Kylie is notoriously private. After an hour and 15 minutes, I ask the burning question

“I’m definitely getting pickier,” she says. So, what’s off the table, from a relationships point of view?

You could hear a pin drop,” Kylie Minogue says about the point, in episode two, when she starts crying about the impact her former boyfriend, INXS singer Michael Hutchence, had on her. “I’m like, I know I’m going to cry at some point in this goddamn documentary. When’s the point going to be? But I also knew that I was holding on to a lot of stuff.”

This month, Netflix released a new three-part documentary, simply titled Kylie, exploring the life and times of one of the world’s most enduring (and media-shy) pop stars; the singer behind era-defining tracks such as I Should Be So Lucky, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Spinning Around and, more recently, Padam Padam.

It’s a triumph; an intimate and affecting tale of an intensely private star, which spans her earliest teenage years as an actress in Neighbours to her incipient pop stardom, global fame, her various stylistic reinventions, her love affairs (notably with her Neighbours co-star Jason Donovan, followed by Hutchence), her initial breast cancer diagnosis in 2005 and, ultimately, the woman she is today.

Above all, it is a moving portrait of a 58-year-old woman that differs from the sort of PR-driven style of documentary content we have become accustomed to of late. Here is Minogue not so much as you’ve never seen her before, but Minogue the person she has chosen not to show us before.

We meet over Zoom, and while I wait for her to appear on screen from her home town of Melbourne, I hear lots of shuffling and groaning in the background. “Urrgggh, am I on?” she says, finally popping up wearing a white baseball cap, a black sleeveless T-shirt and a white oversized Chanel cardigan. “I had to get on my iPhone. Trust me, it’s easier this way. I couldn’t put you through the hassle of me trying to connect on to my laptop. We’ve all got lives to live.”

Her team had warned me in advance that Minogue likes her interviews short, 20 to 30 minutes max. Determined to break that rule, I try to put her at ease. Guess what, I say, we’ve got three things in common. “Oooh what?” Well, I used to live on the same street as you during the ’90s and early noughties. “Shut up!” she says, screaming. “I’ve got such good memories of that time. What are the others?” I’m 5 foot 1, too. We both agree life is better in heels. “But I have recently succumbed to the trainer,” she adds, rolling her eyes. “And what’s the third?” Well, we’ve both had cancer. “Oh,” she says. She asks when I was diagnosed, but then quickly retreats b