Kylie Minogue sparkles in spectacular hometown performance
By Will Cox
MUSIC
Kylie Minogue: Tension Tour ★★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, February 20
There’s a feeling of excitement outside Rod Laver Arena that goes beyond most shows. People in sparkly outfits are hugging before they enter, their pink cowboy hats butting against one another. They’re lining up to take photos with a life-size (if anything, slightly larger than life) cardboard cutout of the star attraction. The queue is longer than the one for the bar.
Kylie Minogue performs at Rod Laver Arena, February 20, 2025.Credit: Joe Armao
That’s not a surprise. In the Australian consciousness, Kylie Minogue is on par with Madonna – one of the few figures that’s stayed relevant across the last four decades of pop music’s evolution.
What’s surprising is the excitement I’m feeling at this point. I wouldn’t describe myself as a fan. I’ve never bought a Kylie record, she’s simply been there all my life: in the charts, on the radio, at every house party I’ve ever been to. Her pop career started the year I was born, and her music is baked into my brain.
Inside the arena, there’s a T-shaped catwalk she promises to traverse later, and a simple modular set made up of platforms and stairs. Kylie emerges from a trapdoor in the floor and ascends on a swing, encased in a diamond of laser beams and surrounded by eight dancers in silver outfits. She’s in a gold sparkly dress and high black boots. After opener Lights Camera Action, she brings the crowd onside with 2001’s In Your Eyes.
Tonight is the third night of the Tension tour, and her first home-town show in over five years. She crisscrosses the decades, from her Stock Aitken Waterman boppy beginnings, to her creative coming-of-age album Impossible Princess, to the full-on queen ascendance of Fever. Her career is rebirth upon rebirth upon rebirth. A little tweak here, a little remix there, and it all fits together seamlessly.
In the Australian consciousness, Kylie Minogue is on par with Madonna – one of the few figures that’s stayed relevant across the last four decades of pop music’s evolution.Credit: Joe Armao
The early sequencing of bangers like Come Into My World and Spinning Around, both before the first costume change, remind us just how much she’s got to get through. She’s shadowed by six to eight backup dancers at all times. This must be how she lives day-to-day. After a few songs I can’t imagine her without them, following her to Coles, driving identical, smaller cars in convoy around her on the Monash Freeway.
After a quick costume change she’s back, in a red sparkly zip-up jumpsuit for On a Night Like This. She crosses through the decades again, from the ’80s to last week, with her latest single, the pretty-good Last Night I Dreamt I Fell in Love. Her dancers are now in brightly coloured jumpsuits and bucket hats. On Shocked, she even raps. Ill advised, but it was the early ’90s and everyone was having a go.
Kylie recorded her first demo tape at 17, and released her first single at 19. When she plays it – The Loco-Motion – it’s wonderfully at odds with her later sex-goddess image. Her dancers, in colourful dogtooth, do a vogued-up interpretation of the dance. Those old enough in the crowd join in. For this and Better the Devil You Know, there’s no cool, no tension, just unadulterated joy. She confidently straddles the roles of international pop icon and girl from Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.
Confetti cannons go off overhead as she walks through the crowd to a small satellite stage, where we’re treated to an a cappella burst of Where the Wild Roses Grow and a rendition of Say Something, from her 2020 Disco album. She asks for a request and the room sounds like the floor of the stock exchange. Somehow she hears a song title among the screams and gives us a genuinely impromptu Did It Again.
Thursday’s show at Rod Laver Arena was Kylie’s first hometown gig in over five years. Credit: Joe Armao
The gothic melodrama of Confide In Me is augmented by her flowing black robe and a sea of smoke, then she throws the robe off for Slow, my own personal highlight. It’s tense, it’s hot, it’s simple. And then 2020s singles Edge of Saturday Night and Tension lead us into the mega-hit Can’t Get You Out of My Head. A wave breaks across the room the moment she utters the first “La la la”. Not a thing is changed in the arrangement; it’s perfect as it is. The dancers are doing something, but I can’t be sure what – I’m watching Kylie.
All this, and she hasn’t even hit Padam Padam yet, the career-resurgence track that ties it all together. It’s a future classic.
When she closes the night with Love at First Sight, her dancers are all wearing shirts with different era Kylies on them. She’s reinvented herself so many times, but there’s something distinctly Kylie about it all. Maybe it’s how Padam Padam’s onomatopoeic heartbeat chorus subtly reminds us of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, maybe it’s the delivery of a line like ”You look like fun to me / You look a little like somebody I know”. Always playful, always intimate. Enduring. Timeless. Transcendent.
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