Kylie Minogue: Photos From the Billboard Women In Music Shoot

It’s Friday night in Las Vegas, and Voltaire, the intimate art deco-meets-Studio 54 new performance venue within the Venetian, has transformed into an extremely lit gay club. Beneath countless sparkling disco and glass balls, the crowd of 1,000 dances to the DJ’s mix of a who’s who of dance-pop — Jessie Ware, Spice Girls, ABBA, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s recently revived “Murder on the Dancefloor.” Intermittently, elastic-limbed burlesque artists enter to striptease, dance and execute feats of dazzling flexibility. This is Voltaire’s Belle de Nuit “preshow.” And it’s just the warmup to the main event.

“It’s almost time for Kylie Minooooogue!” the evening’s MC declares. “Yeah, that’s right — Mother is coming!”

The screams become truly deafening when, roughly 10 minutes later, the curtain opens to reveal the diminutive 55-year-old Australian pop star clad entirely in metallic gold. She launches into “Your Disco Needs You,” a rousing track from her 2000 album, Light Years: “Let’s dance through all our fears, war is over for a bit,” she sings. “The whole world should be moving, do your part, cure a lonely heart!”

For the next 70 minutes, Minogue follows her own command, belting songs from her three decades-and-counting career that have united listeners with their infectious dance-pop melodies and lyrics that, whether ebullient or bittersweet, are always anchored by a deep, sincere sense of joy. She shimmies to her cover of Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “The Loco-Motion,” one of her earliest hits from 1987 (and still her highest-charting Billboard Hot 100 entry, peaking at No. 3); she rises above the stage in a flowing red cape like some disco high priestess to sing her seductive current smash, and her biggest in the United States in more than 20 years, “Padam Padam.” She’s a consummate pop diva, stomping down the stage’s catwalk and striking poses — until each song ends. Then, she simply becomes Kylie: giggling, kicking up her stiletto heels in a happy dance and, at one point, speaking into her water bottle when she mistakes it for a microphone.

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