From girl next door to Nashville pop princess, Kylie Minogue has spent 30 years surviving and thriving in the music business.
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As she approaches her milestone 50th birthday on Monday, the Melbourne-born pop star has had one of her most successful years to date.
Her 14th album, Golden, has become her sixth chart-topper in the UK, a place she's called home since the early 1990s and a country that's embraced her since her days as a TV soap star on Neighbours.
A career of this length could never have been predicted when she released The Locomotion in 1987.
Minogue's cover of the Little Eva hit gave her a first taste of pop success, and she was quickly enveloped into the British hit-making factory that was Stock Aitken & Waterman.
The songwriting trio wrote her follow-up single, I Should Be So Lucky, and by the time she was 20 Minogue had two number one singles under her belt.
"I love the moment of first hearing Locomotion on the radio," Minogue told Vogue Australia's May issue.
The singer recalls she was gathered around the radio with her family at the time.
"They said : 'We've got a new song in at number one... Locomotion,' and we were just like: 'Ahhh!'."
While the 90s were pure pop for Minogue, she truly found her groove in the 2000s.
After a few years languishing at the back-end of the charts, she released the disco-flavoured Spinning Around and danced in a pair of thrift-shop, gold hotpants, to become a chart-topping force to be reckoned with.
The synth-pop infused Can't Get You Out Of My Head came a year later and became her biggest hit to date.
However while Minogue has enjoyed enormous success on the music charts and collected a string of awards from the BRITs, ARIAs, and MTV along the way, there has been some personal pain too.
She's battled breast cancer and endured several high-profile relationship break-ups over the years, including her recent engagement with British actor Joshua Sasse which ended in 2017.
But Minogue wasn't prepared to just slink off into the night with a broken heart.
Instead, she poured her pain into a new, country-pop album, Golden, written in the home of country music, Nashville.
"I don't know where the year's gone. I think I was in studios for most of it and I really am feeling better than I have in such a long time," she told Vogue.
Minogue recently returned to work with Australian music mogul Michael Gudinski's Mushroom Group, a move that thrilled her long-time friend.
"To think she's doing it better than ever at 50! What she's achieved is almost unparalleled in this business," Gudinski told AAP as he prepared to fly to the UK to join Minogue's 50th birthday celebrations.
Gudinski, who signed Minogue when she was just 18, says he's proud of her success and attributes it all to her ability to re-invent herself as a pop artist, as well as create spectacular live shows.
"She never really sat back as Kylie. There's been different adaptations. She's been very, very smart because pop artists don't usually maintain such long careers," Gudinski said.
"She's absolutely Australia's greatest export. She is really like royalty in England.
"I think this renewed uplift in her career is going to bring much more. It's like we've only just begun phase four or five."
Former Countdown host Molly Meldrum is also full of praise for Minogue.
"I should be so lucky, so very lucky to have met Kylie while working on Neighbours together and she has been a great friend since," he told AAP.
Gudinski, whose Frontier Touring company has always been her promoter in Australia and New Zealand, hopes to entice Minogue and her Golden Tour - her first in three years - Down Under in 2019.
"I'm sure we'll get her back in the first few months of next year," Gudinski said.
"She's become renowned as one of the best live touring acts in the world. She's really taken musical theatre on the road.
"So really, she's the ultimate show girl."
Australian Associated Press
