night. Her dazzling show Fever 2002 hit the road in Wales – the first of a string of 25 dates across the country. The lucky, lucky, lucky crowd of 6,000 at the Cardiff Arena went crazy as Kylie’s biggest ever gig powered into action.
The pop babe arrived on stage wearing a £40,000 Terminator style outfit made from a cast of her body. But that was quickly lifted off to reveal a skimpy silver outfit as she opened her set with Come Into My World. In Kylie’s first clothes change she sported a hooded white top to sing Fever. She looked like a nun but was rolling on a bed.
Next came a Clockwork Orange-style tight jump-suit and bowler hat for Spinning Around. Then she turned Hollywood starlet for a moving version of the Crying Game. Other outfits included a cop uniform basque like those seen in the movie Moulin Rouge. But the highlight of her nine costume changes came when the pint-size star appeared to grow to 15ft tall. She was lifted in the air singing Burning Up while her dress, made from 200yards of fabric, rolled down to the ground.
And not even her sore throat could stop her performing. As Kylie told the audience when her voice began to falter: “You have to excuse me. I have not been well recently and I have a frog in my throat. “Everyone has been working really hard to make me better and cancel is not a word in my vocabulary.” By the end of the two-hour show the star was obviously in pain and her voice was hoarse.

As she was about to perform her final song, the huge No1 Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, she wiped away a tear and told the audience: “Thank you for making a difficult evening really special.” The set list will not disappoint old or new fans, with numbers spanning the 33-year-old’s hits going back to the Eighties. Classics such as I Should Be So Lucky and Better The Devil You Know sit alongside modern favourites including Kids and Spinning Around, many served up with a new twist.

The scale of the show is a far cry from Kylie’s gigs of just 12 months ago. But since then the Queen of Pop has had a No1 single with Can’t Get You Out of My Head, a No1 album with Fever and a Top 10 U.S. hit. She has become Britain’s biggest female pop star – and when you catch this tour you’ll see why. It’s a triumph.

As her unexpected recent success in the US proves, Kylie Minogue has never been taken more seriously. Reviewers ignored her self-conscious attempts at gravity during her mid-1990s indie makeover, then fell over themselves garlanding Fever, an album packed with precisely the sort of sparkly production-line pop that normally brings on an attack of the critical vapours. Now the US, a country hardly suffering a dearth of blonde pop moppets, has fallen under her spell.

The Fever show reflects the new seriousness with which Minogue is regarded. Costume designers Dolce & Gabbana have dubbed Minogue "the quintessence of the contemporary artist", a sentiment even Fever's most vocal adherent might think is gilding the lily a bit. The sets purport to be influenced by A Clockwork Orange and David Bowie's Diamond Dogs tour; the centrepiece of Bowie's 1974 shows, however, was an enormous hydraulic blood-spurting penis - presumably an influence too far for Minogue's designers.

In the event, the show is less Stanley Kubrick than Dino De Laurentiis. Visions of urban dystopia are secondary to the serious business of revealing Minogue's buttocks (according to tabloid legend, insured for £3m) in a series of spangly outfits. The literary and cinematic allusions are less sophisticated than the special effects. There are blasts of synthesised Beethoven between songs, but the audience are more impressed by the giant inflatable letter K on the stage.

Quite right, too. Strip away the pretentious babble and there is a slick, tightly choreographed and highly entertaining spectacle. Minogue is not the world's most characterful performer - she has two on-stage modes, big grin and simper - but it hardly matters in a show that features fluorescent tap-dancing Jedi knights, muscular male dancers in high heels and suspenders, and a man walking down some stairs on his hands.

Old hits are updated in keeping with Fever's adoption of vogueish dance-floor styles. I Should Be So Lucky becomes booming progressive house, while Locomotion sounds peculiar as slinky trip hop. Like Robbie Williams, Minogue keeps the audience interested in album tracks by making reference to other songs, including Donna Summer's I Feel Love. But it's during the finale, when the audience sings along to Can't Get You Out of My Head, that the show reveals its true colours. On the overhead screens, the lyrics appear, along with a bouncing ball. Whatever Dolce and Gabbana might think, this is not an artist at the cutting edge, but shameless end-of-the-pier stuff, done to perfection.

