Green Girl Gardener

On Friday I went to see Kylie Minogue at the Genting Arena (formerly the NEC Arena) with my sister in law. We booked these tickets way back in the dead of winter when we were being attacked by the beast from the east, and the snow was getting thicker and thicker and it was getting colder and colder, so we’d had a long time to look forward to it. She didn’t disappoint.

She was AWESOME!

I first went to see Kylie nearly twenty years ago, coincidentally at the same venue. I remember being really surprised by how good her voice was live, and twenty years later she’s still just as good.

Despite the title, she didn’t do I should be so lucky – I guess there’s only so many times you can sing what was once your signature song. She did do quite a few of her older tracks though – better the devil you know, tears on my pillow, confide in me and, of course, the locomotion, and she did quite a few from her new album, Golden.

We had reasonably good seats in block 9, which was at the back of the arena, but directly facing the stage. It’s always difficult to get good photos from a distance and with all that artificial lighting, but here are a few to give you an idea.

She had six outfit changes throughout, but I only got pics of the four above. She was really quick with her changes, someone must’ve been standing backstage with the clothes ready for her to slip them straight on. The new album  has quite a country feel to it, so there was quite a heavy cowboy influence to some of the outfits. She wore a couple of pairs of AMAZING stiletto cowboy boots and the dancers had cowboy hats and chaps on.

The lighting and screen effects were amazing. I don’t know how they get the lights to do that, but I almost felt that I could reach out and touch the strobes as they swung round towards us. Almost like you could climb on them and crawl up them to be closer to Kylie!

I really like the Genting Arena as a venue. Despite it being such a massive venue, the acoustics are really good, and shows always seem to run like clockwork. It’s generally very well organised. As you might expect with such a huge audience, you do have to queue for the bar and the ladies, but they’ve done a lot to try to ease congestion – the food and beverage stalls are cash-free which speeds up the serving time, there are dozens of toilets in each block so the loo queue moves swiftly and you can prepay for parking to save queuing at the pay stations. They also open the doors at 6pm which I guess helps to stagger entry so queues at the turnstiles are minimised.

All in all, a fantastic night.