Kylie Minogue. If her newly released 15th album, Disco, beats Little Mix’s Confetti to No 1 next week, she will be the first female artist to top the UK album chart in five consecutive decades, a feat only previously achieved by Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Paul Weller. “I’m so glad I didn’t know that when I was making this album,” she says, her still thoroughly Australian accent expressing real relief. “I would have felt the pressure.”It is a Friday afternoon in mid-October, and we are in a London photo studio, where Minogue has just finished an intensive two-hour, four-outfit shoot (this counts as elite-level efficiency, the Guardian’s photographer tells me).