IT was the biggest and most ambitious show of a career which spans almost 20 years.

When Kylie Minogue kicked of her greatest hits tour to an 8000- strong crowd at Glasgow's SECC last night, the statistics were enough to make your head spin.

It featured 18 top 10 hits, five costume changes and will make 22 stops before ending with a headline - and debut - appearance at the Glastonbury festival in June.

More than 40,000 fans will see her in Glasgow alone where she has sold out five nights.

The show costs pounds-5 million to put together, the art deco style stage swallowing up pounds-1m by itself, the most expensive ever built for an arena tour.

It is reported to have taken two hours to unload the 15 trucks that brought the show to the SECC, half of one of them devoted solely to feathers.

Minogue opened her sell-out Showgirl tour to an exhilarated Scottish audience the week after Neighbours celebrated its 20th anniversary, displaying how far she has come since since the grubby overalls of her days under the bonnet with Jason in Australian TV's most successful export.

The star strutted out in a pounds-30,000 John Galliano miniscule diamond-embedded bustled couture corset - which drew her waist in to a waspish 16 inches - covered in jewels which had been hand-sewn, and an extravagant matching feather head-dress in the colours of the Saltire. It was all very Moulin Rouge meets Las Vegas via the Folies Bergere.

She launched the burlesque proceedings with Better The Devil You Know, the SECC stage bathed in a blood-red light, with Kylie very much the madam of this bordello.

A circus unfolded, as she raced through On a Night Like This. Then everything went acid house, with the diminutive popstrel pumping out the gay anthem, Shocked By The Power. The crowd - kids, teenagers, mums and dads, gay, straight and in between - all shook their booties and screamed their appreciation.

When she asked them "Do you like what you see?" the answer was a resounding yes.

A rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow saw an angelic Kylie float from the ceiling perched on the crescent of a silvery moon, but the raunchy, smoky, slowed-down jazz version of the Locomotion was the highlight of the evening.

The six-part show was created and directed by Minogue's long- term creative director William Baker and choreographed by Rafael Bonachela and Michael Rooney.

The array of costumes included designs by Karl Lagerfeld and Julien McDonald.

The current tour may see Minogue hang up her hotpants to become a mother, which she says is her next goal. If so, motherhood will be the latest reinvention in a string of chameleon changes including her early alliance with Stock, Aitken and Waterman; an indie period of collaborations with bands such as the Manic Street Preachers; and latterly disco chic in which she achieved iconic status with Can't Get You Out of My Head in 2001.

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