---

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
By Jane Warren
08.07.2008

What is so special about Kylie Minogue?

Last week she picked up an OBE, this week she has been voted Britain’s most popular person. So what does make the eternally happy Kylie Minogue such an unlikely icon?

WHEN SHE was seven years old, Kylie Minogue entered a piano competition near her home in Melbourne, Australia. “Apparently, I walked on to the stage, sat on the piano stool and before I began to play, unprompted, looked over to the judges and gave them a big smile. To this day, I’m not sure if it was my piano playing or the smile that scored me a place.”

Since then, she’s made a habit of flashing that trademark mega-watt grin. While other pop divas enhance their reputation by falling out of night­clubs drunk at 3am, taking drugs or gesticulating at the pap­arazzi who trail them, Kylie has chosen a very different route: by being girl-next-door nice.

So nice, in fact, that she is now, officially, the most popular person in Britain – more popular, even, than the much-loved Terry Wogan and Bruce Forsyth, who came second and third respectively in the poll by leading market research firm onepoll.com.

Kylie began her career as an actress

For many pop stars, coming top of a list like this would be deeply worrying but Kylie is nothing if not smart: she knows her enduring appeal depends on the depth of her fan base. She may not have the greatest voice; she may not be the best dancer or the most sultry performer but as a package she is peerless. Women want to be her and men want to be with her.

The Doctor Who episode in which she guest starred last Christmas drew the show’s highest viewing figures since 1979, while she has been honoured with no fewer than four waxworks at Madame Tussauds – only the Queen has had more models made. And while she may be popular with the masses, last year she was also considered worthy of her own exhibition at London’s V&A museum.

Official recognition of public affection for her crowns a glittering year for Kylie: in February, she received a Brit Award for Best International Female Solo Artist; her European comeback concert tour, which kicked off in May, has been a sell-out and last week she was awarded an OBE by Prince Charles. In typical Kylie style, she gave the heir to the throne “that smile” before chatting, joking and even clasping his hand with both of hers, leaving him looking decidedly smitten.

There is something about Kylie that makes people want to protect her – and not just because she’s only 5ft tall. At 40, she still has a doll-like appeal. Her poor taste in men – she dated Jason Donovan, rock star Michael Hutchence and model James Gooding, none of whom popped the question – only adds to this effect. More than any other performer you feel that Kylie’s appeal could last for ever.

However, as her pop career enters its third decade, she appears to be aware that this is the perfect time to diversify. She has cannily spent the past few years turning herself into a brand, selling everything from cushions and perfume to underwear and candles – all notably cuddly, cosy, intimate products that convey the Kylie feel-good factor.

Since the release of her studio album X at the end of last year, she has appeared in adverts for her third fragrance, Showtime, and promoted her new bed linen range, Kylie at Home. Her earnings last year were estimated at more than £12million.

She now has her own lingerie range

So how did the Australian sex kitten – whose first foray into pop music saw her derided by one critic as a “singing budgie” – inveigle her way into our hearts so effectively?

Kylie is one of the few artists to have had No1 hits in the Eighties, Nineties and 2000s. Her pop career has resulted in sales of more than 65million. But her popularity goes deeper than her ability to churn out breezy hits with the sort of lyrics and tunes that stick in your head long after they’ve finished playing.

“I have this smiley-Kylie image and that’s fine with me,” she told an interviewer recently. “I tend to be more of a positive than a negative person. But I still have some dark and sad moments. It’s not my job, though, to go public with those.”

When her relationships flounder, as they too often seem to, she issues dignified statements and never rakes over the coals publicly.

Even when she split up with Olivier Martinez, the French actor widely acknow­ledged as the love of her life, after four years together, she didn’t break down publicly but issued a statement in his defence.

Last week, they were photo­graphed together again, having dinner at a Paris restaurant with her parents and manager, sparking rum­ours that they were back together. “It’s difficult to age with dignity in the pop business but I like to think I’ve managed it so far,” says the singer who was 40 in May.

Her relentlessly professional attitude – in which she reveals just as much as we need to know but not a smidgen more – was highlighted when she was diagnosed in 2005 with breast cancer.

