Kylie Minogue brings her Kiss Me Once tour to Dublin tonight, and I will be there, as will confetti-firing cannons, crystal-studded scarlet headpieces and an amphitheatre glowing with people who understand the magnificence of Your Disco Needs You.
For the 1980s children in the audience, the ones old enough to remember Smash Hits, the show designers have resurrected the bubble bath from the video to I Should Be So Lucky – amazingly, almost 27 years later, the water is still hot.
They have also incorporated what looks like an inflatable version of the Mae West Lips Sofa for Kylie to kick back her heels on, and so a seamless link is drawn from the Stock Aitken Waterman production line to Salvador Dalí.
This is routine, no-complication staging as far as the arena circuit goes: pop is even more practised at paying homage to the surreal than it is at being surreal in its own right.
At this point in her career Kylie could be forgiven for settling for a life of offstage bubble baths and occasional ventures into television studios to give guarded encouragement to talent-competition contestants.
Instead the singer whom Clive James, his eyes twinkling at 180mph, named Woman of the Decade in 1989, has once again trained herself to withstand the athletic rigours of performing a two-hour set list of helium-pop classics while imprisoned in heavy corsetry.
She is sometimes labelled robotic, which is less an accusation than an accurate description of the target aesthetic.
To complement her vocal exercises in synthpop she packs her videos with android dancers helmeted in coloured plastic and clad in wipe-clean fabrics.
Her stylist, William "never trust a stylist" Baker, once listed his biggest influences as Hollywood glamour, pink- feathered showgirls, Blake's 7 and Doctor Who.
Detours into Grecian drapery aside, this combination of burlesque and science fiction still forms Team Kylie’s visual default.
So when deep-feeling detractors complain that she is too cybernetic for their sensibilities, what they really mean is that when she channelled the gynoid from Fritz Lang's Metropolis via a Jean Paul Gaultier mirrored leotard, it did nothing for them as a look.
Messy confessionals
When heartfelt conscious uncouplings and other messy media confessionals are so common it can seem unnerving that Kylie so successfully keeps her private life encased beneath a professional mask.
It’s not that nothing of interest has happened to her – plenty has. It’s that she never seems to let being famous get the better of her, ever.
A recent Australian television interview in which she spoke about her relationship with Michael Hutchence, the late INXS frontman, was emotional, but it was far from the breakdown it was dubbed.
Memories of Hutchence are now a part of the act: ticket-holders to the 3Arena concert can expect a cover of INXS's 1987 hit Need You Tonight performed in a black PVC trench-coat costume. At another point she quick-changes into a version of a sequinned noughts-and-crosses minidress she was once photographed wearing while on Hutchence's arm.
For the most part, though, Kylie keeps herself out of her music and lets others write her lines, almost as if she’s an actor or something.
It’s hard to believe now, but people used to waste time liking Kylie ironically. I’ll put my hand on my heart and say that no irony’s involved in this fandom, but some politics do creep in.
Because Kylie, someone whom young girls liked, was once considered embarrassingly uncool. She was the girl next door, but the girls next door had learned to hide their cassettes.
Correlation is not causation, they say, and it certainly didn't help that Stock Aitken Waterman songs, as Bob Stanley wrote in his pop-music history Yeah Yeah Yeah, so often sounded like they were "recorded on keyboards that had come out of a Christmas cracker".
Yet even in 2014 “things that girls love” fall through the cracks of “cool” with the ease of a little baby sister doing the loco-motion.
She cringed herself for a while, but worked hard, secured gay-icon status and dabbled in the avant-garde, wandering around Tokyo in a kimono declaring herself to be a typeface called German Bold Italic. Who can argue with that?
She has played a suburban mechanic, a cosmic waitress and, on stage, a cabaret artiste.
If it all seems a bit industrial, then so much the better. Why coast on desperation when you can sustain yourself through hard graft?
Tonight everyone who pays to get into Kiss Me Once will be dancing while, in her glittering office, Kylie clocks in for another shift.
Shane Hegarty is away