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Showgirl Homecoming Live
Kylie Minogue
****
You can't hear feathers, so this live recording of Kylie's hits tour at the Sydney Entertainment Centre lets you focus without distraction on the songs that made it all happen. Confide In Me, a musical turning point in Minogue's career, is given an Indian feel, her voice soaring alongside the sky-high strings. Cowboy Style gets a tribal update and the claustrophobic Too Far adds to the mood.
Many of Minogue's finest Stock Aitken Waterman moments are shoe- horned into a medley - Step Back In Time, What Do I Have To Do, Shocked. Her longtime musical director, Steve Anderson, also weaves in grabs of CeCe Peniston's Finally and his own Such A Good Feeling, by Brothers In Rhythm.
Somehow her Nick Cave duet Where The Wild Roses Grow works when it's implanted in the midst of her urban romp Red Blooded Woman, and the experimental brilliance of Slow is given a pounding electronic revision.
In past tours Minogue's earlier hits have been given makeovers Joan Rivers would baulk at. So it's got to the point where the most ironic thing Anderson could do to I Should Be So Lucky is what he's done here - perform it exactly as it sounded in 1988.
But although Anderson's kept the pop highs SAW encoded into the DNA of Hand On Your Heart, he's implanted a hands-in-the-air piano line. Can't Get You Out Of My Head is now a Donna Summer meets Dr Who theme. The money shot is Bono replacing Robbie Williams on the duet Kids, the audience reaction nearly measuring on the Richter scale.
CAMERON ADAMS
Voila
Belinda Carlisle
****
This compelling French-language album finds the pop legend embracing a true calling rather than indulging in a calculated...