Source: The Courier-Mail October 18, 2009

AUSSIE pop star and style icon Kylie Minogue could do for golf what she has done for everything from perfume to underwear – make it sexy.

The pop princess has admitted to becoming addicted to playing the game with her beau, Spanish model Andres Velencoso.

“Golf can be sexy,” Minogue told women’s magazine InStyle Australia.

“For me it’s been great to do with Andres in the fresh air for hours. And golf courses are normally attached to very beautiful hotels with beautiful spas and a Michelin star restaurant,” she said in the magazine’s November issue, out on Monday.

“You play golf, you relax, you eat. You would be surprised by the people who play golf.”

She has even joked about putting together her own range of golf clothing, which if it happened would certainly shake up the normally conservative world of golf.

“Maybe I need to get into designing golf wear because let me tell you it’s not easy to look good on the golf course,” she said.

Source: The New York Times 14-10-09

REVIEW: Kylie Minogue at the Hammerstein Ballroom. It’s a long story, how she has remained apart from the American post-disco line, but it boils down to Europop’s absolute foreignness: there is no Bronx in it. Ms. Minogue has studied Madonna for years, but maybe this country needs only one blonde, stadium-filling, high-camp, digital-burlesque artist at a time and Lady Gaga — who draws from both Madonna and Ms. Minogue — has dibs on that spot.

Ms. Minogue’s voice never definitively dropped, like Madonna’s; she’s still comfortable in helium range. And while Madonna dealt in transgression nearly from the start, Ms. Minogue naturally circumvents the dark parts of desire. Between songs on Tuesday she was edgeless, posing no threat or subtext. She does enjoy-your-life music, no heavy message. And though you have an apparent advantage in connecting with it if you’re a gay man — the crowd at the Hammerstein was possibly 90 percent male — you’re free to make of it what you want.

Tuesday’s set went deep into disco, techno and various kinds of superpop, derivative but with champion hooks. (Ms. Minogue has released good songs throughout her career, including the recent Daft Punkish “In My Arms” and the thumping new song “Better Than Today.”) Champion stagecraft too. At the beginning she descended from the ceiling, wearing something like a string of feather boas and a solar-system headdress, standing atop an enormous shiny skull. Before long, after “Come Into My World,” a robot was high-stepping toward her, bearing a glass of red wine on a silver tray.

She had a live band, for what it’s worth — drums, bass, guitar and keyboards — though it all sounded like being inside a giant synthesizer. But her dancers, male and female, were invaluable. For “Shocked” they turned flips and cartwheels in front of exaggerated smiley faces on the back screen, looking like gym rats done up by Jean-Paul Gaultier; for “Boombox” (“Baby I’m your boombox/make you spin like a top”) they crept around in catcher’s masks; for “Slow” they performed interpretive gestures with neon-light tubes; for “Red Blooded Woman” the bare-chested men teased one another in front of shower stalls as Ms. Minogue posed on a gym beam. Please be seated: there’s more.

During “White Diamond” a footman approached Ms. Minogue, who was fretting glamorously on a couch flanked by panther statues, with some sort of dismaying note or book — again, on a silver tray; she flung him away and they did a routine of tension and release. For a stripper-dance version of “The Loco-Motion” the men dressed in female bondage gear and the women in flesh-colored body suits with pasties.

Ms. Minogue is effective in complex static poses, at one with her garments; at the start of “Like a Drug” she was shown on screen wearing something like an enormous doily, batting enormous eyelashes. But she was physical too, dancing as well as she could on high heels and walking more than once on the outstretched limbs of her dancers. And in the lovingly slow treatments of her biggest early hits, “The Loco-Motion” and “I Should Be So Lucky,” she used sufficient vibrato in her voice to assure you that she had one, a nearly intimate gesture after all the oversized ones. The concert was a stadium show intelligently compressed for 3,500 people, and that was why it worked.

Source: SMH (by Christine Sams) October 5, 2009

Kylie Minogue’s first show in the US has attracted a range of responses from American critics but it’s clear the singer and her manager, Terry Blamey, were thrilled with the reaction of fans.

Blamey sent an exclusive message to S after the show in Oakland, California, last week: “I’ve been at every show and this is maybe the best to date. It was certainly the biggest audience response we’ve ever seen. What a welcome to America!”

Fans queued around the block ahead of Minogue’s live appearance – with at least one local newspaper dubbing it “Kylie-fornia”. But given her first two shows were in the San Francisco Bay area, Minogue was assured of a besotted audience – after all, she is one of the biggest gay icons in the world.

The mainstream US market has never quite understood Minogue and she has struggled to gain traction there as anything other than a niche act, despite winning a Grammy in 2004. She is often referred to as a “dance artist” by music critics there.

At least one reviewer at her debut US show was impressed by the spectacle Minogue offered up but far less enthusiastic about her performance skills.

“It was nothing short of gigantic, an over-the-top spectacle that featured enormous props, a killer laser-light show, wild theatrical elements, artfully choreographed dance routines and a Cher-worthy closet full of pricey costumes,” wrote Jim Harrington in The Oakland Tribune.

But clearly underwhelmed by Minogue’s robot-themed segments, he questioned her dancing skills, saying she “flat out can’t dance”. Huh?

Delighted fans thought otherwise. “Americans are stupid, obviously,” Dustin Thornhill, a 28-year-old fan from San Francisco, told Reuters. His friend, Nicky Bangles, said: “We’re so excited. We’ve been waiting millions of years.”

Source: Daily Mail By Chris Johnson
30th September 2009

These are some the stunning creations in which Kylie Minogue will grace the stage for her first-ever North American tour, which kicks off tonight. In a pop/fashion collaboration that will Victoria Beckham green with envy, she will wear an array of costumers from John-Paul Gaultier’s Autumn/ Winter 2009/10 collection. Kylie personally hand-picked the French designer’s outfits during Fashion Week in July.

Kylie, 41, who begins her six-city For You For Me Tour in San Francisco, will slip into a series of ensembles and, as these pictures show, sparkle seems to be a recurring theme.

But then she has high standards to live up to, costumes from her last tour, Showgirls, were later exhibited at London’s V&A Museum.

These outfits include a sexy silver corset number, a stunning floor-length shimmering metallic halter-neck dress and a slinky short black number with leather gloves and waistcoat.

She has also released a behind-the-scenes video, filmed just two days ago, showing the frantic last-minute rehearsals and backstage preparations.

In the two-minute clip, we meet some of Kylie’s scantily clad male dancers and hear from her head of wardrobe, Louise, who is avidly sewing feathers onto costumes.

Fans can expect to hear some of the Australian singer’s best-loved songs, including Better The Devil You Know, Come Into My World and I Believe In You.

After her two shows at the Fox Oakland Theatre in San Francisco, the nine-date tour will move on to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago, then into Toronoto, Canada, before finishing off with three gigs in New York.

Writing on her official tour blog yesterday, Kylie praised her team for pulling things together during the second day of production rehearsals.

She said: ‘Production Rehearsal went incredibly well – everyone putting in 100 per cent.

Choreographer Tony Testa and assistant Jillian Mayers worked hard on the last day before show day to perfect the dancers moves. The choreography is beautiful and eye catching.

‘The sun is San Francisco slept behind the clouds today which was quite a change from the past 2 days.

‘No doubt tomorrow will be sunny for opening night! Nerves are buzzing and Kamp Kylie is getting incredibly excited. Oh my goodness… Kylie-fornia!’