2 May 2025, Crypto Arena, Los Angeles, CA

It is no accident, although unplanned, that Kylie Minogue performed the final show of her US “Tension” tour the same night as the Australian federal election. While the humungous audience at Crypto Arena was largely American and male and gay and sparkly, the joy and pride for the Aussie icon whose unpretentious star shines so bright, whose home accent seems more evident than I’ve heard in years, whose decades of hard work have ascended her to global success few really imagined possible when she released “I Should Be So Lucky”, was as glorious and victorious as an election result in favour of what is good and true and fair and free.

This girl is nearly 57 and dancing like a maniac in skin-tight vinyl or shimmery, sequinned, diamante outfits and fishnets pouring into thigh-high boots with killer heels. She’s singing songs that move people. She’s making everyone smile.

Kylie Minogue is wondrous.

Candidly, I need to state up front, I am not well qualified to write a deep critical appraisal here. I have not been a devoted Kylie fan, in that I really know just a few of her songs – from the hits of Stock Aitken Waterman years to now – and the over-produced disco/electronica/dance party genre is not my thing. Nor is her voice something grand to my ears. It was not lost on me that nine years ago in the same arena (when it was Staples Center) I saw two of the greatest voices of all time, Barbra Streisand and Adele, within a few days of each other, and that Kylie’s staging and production was reminiscent of what Adele had done (back then quite groundbreaking, now de regueur). But when you watch a star so loved, so totally completely loved and appreciated as Kylie is, it’s mesmerising. It reminded me of those John Farnham concerts I attended in Sydney in the late 1980s during his Whispering Jack and Age of Reason years, the wave after wave after wave of love that crashes on to a stage tsunami-like and renders an artist speechless. Kylie was speechless at times in front of her devoted Los Angeles audience. (West Hollywood had to have been a ghost town that evening, my friend Tracey remarked on our way home, and a week later on KCRW the reviewer said he had never seen so many gays in one room… Clearly that man had never been to Mardi Gras in Sydney.)

And then she would just let herself scream and squeal and shriek in delight, crouch down to the floor to take the weight off, and let herself soak it all in, the adulation and frenzy. When she recorded “I Should Be So Lucky” in 1987 she might have hoped to be this lucky, but without the seriously hard work and determination and strength and resilience (and, early on, street cred from Michael Hutchence and Nick Cave associations) this night’s splendour could not have had the authenticity it did.

It was a night of genuine heartfelt well-deserved brilliance.

That was in spite of some weird issues with the backing track that she and her singers and band performed to, and in spite of my uncertainty of whether what I was hearing was always her voice, or a pre-recorded track – except during the acoustic rendition of “Say Something” which was very sweet, and very clear that it was just Kylie. It didn’t matter during songs like “Come Into My World”, “Spinning Around”, “Better The Devil You Know” (my fave from the S-A-W era; I used to play it on my radio show a lot), the very theatrical and fabulous “Confide In Me” and the mega US hits “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” and “Padam Padam” – I am going to presume it was her voice leading in all of those and it was electrifying to watch her perform them – and at the same time feeling that her songs for the most part don’t go anywhere, they just loop around in a groove and a vibe that for lovers of that genre is intoxicating, and I totally get that that can be enough. But I don’t feel a drama, a story arc, an emotional crescendo. Something I did feel when Madonna put out her Ray Of Light album, the first time I found the electronica-pop-dance hybrid interesting and relevant. I think if Kylie had not had such compelling videos for some of her songs, I might be even less connected to them. I know it doesn’t matter what “Padam” means, but I generally gravitate to songs with meaning. And yet, dancing along to those insanely catchy melodies in a Kylie song is amazingly therapeutic and fun, as is being witness to her bounteous energy.

In fact I would have loved more of those early hits she omitted like “Step Back In Time” and even, yes, “I Should Be So Lucky”. Just to cover all bases. (We did get “The Loco-Motion”. Meh.) Admittedly, I have no in-person knowledge of what Kylie’s set lists have been comprised of over the years. I had not been aware that she had played the Hollywood Bowl back in 2009, something a devoted fan, Mario, in our row informed me. He only picked up his ticket for this night a few hours before the show, having believed it was sold out and was prepared to (and maybe did) fly to London to see her. He probably went to more than one of her recent Vegas residency shows, too. Maybe he was even at her historical appearance at Glastonbury in 2019.

This was my first time seeing Kylie Minogue in concert since 1990. In actual fact, I thought it was my first time ever, but then I started to creak back the memory vault, checked my website (the Debsite), and sure enough, bingo, there was a review from my Variety scribe period. Since then, unless I have forgotten another time, I’d never been compelled to see her perform. I just dipped in and out of interest in her career, loving some of her hits, admiring her evolving style, wondering at her tireless energy and ever-growing fan base. Here in LA I attended a Grammy Museum in-conversation event in 2023 (a few pics included in my photo gallery), sitting up close and wondering why I should have been surprised she’d had some work done to her face. Subtle work, but work nonetheless. Of course, why wouldn’t she? I never felt Kylie was trading on beauty so much as personality, vivacity, effervescence, and a shrewd knack for teaming up with exactly the right song people. She’s authentic. And yes, she is gorgeous, and so she likely wants to stay gorgeous. As I was watching the exquisitely beautiful Rita Ora in her opening set at Crypto Arena (and when she joined Kylie on stage during “Spinning Around”), I found myself wondering in fact, how women like Rita and Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter et al are going to look 30 years from now. I won’t be around to see for myself, and I can’t foresee what their musical longevity might be either, but in those early years of Kylie’s music success and celebrity, I never foresaw what I saw on May 2nd in LA.

For a moment, when she sang a short snippet of “Where The Wild Roses Grow”, I thought maybe Nick Cave might step out on stage. I was thinking of Nick several times during Kylie’s show, as the last LA-based review I wrote here on Debbie Does Music was from Nick’s concert at The Orpheum a whole 18 months earlier. It’s been a fallow writing phase in my life even if not a musically fallow phase, so as always there is a backlog of concerts where I took photos that need to be documented. There has been a lot of back and forth geographically, and now I am here in LA to stay. So even while the state of the nation back in Australia is more promising than what I am dealing with in the US, the inspiration of music and performance here is my motivation and guiding light.

Padam padam to that and to Kylie Minogue for every moment she shines and every stage she shines upon. I am more than happy to live in an age when Kylie exists. And I think my respect for her will only grow as we both age.

(Thank you to the Australian Consulate and AEG for my tickets, which I won in a competition. Yay for being an Australian in the US!)

Final note: I’ve got a lot of photos of Kylie to share. Click on the first pic in the gallery to enlarge and click through. I gave my poor, dying Sony Cyber Shot some CPR and somehow it withstood hundreds of shutter squeezes over the two-hour show, stretching that focus from our good but distant seats. Better seats than I had for the Elton show in this arena, but the photos are not as sharp, which is due to the camera wanting to be put down and out of its misery, methinks. The screen is dead and I was looking through the tiny viewfinder. Thank goodness the camera has one as otherwise I wouldn’t have known it was still working. So I am open to donations for a new camera small enough to take into venues with tight camera rules, and zoomy enough to take great concert photos. Feel free to reach out if you want to help!