Step back in time to the Albury’s legendary Kylie show
Image: Kylie Minogue at this year's Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade. Image: file photo.
For the first time ever, the full version of the Albury Hotel’s legendary Kylie Show is now available to watch online.
YouTube user Allan Davis has uploaded a March 1993 performance of the drag show to the video sharing site, and posted the video to the Lost Gay Sydney Facebook group.
The video features all 35 minutes of the show, including encore, and stars a range of Sydney drag identities including Miss 3D, Portia Turbo and Bernina Bod.
The Kylie Show was a mainstay of the Albury in the late ’80s and ’90s, and the hotel – which was known as ‘drag queen central’ – was one of Gay Sydney’s premier venues until it closed in the year 2000.
Kylie Minogue herself has acknowledged the tribute act numerous times.
In 2014, when she appeared at the GLAAD Awards in New York City, she told the assembled crowd: “The LGBT community has really been there for me for my entire career.
“It seems like a long time ago I was in Sydney, and someone said to me, ‘Hey, there’s a Kylie drag show on tonight.’ It was at the Albury … which was the most iconic gay bar on Oxford St, the most iconic gay street in the very gay town of Sydney, Australia.”
Speaking to US music industry bible Billboard last year, Minogue said a visit to the Albury Hotel marked the first time she realised she was a gay icon.
“At the time it was the gay bar in the gay area in Sydney,” she recalled.
“I was in the car, my manager was in the car with me along with a couple of other people, and someone said: ‘There’s a Kylie night at the Albury tonight.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ I’d never heard of a Kylie night but I said, ‘We should go! We should go!’
“At the time, I’d done an ad for Coca-Cola and someone said, ‘Ooh, I think someone has gone as a Coke can,” she laughed.
“There weren’t many versions of me then, I’m talking 1989 or ’90. Now there’s tonnes of them – choose a look.”
In a post to the Lost Gay Sydney page, Glenn R Lewis (AKA Miss 3D) said the tribute show show was one of the most popular events in the history of the dearly departed venue.
“The Kylie and the [Shirley] Bassey shows were probably the most successful crowd pullers the Albury Hotel ever presented,” he wrote.
“There were actually three different Kylie shows – all very successful, especially the first one that ran for 18 months.”
The show is just one of many strands to Minogue’s long association with Sydney’s LGBT community.
The singer, songwriter and actress has performed at the official Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parties of 1994, 1998 and 2012.
She was a guest presenter of the 1998 Mardi Gras Parade telecast, and has attended the parade numerous times, most recently in March this year, when she made a surprise appearance at Taylor Square with Australian drag star Courtney Act.
The Kylie Show, Albury Hotel, Sydney, March 1993 setlist
Locomotion
What Do I Have To Do?
Things Can Only Get Better
Tears On My Pillow
Got To Be Certain
Never Too Late
Better the Devil You Know
Hand on Your Heart
I Should Be So Lucky
Shocked
Step Back In Time
I Guess I Like It Like That
Do You Dare?
What Kind of Fool?
Encore: Celebration
