BY definition, pop should snap, crackle and pop. It isn’t meant to last. And yet Neighbours starlet Kylie Minogue, who had a debut number one with I Should Be So Lucky in January 1988, is still making pretty, if less innocent pop 26 years later.

Why should she be so lucky, lucky – breast cancer aside – to have achieved such longevity when others have fallen by the wayside? Kylie has come through the “wayward” Michael Hutchence and Nick Cave initiation years, the experimental phases of Confide In Me and the Manic Street Preachers –produced The Impossible Princess, and the blip of the Deconstruction detour, but Kylie always returns to her pink showgirl default position. Her success keeps on spinning around again because she never strays too far or for too long, and she has a canny sense of timing, pepping up BBC1’s The Voice this season before already announcing she will leave after only one series.

Every English paper’s favourite ex-pat Aussie is 45 but, unlike the harsher, harder Madonna, her voice is still going on 20, 21, 22, sounding as little girl in tone as Marilyn Monroe once did, and not by coincidence, she references the later Norma Jean on bonus track Mr President, one of many kittenish numbers on Kiss Me Once. The pop-funk of Sexy Love, dubstep single-in-waiting Sexercise and fancy French fondant Les Sex do exactly what they say on the tin, but you would find more steam in a sauna.

Aligning herself with Jay Z’s Roc Nation management elicits a better strike rate from Kylie than on the X or Aphrodite albums, typified by the disco rush of Into The Blue, but her Beautiful duet with Enrique Iglesias lacks chemistry and it is left to 2014’s alchemist of the year, Pharrell Williams, to mine new Kylie gold on the retro I Was Gonna Cancel. Will you play Kiss Me Once more than once? All of it, no, but as ever, there is just enough to keep Minogue in the moment.