Who says the music charts are only for twentysomethings?
Certainly not Kylie Minogue, 52, the Australian songstress who brought us pop hits in the 1980s to 1990s like "Locomotion" (a remake of the Little Eva tune) and "I Should Be So Lucky" — and who's now racing back up the charts with a new single, "Say Something," and album, "Disco."
The video for the single dropped on Friday, and it's full of glitter and lens flare and ... is that Minogue astride a shiny horse statue?
Why yes, yes it is.
The tune is pure escapism, earnest dance fun that reminds us just how much we've missed a regular diet of disco delights. (We're also hearing a callback to Queen's "Radio Gaga" in the opening beats of the track!)
As Minogue told GQ in May, the new album is "grown-up disco. (It's) difficult even for me to explain. But even grown-ups need some pure pop fun."
Quite a bit of the record (her 15th studio album) was recorded at home due to COVID-19 quarantines, and as she admitted to The Independent in May, there was "steep learning curve."
But Minogue is known for surmounting seemingly impossible obstacles.
In 2005, she was diagnosed with breast cancer while on her "Showgirl: Greatest Hits" world tour. She underwent radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and had a partial mastectomy, then went into remission the following year.
In 2014, she told Australia's "60 Minutes" that facing cancer had changed her attitude about how to live her life. "Someone had said to me at the time, 'You need to be a little bit selfish' .... It's not in my nature to be selfish but now is the time to do that let people take care of you," she said. "And ... that's what I did."
Though she hadn't really planned on having children, the diagnosis, which came when she was 36, permanently derailed that option. "I don't want to dwell on it, obviously, but I wonder what that would have been like. Everyone will say there are options, but I don't know," she told Hello Magazine in 2019.
How did her cancer experience change her?
“It’s always such a difficult question to answer with a neat sentence, but cancer changed many things forever, and some things didn’t change at all,” she recently told WHO magazine.
"My view of the world was different, my destination, for the most part, was the same. Broader, for sure. I was even more passionate about the people and things that I loved, but life as I had known it was on hold."
Still, she's found love with British GQ creative director Paul Solomons, and has a generally positive attitude to growing older in the public eye.
Back in 2014, she told Good Housekeeping, "When I say out loud 'I'm 45,' I think: 'Really? Wait a sec, how? That's not right!' You have to accept it, even if you don't feel like accepting it sometimes. But hey, I'm lucky to be here so it's all good."
