The word on the web — from bloggers who have been comparing notes since the KylieX2008 tour kicked off in Paris in May — was that this show was, by her extravagant standards, a muted affair. The costumes, the choreography, even her singing, were all felt to be a little below par. Maybe the citizens of Belfast, the first stop on Kylie’s UK tour, don’t set much store by online gossip; or perhaps not having seen the recent Showgirl and Fever tours, or indeed witnessed any live headline performance by Kylie Minogue in their city since 1990, they were simply delighted to welcome her back. Either way, the 12,000 mainly female fans packed into the Odyssey Arena last Sunday were having such a raucously good time that, towards the end of her 2½-hour show, Minogue had to ask them to “calm down” to make way for a rare rendition of one of her older, more reflective numbers, Step Back in Time.

This request had no effect whatsoever, of course, but it did highlight a nagging sense that, now 40 and a shade stouter after her recent battle with breast cancer, Kylie might, just might, be finding her role as a disco show queen more onerous than she once did. Her entrance, suspended in a silver wheel 10ft above the stage, wasn’t as spectacular as previous aerial stunts; and although she managed eight lightning-fast costume changes in the course of her performance — which variously styled her as a cheerleader, a sailor, some kind of Japanese zany with what looked like a bowl of fruit upended on her head and, most bafflingly, a party girl seated on a giant gold skull — you felt a growing distance between Minogue and her elaborate masks.

She seemed more comfortable strolling around the front of the stage than she did cavorting with her costumed dancers. The images flashed across the imposing video screens at the back of the stage likewise suggested that she felt happier delegating her show’s visual impact to technology than focusing it upon herself.

If the bloggers were broadly right about the above, however, they were wrong about Kylie’s vocal performance. At the points in the concert where she really sang — as opposed to joining in chorally with her three backing singers — she sounded more impressive than ever. When she dispensed with the visual trickery and performed Flower and I Believe in You, alone on the stage, she suddenly seemed like a different, more mature Kylie than the supermarket-own-brand Madonna who made her big pop debut 20 years ago with the Stock Aitken Waterman production I Should Be So Lucky. Therein, perhaps, lies her problem for the future. The riotous, arms-in-the-air response accorded to Lucky and the rest of the pulsing disco anthems that bulked out the show indicated that her fans — or the Belfast contingent, anyway — love the Kylie Minogue they know better than the one she might prefer to be. If so, she won’t be the first or last pop icon to end up a captive of her audience.

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