When you try to explain why Kylie Minogue is such an appealing person and pop star, it sounds like you’re talking about your preferred upper. She’s fun and bright—luminous even. She’ll make you giggle and cry and dance. Want to have a nice time? Go with Kylie!
Minogue brought that energy with her last Monday night in June at Café Carlyle in New York, where she stripped back her dance anthems like “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” “Love at First Sight,” and “Say Something” from her last album, Disco. She added in three backup singers and a pianist, and pulled off a cabaret set. There in a black, strapless Alexandre Vauthier dress, she vamped against the piano and told jokes. “We only have a handful of songs for you tonight because we know you’re very busy people,” she said. “So I invite you to join in, get comfortable. It’ll be over in a flash. And then I’ll be crying.”
Nailing a big performance in an intimate space is difficult for even the most seasoned pro, but for Minogue it was light work—her vocals, famously high and clear, cut through the hushed dark room like a light beam. It’s all the more surprising considering that the same week she was in New Jersey at the MetLife Stadium, making a cameo on the stage with Coldplay, her old mates from her home away from home, Great Britain.
“Pretty much summed up my life right now—the extremes, the unexpected,” she told me, back couchside in Carlyle suite on Tuesday.
In 2020, the pop star became the first woman in the U.K. to have a number one album for five straight decades. This is wild to think about. As any mathematician readers may have already noticed, at 54, she’s barely been on the earth for more than five decades. Disco, released amid COVID, is the latest, and it’s pure Kylie. Going disco isn’t a total rebrand for her (she’s been there before), but it’s a return from the album that preceded it, Golden, an articulate go at today’s Nashville.
“I haven’t had the touring experience with albums, and it’s just really odd not to have. It will happen. It might not be the Disco tour. It might be with the next album, but there’s a whole bit missing. So when I hear that it touched someone I’m like, oh, thank you, God,” she said, and for all those who discovered her disco dancing around their apartments alone, she added, “In years to come, maybe I’ll collate more of people’s experience and understand how it happened. Like we all had such personal and profound experiences in lockdown. To be part of people’s better memories of that time was really very moving.”
One thing about Minogue is that she’s done indie, she’s done rock, she’s done synth pop, she’s done so much, but she doesn’t lose herself in reinvention like some stars do. She’s still recognizably Kylie every time. Expansive, containing multitudes, and also essentially her. The throughline is frothy joy (even if you’re crying on the dance floor), shortcut to lose one’s inhibition and oneself, unpretentious.
These are all—coincidentally or not—great ways to describe her wine label, Kylie Minogue Wines. (I can only speak to the prosecco rosé and the Cotés de Provence rosé, but the line also offers sauvignon blanc, brut reserva cava, merlot, and many more.) The intimate performance at the Carlyle was in honor of the release of the range in the U.S. So, yes, the queen of up has invested heavily in a depressant. Don’t worry though. As you’d expect, it’s all very light in Minogue’s hands.
There’s nothing new, and possibly nothing critically useful left to say, about a celebrity finding success in a side-hustle. It’s a smart thing to do in a world where opportunities for making money off one’s music itself grow more limited every day (especially considering how a global pandemic you may have heard of curtailed tours, a previous last-bastion income-generator for acts and all those who rely on them for jobs). Celebrities have fragrances, makeup and skincare lines, clothing lines, and many, many have wine or spirits brands. It’s more notable, then, that in the year 2022, the performer and her big pink bottle of booze scalloped in hearts is a cut above the bunch.