A huge surge in sympathetic affection followed, as well as an enormous increase in breast screening, which was nicknamed the Kylie Effect by medical professionals.

Although she was seriously ill, we loved her for the way in which she battled the disease with chemo-therapy and radiotherapy treatments. She may have looked pale and wan but when she was pictured in her silk headscarf walking Olivier’s dog around Paris, she seemed to be gathering strength.

She famously refused to wear a wig and the pixie look that replaced her flowing tresses when her hair grew back was worn as a badge of honour. “I’m not the same,” she said simply. She came through the other side of her illness to prove that a breast cancer diagnosis didn’t have to be a death sentence and that it was possible to emerge smiling from such a terrifying ordeal.

Seeing her now, it’s hard to believe that just a couple of years ago she was making headlines for her cancer battle.

“During my therapy they told me, ‘You’ll reach a point when you’ll almost forget all this has even happened’. Now I tell myself it’s true – I’m back living life to the fullest. Sometimes, I do feel this disease was in the past. It’s remarkable what a person is able to put up with.”

And how much reinvention is possible. Two months after her treatment ended, she was spending six hours a day rehearsing as well as working out regularly. She also found time to write a children’s book, The Show­girl Princess, release the first of her signature scents and to guest-edit Australian Vogue in December, 2006.

All of this led one men’s magazine to declare her the “biggest female pop star in the world” and to rave that, while many people in the pop industry are “manipulated puppets” who are “as vacuous” as they often seem, “that’s the last thing you could say about Kylie – she’s all flesh and blood”.

In Aborigine, Kylie means boom­erang and there are few who have demonstrated such an amazing ability to bounce back.

Quelle: Daily Express

---

I blew chance to write for Kylie because of drugs, admits Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie
Beverley Lyons And Laura Sutherland
07.07.2008

Bobby Gillespie and Kylie | Picture: KYA

SCOTS rock star Bobby Gillespie has revealed he blew the chance to work with pal Kylie Minogue - because he was too stoned.

The Primal Scream frontman said that the Australian singer had approached him to write a song for her.

But he admitted that he was taking so many drugs at the time that he wasn't capable of writing anything for the tiny chart-topper.

Gillespie, who is looking forward to a headline show at T in the Park this weekend, revealed the approach was made at the height of Primal Scream's fame.

"She did ask us to write a song for her once," he said. "We met her and she was f***ing lovely.

"This was when she was a proper pop star, in 1992 or around about then.

"However, we were too f****d up to even write a song for ourselves at that time.

"She has come to see us at a couple of gigs but I think the moment has now passed."

Gillespie then laughed off rumours that he had tried to corrupt the former Neighbours star by slipping her Ecstasy backstage at one show.

He told the August issue of Q magazine: "People were offering her stuff and she said 'thanks, but no thanks'. She was lovely."

Kylie is currently on her X2008 World Tour and played at Glasgow's SECC on Saturday and last night, where she wowed sell-out audiences with high energy routines. And she will take to the SECC stage again on Tuesday and Wednesday.

And the tiny singer was set to hook up with Bobby - who she has known for years - for a night out, as Primal Scream are playing a secret gig in Glasgow tonight.

Gillespie, who has worked with supermodel Kate Moss, is currently putting the final touches to Primal Scream's ninth album Beautiful Future.

REM and Amy Winehouse are among the other acts set to feature at this year's T in the Park at Balado, near Kinross, over four days next weekend.

Despite being criticised in a report as the most expensive music festival in the country, the event has sold out again.

Around 250,000 tickets have been sold for the festival, which has been stretched in duration to feature three full days of music.

Quelle: Glasgow Daily Record, UK

---

Kylie Minogue at the Belfast Odysey Arena - the Sunday Times review
Robert Sandall
06.07.2008

Kylie Minogue at the Belfast Odyssey Arena

The word on the web — from bloggers who have been comparing notes since the KylieX2008 tour kicked off in Paris in May — was that this show was, by her extravagant standards, a muted affair. The costumes, the choreography, even her singing, were all felt to be a little below par. Maybe the citizens of Belfast, the first stop on Kylie’s UK tour, don’t set much store by online gossip; or perhaps not having seen the recent Showgirl and Fever tours, or indeed witnessed any live headline performance by Kylie Minogue in their city since 1990, they were simply delighted to welcome her back. Either way, the 12,000 mainly female fans packed into the Odyssey Arena last Sunday were having such a raucously good time that, towards the end of her 2½-hour show, Minogue had to ask them to “calm down” to make way for a rare rendition of one of her older, more reflective numbers, Step Back in Time.

