Kylie Minogue has a very determined handshake. The pocket sex bomb – 5ft 1in and one of Australia’s biggest exports – stands up with out-of-bed hair and exerts a surprising pressure on the hand. Surprising in view of the fact that she is just about to talk about her nervous breakdowns. She has had two, the first in 1988, the second shortly after – both at the height of her popularity.

‘I don’t normally talk about them. When I think about it, it was quite amazing that I was just 20, and to have had so much stress and to have been in that kind of position, it angers me. There were so many people just thinking about themselves and really only thinking of me as a product, not a person. They’d forgotten that I had to go home to sleep and eat and to be able to think properly.’

There was a stage, she says, when she couldn’t turn on the radio or TV without hearing about or seeing herself. ‘And none of it was nice. As much as the people closest to you can say, ‘I understand’, they never can unless they’ve been in that position themselves.

‘I felt very lonely and I thought no one would understand what I was talking about. I got to a point where I couldn’t make sense of it any more. I was so mixed up and jumbled, I couldn’t even work out why I was angry.’ She says she didn’t take medication or seek psychiatric help. ‘I relied on family and friends. Normally I work and work until I fall over, and I needed someone to say, ‘You can let these people down’.’ And later: ‘For people who think that it’s easy and that I click my fingers and something happens, I would love them to to spend just a month with me and see what they think.’

It is easy to see why she feels so confused. In 1990, BBC/Smash Hits Awards voted her Worst Singer, Worst Dressed Person and Second Most Horrible Thing In The World.

How did that feel? ‘I wonder what was the first most horrible thing! Sometimes I’m voted best – sometimes worst. Oh, I don’t really know what to think.’

Can this really be the confident Charlene from Neighbours? The child-woman who made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the youngest female soloist to have had a No 1 British album; the singer who is about to release Let’s Get To It and has already sold out the first night of her October Wembley Arena tour?

Yes, indeed, but this Kylie is a woman in transition. A couple of years ago her audience would have been composed mainly of 10-12-year-olds. Now her fans have changed. She attracts more of the teenagers to mid-thirties, plus a big gay following.

The Kylie I met was getting over flu. ‘Today I feel old,’ she groans. She doesn’t really like interviews. ‘Because you’re meant to have an opinion on everything and to know yourself and be able to tell someone what you think in five seconds.’

She is vulnerable and indecisive. Ask about her character and she admits to being ‘very changeable and quite insecure’. In some ways – in terms of responsibilities – she seemed far older than her 23 years, and in others she seemed a child. Initially I found her really hard going and then I warmed to her. She’s a professional, and she really wants to be liked. She says: ‘I may not be secure or appear to be that strong, which may be partly to do with the way I am built . . . but to have lasted this long . . . If I were wimpish I would have stopped four years ago, as soon as I was getting criticism, or as soon as the workload became too much. I do have an inner confidence.’

She can’t be as stupid as her image – nobody could. Listening again to my recording of what she has said, she’s not dim-witted. Yet she presents herself as unfocused and unintelligent.

A few years back, the Press were wondering whether she was anorexic. Newspapers watched her food habits closely. One day she stood up at a Press conference, leaving behind a loaded plate of food. ‘What about all the starving Africans?’ yelled an oik from a tabloid. ‘Name two,’ she reposted. That was smart and snarly.

Today she wears black tights, a scooped T-shirt and a mauve skirt with a hem somewhere up by her knickers. She has the perfect bubblegum pop, reedy, flutey voice and a fairly enduring, dancing around, ‘showbizzy’ personality. She’s not a material girl. More of a guileless girl.