4 stars

In 2001, Madonna's Drowned World tour sacrificed populism and the back catalogue on the altar of "edginess" and art. Although undeniably impressive, it prioritised spectacle over pleasure, and was hard to love. In 2002, Kylie Minogue's Fever tour proves that you can combine both approaches. The Fever tour is a High Art/Pop Art collision, a Stanley Kubrick meets Baz Luhrmann extravaganza. Oh, and she gets her hits out.

Before the show, the local media are full of stories that she's ill, that her throat won't last the night. It may turn out that the name of the Fever tour refers to more than just her latest album. In the event, you'd never guess there was a thing wrong with her. The frailties of the flesh – disease, ageing – are beneath Kylie Minogue.

A cryogenic pod rises from the stage, and splits to reveal the most famous arse in Britain. The show – apparently the kind of spectacular she's wanted to stage for years, but can only now afford – is divided into a series of theatrical acts, each with a different visual theme, and the first is cyber chic.

Dressed as a futuristic space vixen and surrounded by latex-clad dancers, she moves with mechanical, robotic jerks. For three songs – "Come Into My World", "Shocked", "Love At First Sight" – her imperious face is a mask of aloofness. It isn't long, though, before Cyber Kylie accedes to Smiley Kylie, the unnaturally mean mouth breaks into a beaming grin, and it's "Hello Cardiff, how are you doing?", and the Greatest Living Welshwoman is sending her love to her Welsh relatives, "the Joneses" (talk about hedging your bets...).

Act two is Droogie Nights, mixing Clockwork Orange with disco imagery, as Kylie and her ensemble, in black bowler, white overalls and riding boots, perform "Spinning Around" in front of an inflatable letter "K" straight out of the Korova Milk Bar. Then follows a more traditional section, all ballgowns and rose petals, and containing some of her more mature songs ("Finer Feelings", the wonderful "Put Yourself In My Place") and a cover of "The Crying Game".

It's a brief interlude of minimalism, before the show explodes into Technicolor with a sequence inspired by scratch/hip-hop culture of the 1980s. (Kylie wears a vest bearing the legend "Slim Lady"). There's a queasy incongruity between the garishness of the visuals and the gothic menace of "Confide In Me". It feels as though we've walked into a the video for "Buffalo Gals" or "The Message". Re-emerging in a cop uniform for a Robbie-less "Kids", she stalks around the stage after a male acrobat who has a marvellous contempt for the concepts of "up" and "down". "Lost? Jealous? Anxious? Desperate?" flash the words on the big screen, neon red, fast and semi-subliminal. "Call now for acceptance and satisfaction".

By the closing section, in which Kylie, by now kitted out in UV fetish wear from Cyberdog, reinvents her cheesy SAW hits ("I Should Be So Lucky", "Better The Devil You Know") as trance/darkwave/hard house anthems and references New Order in the remixed version of "Can't Get You Out Of My Head". During "Better The Devil You Know", I remember Nick Cave lecturing on the love song, in which he saw a certain human horror underlying this track: "Like Prometheus chained to his rock, so that the eagle can eat his liver each night, Kylie becomes love's sacrifical lamb bleating an earnest invitation to the drooling, ravenous wolf that he may devour her time and time again, all to a groovy techno beat." Glancing around at the waving lightsticks and bobbing Stetsons, I suspect I am alone.

Can't get Kylie out of our heads

The one-time girl-next-door is now Tinkerbell on crack... and a bona fide superstar

Kylie Minogue's intrinsic likableness has been discussed so often, you could start disliking her for it. As it happens, I felt my first flash of dislike for Kylie recently. I think I saw her huge country gaff featured in a newspaper and came over all huffy about how rich she was. Maybe on some subconscious (and deeply irrational) level I'd sucked up her girl-next-door persona and assumed she'd been sharing a poky flat in Earls Court with three other girls all these years.

