In 1987 Stock Aitken & Waterman's production savvy, coupled with twice daily slots for the UK's favourite soap, Neighbours, helped propel Kylie Minogue's debut album, Kylie! to No.1 in the UK charts with sales of 2m copies. Fast forward to 1998 and a fallow period for our diminutive diva. She was without a record label having marked the intervening years with brave but uncommercial career directions including an album%u2019s worth of indie material written with the Manic Street Preachers?! Kylie%u2019s audience were bewildered.

Then in September 2000 along came a pair of gold hotpants, as worn by Kylie in the video to her No.1 comeback single, Spinning Around. Kylie's buttock-hugging satin shorts were the most photographed pop fashion item of the last 25 years and helped complete her transformation from soap actress-cum pop singer to global icon. In 2004, shortly before her 36th birthday, Kylie announced the hotpants had been put into retirement. Cue sounds of mass sobbing from young male admirers across the world...

Kylie was born on May 28, 1968, in Melbourne. In 1979, she began her acting career in the Australian TV drama series Skyways, eventually gaining a starring role in a children's series, The Henderson Kids, before achieving national fame in the daily TV soap opera Neighbours. Once she was firmly esconced in Australia's affections as grease monkey Charlene Ramsay, she appeared at a benefit gig where she sang Little Eva's Loco-Motion. It was swiftly released on Mushroom Records and became the biggest-selling Australian single of the decade.

British hitmakers, producers Stock Aitken & Waterman, already had a business relationship with Mushroom and were chosen to write a hit single for Kylie. But when Kylie turned up at SAW's South London studios, the trio had forgotten she was coming. But they quickly knocked off a song for her while she waited. The result, I Should Be So Lucky, gave Minogue her first UK No.1 single. During the next couple of years, with SAW at the helm, Kylie became the popstrel it was OK to like with hits including Shocked, What Do I Have To Do and Better The Devil You Know.

Combined with Kylie's changing image, which went from Australian ingenue to adult sophisticate, she soon dumped boyfriend and Neighbours co-star Jason Donovan in favour of the bad boy of rock, INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. "I think she wanted to change. Going with Michael Hutchence was the change," said Pete Waterman who feared that Hutchence's influence would turn her into a fully fledged rock chick.

By 1992 Kylie was being courted by the likes of Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, who memorably asked her: "How do you feel about people masturbating over photographs of you?" (She replied: "If I give them some joy then I'm happy.") Meanwhile the Manics approached her (unsuccessfully) to sing on their track, Little Baby Nothing. In the same year Kylie's PWL contract came to end and it wasn't renewed. "I was aware that I didn't feel right," Kylie told Q magazine. %u201CPWL was a hit factory but I was starting to comprehend that people like Primal Scream a) knew who I was and b) had and opinion and that it was mostly good. My world just opened up."

Kylie switched her allegiance to the burgenoning dance label, deConstruction, an offshoot of the BMG label. Mooted collaborations with Primal Scream, KLF and even an offering from Prince came to nothing. In the end, dance duo Brothers in Rhythm were drafted in for Kylie's eponymous, new label debut. With an image recraft, a sober, arty black & white cover, Kylie's first single from the album, Confide In Me, reached No.2 in the UK charts. But it would be her last appearance on TOTP for five years. It was a period of artistic rather than commercial growth for the Oz princess. Hits and misses came in equal measure. She dabbled with the avant garde, miming naked in an arty short film by British artist Sam Taylor-Wood and went Goth for her duet with Nick Cave on 1995's Where The Wild Roses Grow. Meanwhile her film choices seemed odd. She appeared opposite the muscles from Brussels Jean Claude Van Damme in 1994's Streetfighter and opposite Californian surf goon Pauly Shore in 1996's Bio-Dome. "I've never even seen it," giggles Kyles.

Kylie's next album with deConstruction had the title of Impossible Princess. Co-inciding tragically with the the death of Princess Diana in September 1997, the album's release was delayed for five months. Penned by Kylie with the help of the Manics' James Dean Bradfield, the first single from the album was the catchy but poorly received Some Kind Of Bliss. But the public were unconvinced and the single stiffed at No.22 in the UK charts. The album, re-christened simply Kylie Minogue, didn't fare any better, Kylie's new mood and tunes proved too dark for her gay army and happy-go-lucky shop girl fans. Minogue left deConstruction in 1998. Now without a record label, Kylie was picked up by Parlophophone Records. "People at other labels were surprised we'd signed Kylie," said Parlophone's Head of A&R Miles Leonard. "I think a lot of people felt her career was over."

Together with the label, Kylie set about returning to her pop roots. The finished result was the Light Years album and the album's lead-off single, the stomping, disco-tastic Spinning Around. Penned by Paula Abdul and complete with those dazzling gold hotpants in the video, the single shot to No.1 in the UK giving Kylie her fourth No.1 record. (The only female artist to have had more UK No.1's is Madonna.) The album was slick and upbeat with plenty of kitsch (the over the top campness of Your Disco Needs You a case in point) and featured a breezy collaboration with Robbie Williams on Kids. The album went on to sell 350,000 copies. Kylie was back!

In October 2000 Kylie began work on her follow up album, Fever. Hit machine songwriter Cathy Dennis together with Rob Davis delivered the chart topping Can't Get You Out Of My Head, a song which would keep Victoria Beckham's comeback single, Out Of Your Mind, from the top spot. The success of the single in the UK and, for the first time, in America, helped to turn Kylie into an icon rather than just a pop singer. A lavish coffee table tome, entitled Kylie, also added to Kylie's iconic status as celebs ranging from Bono to Clive James described Kylie's importance to their lives.

Despite her personal evolution and her fame, Kylie retained a sense of girl-next-door appeal to the public at large. When her boyfriend James Gooding split from her in 2001 after cheating on her, the nation felt her pain. (she is now dating French actor Olivier Martinez). In 2005 when it was announced that Kylie had undergone surgery for breast cancer, the news made tabloid headlines for days. In typical Kylie fashion, the star herself refused to whine or complain about her lot although prophetically in 2002 she told one interviewer. "Gay icons usually have some tragedy in their lives. But I've only had tragic haircuts and outfits."

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