For most of the interview she reacts as if she is being interviewed by a male – all those smouldering looks and sexy body language. Now she’s putting her finger in her mouth. Now she’s cupping her head in her hand, exhaling orgasmically, and talking really slowly like some bimbo on Mogadon, with gaps between her words that are big enough to make a bed in. The whole sexy bit is an act, and she hasn’t yet learned when to switch it off. What was her childhood like? ‘Very normal,’ she says, and then goes on to say that she moved ‘about five times throughout my schooling years. Once I got so distressed and didn’t want to leave’. She says she didn’t have pushy showbiz parents – her father was an accountant. Yet she started her acting career aged 11. ‘When I was 16, I was working on TV and had a tutor on set.’ She regrets not having gone to university. What would she have read? ‘Read?’ she says, quizzically. ‘Read?’

She is the eldest of three children. Dannii, her sister, is over here singing too. One imagines sibling rivalry. ‘Not really, we are very helpful to each other. We are very different. If we were similar, that would cause a lot of problems. What she likes in clothes is probably not what I would like, so we are different enough to retain our separate identities.’ In terms of character, Kylie is most like her mother. ‘I find myself doing or saying things, and a split second later thinking, ‘My God, that was so much like my mother.’ I don’t know whether I like that or not.’ She says she feels ‘mushy’ saying it, but her family are so important to her. Who is she closest to? ‘I would say I’m Dad’s girl,’ and there’s a touch of Marilyn Monroe in the way she says it.

She is quite down to earth and wary of her superstar status. ‘I don’t like the judgments and preconceived ideas that people have. They expect you to be larger than life and live up to their every fantasy.’ She’s proud that she has forged her own identity. ‘People can only manufacture you to a point.’

Does she think she deserves to be a superstar? ‘There’s a bit of accident and luck. For every superstar – I don’t really like calling myself that – there are probably 1,000, I mean 100, well maybe 20 people who could do the job just as well.’

She finds it ‘a bit frightening’ – the idea that there are millions of homes playing her voice. She says she doesn’t know what it is that makes her famous. ‘I prefer not to know – if I were aware of it, there’s a good chance I would mess it up.

‘It’s scary that you’re only as good as your next single or video. And you feel insecure because you’re not sure whether you’re impressing this person or that. I’m certainly not my ideal physically. I won’t say what I’d like to be. Part of my job is about trying to cover up those insecurities.’ Trying to be someone she’s not, perhaps. And is she sexy? ‘I’m sexual. I’ve never said – thank God – that I’m sexy or raunchy or anything.’ The love affair is over with INXS singer Michael Hutchence, the man who has gone on record saying he’d taken drugs, experimented with heroin, and would like to have sex all day. The tabloid common sense is that he inspired all the changes in her life, turning Ms Clean into Ms Raunchy. ‘It annoys me that people think that it was just because of him.’

She has a new boyfriend but is reluctant to talk about him. ‘It’s nice and old fashioned.’ Does she have problems with intimacy and maintaining a long-term relationship? ‘I think relationships are difficult, because you have to work at them. And I’m travelling so much. But I’m not bad at them.’ Her ideal man – ‘I hate this question’ – would have to be ‘sincere, intelligent, compassionate, artistic and romantic’.

‘The only certainty about my future is that I want to have a family.’ Ask her about her ambition, and she says when she’s no longer performing, she will be doing some sort of business. She doesn’t know what. ‘I definitely wouldn’t do nothing. That would drive me insane.’ But she could do nothing? ‘I could do nothing – but I couldn’t do nothing and live it up. Maybe if I worked a bit longer I could do nothing and anything I wanted.’ She’s not short of a bob or two. Quite rightly, she says the amount is none of my business. But she admits she’s fairly comfortable for a 23-year-old. ‘Sometimes I would like to be quite frivolous with money, but it’s not really in me. I prefer to be sensible and realise this could end at any time. Money means security to me.

‘In some ways, the more you have the more difficult it gets. Sometimes I’m really envious of friends of mine who have a very simple life.’ What sort of simple life does she yearn? ‘Ooh, er, travelling around the world with a back-pack. Responsibilities drive me crazy sometimes. I guess my decisions can affect a lot of people. It’s like the top of a pyramid and all these people don’t exactly rely on me but want me to make decisions that are best for them, probably more so than what is best for me. I just don’t like having to make decisions. I’m very indecisive.’