ON THE cover of this month's GQ, Kylie Minogue is pulling up the skirt of her tennis dress, recreating the famous knickerless Athena player who used to adorn so many bedsit walls. At the same time she has a new single, Spinning Around - nothing to do with her tennis strokes - in the shops. Are these two facts unrelated? No. She is also on the cover of She (wearing a sparkly pink dress), Minx (in the same dress) and Heat (beside Robbie Williams, wearing a huge coverline suggesting they are ready to start exchanging body fluids at any moment). By the kind of happy coincidence that record companies pay good money for PR people to engineer, Spinning Around is rumoured to be selling like Kylie has not sold since Thatcher was in Number 10. It's almost certain to be the next number one. And that would certainly be good for her bottom line.

Musically, Kylie - she is one of those people who have no need for a surname - has returned to the place where she feels most comfortable, the disco floor. Spinning Around is her 27th UK single; the previous 26 have all gone top 10. Having been in showbusiness since she was nine years old - she's now 32 - Kylie has finally worked out how to make the most of what she has. "I do a number of things that work reasonably well together," she said recently. "I'm an OK actress, OK singer, OK dancer - but combine them and they work. I'm a pretty good little package."

The first time Kylie (and her excruciating perm) assaulted the charts, she was an escapee from Neighbours - a teenager from the back of the Melbourne beyonds naive enough to follow production gurus Stock, Aitken and Waterman's advice about primary colours and amusing hats. Her first single, I Should Be So Lucky, was number one in 1988, and her first album, Kylie, sold 14 million copies.

These were innocent, pre-Britney Spears days, and stardom was fast and confusing. "When I became famous - and that happened very quickly - I didn't know how famous I was, or how big a deal it was to have a number one single," Kylie has said. "I'm not Madonna. Even though she doesn't invent what she does, she has the cunning and the intelligence to pick up on other people's style so immediately that it's like she thought of it. She was surrounded by the right people. I wasn't. People growing up in New York just have a better chance of being cool than some girl growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne."

Unlike normal people, who can hide the family album and deny that they ever owned a ra-ra skirt, Kylie's bubblegum pop and fashion mistakes are part of our collective memory. "Unless you're an absolute freak you have photographs of yourself that bother you - but you can burn them, cut them up or hide them. Me, I'd like to, but I can't find a way to do it. Anyway, those old embarrassing days are so long gone now. Why waste my time thinking about it?"

This can only be a healthy attitude for someone who has grown up in public. Kylie Ann Minogue (her name comes from the Aboriginal word for boomerang) is the daughter of an accountant father and a Welsh former ballet dancer mother. She is the oldest of three: her sister Dannii is soon to become Mrs Jacques Villeneuve, while her brother, Brendan, is a cameraman. Little Kylie played the piano, flute and violin, mimed with a hairbrush in front of the mirror and had a particular thing about Olivia Newton-John in Grease (after the makeover). Yet unlike so many star-struck kids, Kylie had the connections to make her daydreams happen. Two of her uncles were cameramen and an aunt was an actress - and by the age of nine she had appeared in the long-running Australian series The Sullivans and the soap opera Skyways, beside another child actor called Jason Donovan. But it was her little sister who really took to the small screen, singing and dancing on Junior Talent Time. At school, Kylie was nothing more than "Dannii's sister".

So she left at 16, appeared in various mini-series, got herself an agent, and recorded a demo tape of disco standards to show how versatile she was. In 1986 she auditioned for a show created by Crossroads veteran Reg Watson, which needed some fresh young characters. It was called Neighbours, and Kylie went for the part of tomboy Charlene Mitchell. She got it, was reunited with Donovan, and the pair of them became stars, first in Australia and then in the UK. In 1987 their on-screen wedding was the best-watched show in the history of Australian TV.

The novelty of a daily fix of happy sun-tanned people was spiced up by the rumours that Kylie and Donovan were an item off screen as well as on. Kylie recently admitted that they were, sort of, but that it was just because work threw them together and they were friends more than anything. The studio hushed it up to preserve her virginal image.

Then Charlene drove off into the sunset to become a pop star. This was not as easy then as it is now, and Kylie was one of the first soap queens to make the transition. Michael Gudinski of rock label Mushroom heard her demo tape of The Locomotion - then forgot it again. It was not until he mentioned it to his nieces, who started hopping about as only excited 10-year-olds can, that he realised he might be on to something. Yet he also knew that a pre-teen market moppet was not his kind of property, and called in Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

Together, Kylie and SAW produced hit upon hit. She was idolised by little girls and swiftly became a camp icon too, later repaying her gay fans' devotion by appearing at Gay Pride events in London and Sydney and singing a duet with Elton John at a Stonewall benefit.

When she was 21, two things happened to Kylie. She made a record, Better The Devil You Know, complete with raunchy video and without SAW. And she started seeing INXS singer Michael Hutchence, who had been pursuing her for two years. She metamorphosed into SexKylie, rarely pictured without false eyelashes and PVC hotpants.

Her relationship with Hutchence, which lasted for 18 months and ended when he started seeing model Helena Christensen, was a defining episode of her life. "Before Michael I was a suburban girl, working in a soap opera," she has admitted. "Then it was like my blinkers were taken of. I entered the next stage of my life. He was very well- read and intelligent - witty, wild, poetic, a bit of everything. He had so much charisma."

In the post-Hutchence 1990s, Kylie became less of a chart fixture and more of a men's magazine kind of girl. Her tiny frame (she is 5ft 1in and weighs around six stones) was seen around town with Lenny Kravitz, model Zane O'Donnell and indie musician Evan Dando, and she had a two-year relationship with French photographer Stephane Sedanoui.

Her 1997 attempt at musical reinvention, which was initially titled Impossible Princess but had to be renamed when Princes Diana died, was a commercial non-event. The critics were intrigued - it saw Kylie collaborate with fan-turned-friend Nick Cave, the Manic Street Preachers and others - but the public were underwhelmed. She parted company with her record label and went home to Australia, where she found herself a big hit again. She spent 14 months on a collection of photographs (Kylie, published by Booth-Clibborn), appeared in two Australian films which are unlikely to make it to these shores - and then, for the last year, worked on her new album, Light Years, to be released in September. It features, among other musical contributors, Robbie Williams. Who is, she claims, "well fanciable".

How is the new, knowing Kylie who gives the glossies what they want - mostly stuff about Hutchence and photos of her backside - different from the old one with the spiral perm? Both are hard- working professionals who do what is required at the time - but new Kylie is doing the disco bunny thing because she wants to. Once it dawned on her that she wanted to make a poppy dance album, she wondered why it had taken her so long. She can live in Fulham and sing duets with Nick Cave until she is gasping for breath, but she has faced up to the fact that she is never going to be cool.

In fact, it was Cave who brought this revelation home. In 1996 he invited her to join him on stage at the Poetry Olympics in the Albert Hall. He wanted her to recite the lyrics to I Should Be So Lucky. "He said I should just go out there and face my past. So I went onstage and recited those lyrics and the reaction of the audience was amazing. It was such an important moment and it was different from anything I'd ever done. I was in my tracksuit pants without a scrap of make-up on, with a sticker with my name on it. It was a really cathartic moment for me. I felt like I was face-to-face with the young girl who was once me."

She is, she says, comfortable with that. She has moved on. Now - every time she passes the newsagents - she just has to come face-to- face with her bottom.