The Bono Bonus

Lucky me, having tickets to last night's Kylie show where U2 lead and all round good guy Bono made a surprise appearance. Just as well he did, really, because it's the only thing that stuck in my head from the whole extravaganza - except for that near-naked male dancer with the dark curly hair. Not that a lot of it wasn't calculatedly fabulous, mind you, but it was half an hour too long, and no amount of ostrich feathers and stage hydrolics could disguise the thinness of the material. For two-thirds of the night I was entertained enough to think, well, Kylie sounds more like a budgie than ever but there's almost something Chinese Opera about her voice that's kinda cool. And there's a joy to her performance these days that no amount of window-dressing can swamp. But there's no depth beyond chirpiness and it palls after a while. There were a lot of old Madonna references - including a few bars from "Vogue" - and I don't think it's that wise for Kylie herself to beg the comparison. Madonna gets on a wave just before it's about to crest, but Kylie is definitely riding it in the backwash, when we've seen it all before. Ironically, it's this lack of pretension that she's anything but middle-of-the-road that gives her charm. As for the audience, it was a mixture of seven year-old girls in pink glitter, gay boys in pink glitter and middle-aged women with pink feathers in their hair. But mostly it was a sea of Kath and Kims, proving once and for all the brilliance of Jane Turner and Gina Riley in casting Kylie in series two as Epponnee-Rae.