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Kylie Minogue is a gay icon. Just that. Never an indie cool queen nor a deconstruction-led dance princess. Funny how its taken her a good ten years
to realise just that and that after various costume changes, for her camp is where its at. Suspicious? You should be. And thus with its arrow firming
directed at the pinkest of pounds her album "Light Years" is a wry return to camp as knickers, your granny would dance to this, old style Minogue.
And the album is lots of fun; there's the big hits kicking things off with "Spinning Around" and "On a night like this"; hi-NRG and crucially a second
single that actually outweighs the first in style, Ibiza-esque rhythms and summer madness captured.
Everything else is so disco. And so cheesy.
Predictably but also absurdly considering his 'beer swilling, one of the footie lads' status, its the tracks that Robbie Williams collaborates that
scream their campness. "Loveboat" is the Bond girlie's seduction cry to the Bond-like Williams of "Millennium" and Your Disco Needs You" the album's
crowning glory is a copy cat "YMCA" chant, only better. This call to arms/the dance floor is pure comedy with Kylie even interrupting the
central mantra of "your disco needs you" in a bizarre political manifesto
to rally her disco 'troops'. This deserves, no, actually needs some serious single action. Its gonna be huge.
But for all its fun and frolics there's something missing in new/old
Minogue. The album is playful, tacky and cheap( you can hear just about every big club sound from the last year or so warped into it) but its the
knowingness of it all that's a letdown. Kylie is willingly camp and silly but only on the proviso we realise she knows alot better. Like we, the
fans, don't. Thus the aforementioned "Loveboat" is just too smarmy, stretching its comedy just too far whilst the Williams duet "Kids" is all
smartarsed Robbie "doin it for the kids". Its this that grates; the take the piss attitude, doing it by numbers. Its not doing it for the enjoyment,
for the laff, nor is it for the kids. In the end, Kylie has followed her own "icon" Robbie and, whilst the album is a blast, a ride, its a hollow
one cos in the end she's doing it for the quids.
Review by Colin Crummy
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