Kylie Minogue’s concerts in the Baltics

VILNIUS - Quite often the musical dinosaurs, who were popular Europe-wide some two decades ago, visit the Baltics to the joy of a nostalgic public, but this time an actual world-scale superstar, Kylie Minogue, will give her concerts in Latvia and Lithuania: in the Arena Riga on Feb. 25 and Vilnius’ Siemens Arena on Feb. 26. This means that Czech Airlines, sending its emails to the Balts promoting Minogue’s concert in Prague at the beginning of March does so in vain. Another great city of Europe, Amsterdam, will see Minogue’s concert only in the middle of March. Minogue’s Aphrodite – Les Folies Tour 2011, consisting of a 41-concert itinerary, kicked off in Denmark on Feb. 19. Riga will be Minogue’s fourth stop and Vilnius will be the fifth. The tour will take Minogue across Europe and Asia, as well as North and South America.

The tour’s title says a lot: Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty and sexuality of the ancient Greeks, while Les Folies is the plural of the word “madness” in French, and the tour’s title can be an allusion to the famous and still functioning Music Hall of Paris, Les Folies Bergere, which was opened in 1869 for shows where women’s costumes often are very scanty and erotic. Minogue is not influenced by the politically correct idiotism, and she is really not against being described as sexy. Her superb buttocks attracted a lot of the world’s attention after her appearance in her video clip Spinning Around.

Minogue says that she likes it when she is described as a sex symbol, although some time has already passed since she was born, in 1968 in Melbourne, Australia. Anyway, she weighs just 43 kilograms, probably due to some help from her 10 years younger boyfriend, Catalan model Andres Velencoso.

Minogue does not need a lot of advertising – it is enough to switch on the French MCM Top TV music channel, or any other popular music channel, and the video clip of the new Minogue song All the Lovers will appear, where crowds of women and men, dressed only in their underwear, have their sexual foreplay. Last week, Minogue’s song Higher was at No. 3, among the MCM Top 50 hits. Only the simply perfect Colombian singer Shakira, with her song Loca, and Iz, a heavyweight male singer of 343 kilos from Hawaii, who died in 1997, with his Over the Rainbow, were higher than Minogue on the chart last week. Those who have a less poppy musical taste certainly enjoy Minogue’s duet with another Aussie, Nick Cave, singing Where the Wild Roses Grow, which was recorded in 1996.

Minogue will sing her newest songs in Riga and Vilnius, such as All the Lovers and Slow, as well as her good old hits Spinning Around and Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. The stage will be in the form of a heart. It will be equipped with seven elevators, 600 lights and 30 waterfalls, which will be 30 meters high. The team which worked on the creation of this stage, has experience in creating installations in Disneyland, California. Many dancers, acrobats and musicians will take part in her concerts. Her concert, on this tour, requires 200 costumes.

There is some dispute about the origin of the name Kylie. According to one of the versions, the name originated in Australia, where a kylie is a boomerang, or a curved stick, in Noongar, an Australian Aboriginal dialect. Regardles, this boomerang will probably not come back to the Baltics very soon – so, hurry, as long as some tickets are still left.