Or that she was a Kid from Fame - you know, scratching together pennies for dance classes, running around in legwarmers, still chasing her dream, with a smile on her face, a song in her heart, and a bible (in her case, a book of bottom-toning exercises) by her bed. Kylie would only have had to say the word and I'd have been over with a bag of groceries and a shoulder to cry on, at any point in her career. Now here she was, seemingly richer than Midas and Martine McCutcheon combined. Friends, I felt suckered.

All of which says more about me, and the British psyche, than it does about Kylie. A large part of her appeal, in this country at least, has been her 'Little Girl Who Can' chutzpah. Even in her deepest career troughs, Kylie was never a loser (no pretty woman with a good sense of humour could ever be called that), but she was never exactly a winner either. Which partially explains why she survived the bad times. (Only partially mind. Never underestimate the career-reviving talents of a faithful gay audience - they are the St John's Ambulance of pop.)

Nobody had the heart to knock Kylie down because, for all her success, she'd never seemed properly 'up'. Kylie was always someone who seemed to be 'on her way', career-wise, and you could only wish her well. Now, with the rebirth of her career (the international success of Light Years, Fever, 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' and 'In Your Eyes' etc), all that 'on her way' stuff doesn't wash any more.

Kylie has most sincerel and irrevocably arrived, on all the important musical and cultural levels. There's no going back now.

This became even more obvious when observing La Minogue at Cardiff. The last time I saw Kylie (years ago, at the Wembley Arena), she was so appalling I had to watch through threaded fingers. The 'highlight' of the show was a dance routine where Kylie nervously pushed a man's head into her crotch. The expression on her face was like the ending of The Fly ('Help Me!'). I left that show wondering if I should alert the authorities and have Kylie taken into care, but I'm glad I didn't. At Cardiff she was a different woman entirely: confident, happy, accomplished, in control. When I arrived she was already prancing around in thigh boots and a little spangly number that couldn't decide whether it wanted to cover her bottom or not. The song title 'Come Into My World' suddenly seemed an invitation too far, but soon Kylie was off again, doing (what one hopes was) an ironically naff version of 'Shocked', surrounded by dancers dressed as androids in motorcycle helmets. Around this time, a huge white balloon 'K' bounced on to the stage. Kylie giggled and murmured: 'Welcome to our humble little show.'

What followed was a near-perfect presentation of Kylie: The Re-Genesis. Songs such as 'Spinning Around', 'Fever', 'Kids' 'Confide In Me' and 'Rhythm of the Night' passed in a blur of hi-NRG disco, pure pop and electro-experimentation.

Just as the dance floor - that ever-hungry beast for novelty - has changed over the years, so has Kylie. She's also having more avant- garde fun with her wardrobe, cavorting onstage in 'Grace Jones' hooded negligees, a riding jodhpurs 'Sex-Follyfoot' ensemble, a policewoman's cap and, for an odd torch interlude featuring 'The Crying Game', a long black Shirley Bassey gown. Strangely, no little shorts were to be seen - maybe Kylie is sick of being accused of 'spinning around' and showing what she's got. Or maybe she thought her (Agent Provocateur?) basque would do the trick. Which of course it did - Kylie looked predatory and slightly crazed. Tinkerbell on crack.

I said 'near-perfect'. The pretentious dancers really got on my nerves, though Kylie seemed to put them in their place with risible costumes including white body stockings with black bra and knickers on top (for the boys!). Then there was Kylie's penchant for subverting her old material ('Better The Devil You Know'; 'I Should Be So Lucky; 'Do The Locomotion') which is her prerogative, but some of us liked her cheery singalongs how they were. 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' arrived last, by which time Kylie was admitting to the audience that she was trying her 'super super best' but had a 'frog in her throat'. The word 'cancel', she added, was simply not in her vocabulary.

Maybe not, but I bet 'superstar' is. Sooner or later, the Kylie backlash will kick off, but I don't envy the blind deaf fool who starts it.