This request had no effect whatsoever, of course, but it did highlight a nagging sense that, now 40 and a shade stouter after her recent battle with breast cancer, Kylie might, just might, be finding her role as a disco show queen more onerous than she once did. Her entrance, suspended in a silver wheel 10ft above the stage, wasn’t as spectacular as previous aerial stunts; and although she managed eight lightning-fast costume changes in the course of her performance — which variously styled her as a cheerleader, a sailor, some kind of Japanese zany with what looked like a bowl of fruit upended on her head and, most bafflingly, a party girl seated on a giant gold skull — you felt a growing distance between Minogue and her elaborate masks.

She seemed more comfortable strolling around the front of the stage than she did cavorting with her costumed dancers. The images flashed across the imposing video screens at the back of the stage likewise suggested that she felt happier delegating her show’s visual impact to technology than focusing it upon herself.

If the bloggers were broadly right about the above, however, they were wrong about Kylie’s vocal performance. At the points in the concert where she really sang — as opposed to joining in chorally with her three backing singers — she sounded more impressive than ever. When she dispensed with the visual trickery and performed Flower and I Believe in You, alone on the stage, she suddenly seemed like a different, more mature Kylie than the supermarket-own-brand Madonna who made her big pop debut 20 years ago with the Stock Aitken Waterman production I Should Be So Lucky. Therein, perhaps, lies her problem for the future. The riotous, arms-in-the-air response accorded to Lucky and the rest of the pulsing disco anthems that bulked out the show indicated that her fans — or the Belfast contingent, anyway — love the Kylie Minogue they know better than the one she might prefer to be. If so, she won’t be the first or last pop icon to end up a captive of her audience.

Quelle: Times Online, UK

---

Brit men would love to date Kylie Minogue
04.07.2008

Kylie Minogue

London (ANI): Kylie Minogue has topped a list of the women with moolah whom British men would most love to date. The sexy Aussie singer, worth a whopping 40 million pounds, took 49 percent of the votes in a recent poll of 1,000 British singles by online dating firm Parship. Coming in second place on the list was author of the 'Harry Potter' series JK Rowling with 23 percent of the votes.

Minogue comfortably beat Rowling to take top spot even though the latter, with a fortune of 560 million pounds, is far richer than her. Third place on the list went to music icon Madonna, currently married to Brit director Guy Ritchies. Mum-of-three Madge, worth 300 million pounds, took in 12 percent of the votes. Supermodel Kate Moss and author Jackie Collins, who came in fourth and fifth place with 13 percent and 5 percent of the votes respectively, rounded off the top five.

Dr Victoria Lukats, psychiatrist and Parship's dating expert, commented: "The UK really is not a nation of gold diggers. Indeed, many people still consider it bad taste to talk about money. Surveys asking people what they find attractive in others have shown that personality factors and looks are cited as being far more important than wealth by the vast majority of people."

"These poll results appear to highlight this rather than the favourites simply being the richest on the list, the rankings were probably influenced more by perceived personal qualities kindness, sense of humour, passion, ambition, enthusiasm, likeability, charisma and talent as well as looks and style."

The list for the top six Men's Romantic Rich List as per Parship is:

1. Kylie Minogue (40m pounds)
2. J.K. Rowling (560m pounds)
3. Madonna (300m pounds)
4. Kate Moss (40m pounds)
5. Jackie Collins (90m pounds)
6. The Queen (320m pounds)

Quelle: Oneindia, India

News Page: 12 of 31

« First

< Prev

10

11

12

13

14

Next >

Last »

News Archive:

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

Copyright © 2000-2009 kya.pytalhost.net by KYA Germany.
Reuse of contens and pictures only with permission / Weiterverwendung von Inhalten oder Grafiken nur mit Erlaubnis.