Describing Minogue’s enduring appeal to newcomers can feel like explaining why so many children worship Santa Claus. “She is so versatile and always plays different characters and keeps each era so different, whilst remaining the essence of Kylie,” British singer Jessie Ware says of Minogue, whom she had on her Table Manners podcast earlier this fall. “I love that, like someone similar to Dolly Parton, there is still so much mystique around her—she is an untouchable pop star with such warmth.”

As an artist, Kylie has not so much reinvented the musical wheel as she has bedazzled it and kept it spinning. Her music is sumptuous, but utterly free of frills or fuss. Her stickiest lyrics tend toward the hummable and uncomplicated (“I just can’t get you out of my head”; “Get out of my way”); their outer simplicity is the strongest, smartest suit she plays. Mingoue’s songs are agreeable, multigenerational gifts loved equally by straight dads, gay sons, and hip grandparents.

Born Kylie Ann Minogue in Australia in 1968, the international treasure says that although she spent the early years of her career building a name for herself as an actor, singing always came first in her mind. Her breakout role arrived in 1986 with the hit soap Neighbours, an Australian series that was simulcast in the U.K., where audiences embraced Minogue with the sort of overwhelming love ordinarily reserved for glamorous royalty or Paddington Bear. Her character’s wedding episode brought nearly 20 million viewers—on par with the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton 30 years later.

On the heels of soap success, Minogue signed a record deal (fellow artists on her then-label included Bananarama and Rick Astley); her first single, a joyful cover of “The Loco-Motion,” topped the Australian charts and shot her to No. 2 in the U.K and No. 3 in the U.S. A debut album (Kylie) came next, followed by a decade of albums and chart success. After a label switch, she found a home at Parlophone, which helped guide her to the most popular eras of her career with 2000’s Light Years and 2001’s Fever. Accolades flew her way; Hollywood called (Street Fighter, Moulin Rouge); and superlatives piled up (she’s the rare artist to earn first-name-only status worldwide, as well as spots on several “Hottest Women of All-Time” lists). At one particularly high point, one U.K. research group declared the Australian singer the “most powerful celebrity in Britain.”

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In 2005, Glastonbury booked her to headline, a slot she had to withdraw from one month prior to the festival after a breast cancer diagnosis at age 36. Following surgery, she successfully completed chemotherapy, and in 2007, returned to music with X, an album that presciently predated electronic music’s eventual stranglehold on pop. In total, she’s released 15 full-length albums (including this month’s Disco), eight live LPs, a bushel of compilations and EPs, countless remixes, a Christmas album, and a couple of celebratory box sets for good measure, to say nothing of her myriad world tours and global Pride performances. “I just really like the ‘work’ part of it,” she says without a hint of sarcasm. “Oh, I love it so much. It’s not the glamorous part at all that draws me. I would always rather be back in the studio again.”