IN A REVEALING INTERVIEW, KYLIE OPENS UP ABOUT WHY SHE’S SO PROTECTIVE OF HER PRIVATE LIFE, HOW SHE DEALS WITH ANXIETY, AND WHY HER NEW ALBUM IS HER MOST PERSONAL YET

WORDS: CLIFF JOANNOU

PHOTOGRAPHY: STEVE SCHOFIELD

KYLIE

Kylie finds interview situations a little… unnatural. “It’s kind of weird, let’s face it,” she says with a shrug.

The princess of pop is sitting beside me in the royal suite at The Ritz in London, an opulent room with a view overlooking Green Park.

I’m relieved to discover we’re both thinking the same thing: this certainly isn’t my regular Tuesday afternoon experience. “If you and I were having a chat over a drink, we’d talk very differently,” she says.

So how does she rate her “talk” now? “Dull,” she replies, and I try not to take offence. She smiles, acknowledging the fact of the matter: she’s here to promote a new album, and I’m here to get as much out of one of pop’s most guarded artists as I can.

As popular with the tabloids today as she ever was, Kylie, who turns 50 in May, is accustomed to dealing with the media’s sometimes loose grasp on the facts. “A lot of the time you haven’t said anything and there’s a quote attributed to you. Sometimes it’s a great one, or it’s something that is just so wrong. “It doesn’t happen very often but once in a while I’ve seen something that I don’t know I said,” she explains.

Kylie shakes this kind of thing off now, but it hasn’t made her any less wary. It was something that made her feel particularly helpless early on in her career. “I remember on a few occasions thinking, ‘I just want to put the record straight’, but couldn’t. What’s the avenue unless you go and make another load of noise about it, which is putting you in a position of having to defend yourself.” During our hour together Miss Minogue is frequently reflective, drawing comparisons between the entertainment industry she finds herself in today and the world of 1988, when she released her first single. I guess it’s difficult not to be when interviewers still love to discuss how she came to fame through Aussie soap Neighbours.

Interestingly, while I never raise the subject, it’s Kylie who volunteers to reflect on her past. And as she points out, there’s a marked difference between the entertainment industry in which she first found fame and that of today. In the “old days”, celebrities were more distant, their lives only revealed in magazine or TV interviews. Today they are also reality TV stars who release uncensored thoughts on social media. You just can’t imagine Kylie putting herself out there in a Keeping Up with the Kardashians-style show. (Even though I think we’d all dearly love that.) Maintaining a comfortable space between her celebrity and private identity feels natural to Kylie. In respect of her break-up with actor Joshua Sasse last year, she’s discrete about the details. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I would love to have a good old gossip right now, but then it becomes public and that’s not the place to put all of that. That’s never seemed right to me. I don’t want to go on about my last relationship. A, it’s private. B, there’s another person involved, and C, I’ve moved beyond that.”