Padam Padam! What does it feel like to have 65,000 people in love with you and chanting your name? Ask Kylie, who beamed and twirled and swept along the superfans for two hours in Hyde Park on Saturday night, many wearing pink cowboy hats and lamé with glitter on their cheeks, and that was only the blokes.
As my companion Tom – who’d come to “find a husband” – said, in wonderment, “I haven’t seen this many gays together in London since Diana’s funeral!”
Miss Minogue came on at 8.50pm. The crowd had timed their visits to the beer tents and the urinals and toilets, and expectation as a violet sunset simmered over the Royal park was at fever pitch and then an explosion of pink lights, smoke, sound.
A sprite with tousled golden hair cling-filmed in red rubber wriggled on stage, launched into “All the Lovers” and the crowd sang along lustily. Every word. Kylie seemed delighted and overcome throughout her performance, chatting to the crowd as if in the set kitchen of Neighbours, telling us, “Don’t make me go we’ve only just started” and spoiling us with all her hits, for which she changed into different outfits every few songs.
After red rubber came a golden ruched dress which I called “Ferrero Rocher” in my notes, then there was ‘tinsel curtain’ and ‘disco Grecian’ and finally a regal gown with a cloak and baubles. Zoe from Liverpool behind me said, “I may wear that to Tesco next week.”
My guilty secret is I’ve never been to Glasto and always try to go to BST, which Kylie last did in 2015. You don’t have to camp. You can walk home. The loos and the drinks are on hand. A couple of years ago I saw Elton John and the Stones on consecutive nights. I mean.
“Hyde Park just gives doesn’t it,” Kylie said. I found out later that her mother and brother had flown in from Oz to be there which could explain why she seemed so joyously lit by the whole occasion, a mood she transfused into the bopping crowd as if she was basting us with some special happy juice probably available only if you are a daughter of Down Under.
“The Eighties,” she said, jokily, noting the grandparents with kids in the front row. “A lot of you here have heard about the Eighties…I was wondering if you’d like to go there?”And then we had Locomotion.
Kylie she never let up, so much that Sir Keir Starmer should probably just plug her into the National Grid and forget about Great British Energy completely.
She was pure Aussie sunshine and just what we needed after this short, wet, grey summer.
