She's back and she is truly Pop. Meet Kylie Minogue. - Gary Terratzo has her number.

I have something most right-thinking males would kill for. It is Kylie Minogue's phone number and, to paraphrase Fuzzbox, I'm gonna use it. So with trembling digits and visions of gold lame hot pants flashing across my fevered brow, I dial. It rings. I get an answering machine. "Hi, please leave a message." Beeeep. Er. I start to fumble. "Yeah, hi Kylie, this is Gary, you met me at the pub and..." Click. "Hello?"

It is Kylie Minogue, the pop star who came in from the cold to rediscover what she does best. This morning, she may just have stepped out of the shower. I sweep in with a killer question. Uh, do you like doing interviews? "Not particularly. Hahahaha. No, it's the hardest part of the job because it can be monotonous. I'm sick of hearing myself basically. There are the occasional interviews where they're after something that you're not prepared to give."

Well, quite. Kylie is asked a lot of questions other girl pop stars don't have thrown their way. Recently, these questions have concerned the now-legendary hot pants in the video for her stomping comeback single, "Spinning Around". Kylie laughs, she laughs a lot. "I admit those hot pants stole the show. Maybe they should do all my interviews instead because the response to the video seems to be 'yeah, Kylie's in it but there are these gold hot pants'".

Then there's the appearance on the cover of GQ showing off a goodly amount of her derriere. "That was a storm in a teacup", she says coolly. "The stories have been 'that's not her bottom' when in fact the cover is the photograph we took and I knew it was going to look like that but there is one picture inside the magazine where I'm doing what looks like a big serve and I had a little g-string on so when I finally got the magazine, it had disappeared. There was no great 'Oh God, I had big bloomers on and suddenly they've superimposed someone else's bottom on'. It's not that sensational."

Let's put all this behind us because what is sensational is Kylie Minogue's return to the top of the charts after the kind of absence that would force most pop stars into early retirement or even A&R. "Spinning Around" revisits Kylie's fluffy pop roots. Her years as a SAW plaything at the turn of the Nineties were not good. Remodelling herself as an indie waif with the likes of Manic Street Preacher James Dean Bradfield and Nick Cave projecting their designs onto her was not a pretty sight either and may go a way to explaining how 1998's "Impossible Princess" flopped.

"Ah, I wish it were all that simple", sighs Kylie. "There were a lot of reasons why that album didn't work and that's one of them. My personal opinion is that it wasn't cohesive enough in any way, even in the way that it was made. My record company was disintegrating and I was falling apart in that as well. But it was an excellent learning experience. If I was to live up to everything I've done before, I would be a nervous wreck. The best reviews I've ever had were for that album but it didn't sell so now I'm back doing what I do and there seems to be an overwhelming response to that."

The new album "Light Years" includes a stellar line-up of songwriters, including one Robbie Williams on a song called "Kids". There is an attractive snigger from Kylie: "Of course as soon as the papers got hold of the fact that we were working together, they said we were doing a Christmas single."

It won't be the first time Kylie has gone out on a limb. She duetted with Neil Tennant on "In Denial" on the last Pet Shop Boys album, a song about a father coming out to his daughter. A wonderful moment for both parties, it was a sign for Kylie that she had drifted far away from her former reputation as a singing budgie. "I have done different things in the past but now I've come back to what I do most naturally and what I think suits me and what people have been waiting to hear", she says, eager to talk about the new rather than the old. "This new album is so much pop disco and obviously the thing with The Pet Shop Boys and Nick Cave duets, that is the beauty of those things, you're enabled to go to a place."

She prefers to remain coy about relationships, past and present, yet has little time for those who turn her trysts into spectator sports. "Michael (Hutchence) and I didn't do anything like photo sessions together but the attention was just bound to happen. If you have two celebrities seeing each other, you both have an understanding of what to expect. It's a little less fair when it's inflicted on someone. It's a strange concept to grasp, having people wanting to know about you or writing untruths about you or just wanting to know strange little details."

Kylie's rebirth is clearly complete. She is once again the dictionary definition of pop. "People always talk about pop being in and out but pop has always been there. It's periannual, it just changes its form somewhat. At the moment, it happens to be Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and Billie. To have longevity in pop is very hard and I think it's important to move with the times."

All this, and gold lame hot pants too.

"On A Night Like This" is released on 11th September.