Kylie Minogue fulfilled her pledge to deliver the grandest spectacle in her hometown, staging the show at the Melbourne Cricket Ground this Saturday.
The pop sensation headlined the AFL Grand Final pre-game entertainment with an aerial, high-energy performance before a live crowd surpassing 100,000 and millions more watching from home.
The former Neighbours star, now a bona fide pop icon, squeezed more than thirty years of hits into a brisk 20-minute set.
“A homecoming of this magnitude? I couldn’t be luckier,” she told the audience as the stadium lights flashed the initials K and M across the stands.
The performance opened with a video montage commemorating Minogue’s Melbourne childhood, before she launched into Love at First Sight.
Next came In Your Eyes, Get Outta My Way, On a Night Like This, All the Lovers and Spinning Around, all supported by dancers, fireworks and a rapid sequence of costume changes.
Kalkadunga songman William Barton joined her for a dramatic, orchestral-backed rendition of 1994’s Confide in Me, while G Flip offered a rock-tinged take on Padam Padam.
After a faux ending on The Loco-Motion, Minogue re-emerged from a gigantic bedazzled football and glided above the stadium to close with Can’t Get You Out of My Head.
In related finals news, a planned performance by Tones and I at the rugby league grand final in Sydney next week was cancelled after reports she would not guarantee performing her 2019 hit Dance Monkey. The League will instead allocate her rumored AU$1 million (£532,000) fee to support grassroots rugby.
