Editor’s Note: The Albumism staff has selected what we believe to be the 50 Greatest Live Albums of All Time, representing a varied cross-section of genres, styles and time periods. Click “Next Album” below to explore each album or view the full album index here.
KYLIE MINOGUE | Intimate and Live
BMG/Mushroom/Warner Vision (1998)
Selected by Quentin Harrison
Australian songbird Kylie Minogue's first live album—Intimate and Live—was an aural time capsule for her fifth tour of the same name. Prior to this concert, Minogue's past live shows had stopped at charming and competent. The intention with the “Intimate and Live” performances was to put the emphasis on Minogue as a live vocalist and performer—she exceeded any and all expectations.
The ambitious double-album companion became a living record of history, capturing an engaged and empowered Minogue at a career crossroads. At the time, she had just come off of her most artistically enterprising stretch of albums—Kylie Minogue (1994) and Impossible Princess (1997)—for the deConstruction and Mushroom labels.
A considerable portion of the material present on Intimate and Live is collected from these two sets, but Minogue makes room for her earlier Stock-Aitken-Waterman hits too. All of the music is vividly reimagined in this live environment—courtesy of the concert's music director Steve Anderson, also one-half of Brothers and Rhythm—in a wealth of genre flavors from punk to disco.
Of course, all of this lands successfully due to Minogue's own confidence as a singer; she had grown by leaps and bounds in that part of her craft. Intimate and Live caps off Minogue's rewarding deConstruction epoch on a high and points to lessons learned and later applied in the next phase of an already incredible recording journey.
