When Aussie pop star Kylie Minogue performs at Manchester’s Gorrilla tonight it will be a homecoming of sorts.

For it was arguably Manchester which made Kylie cool, providing her with the credible music career which followed her stints as a soap opera star and performer of cheesy pop.

Of course we shouldn’t totally dismiss the contribution made to Kylie’s musical career by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, who plucked her from the small screen and gave her hit after hit, starting with the seminal I Should Be So Lucky.

SAW – who had a Manchester base – gave Kylie more than 20 hits.

However, it wasn’t until she started working with Hacienda DJ Mike Pickering’s Deconstruction dance label that Kylie became known as a cool and credible artist.

Writing in his book Words & Music: A History of Pop In The Shape of a City, music journalist Paul Morley notes: “She was born again. She was on a cooler label, the Deconstruction dance label engineered by Mancunian Hacienda DJ/M People mastermind Mike Pickering, and there was a hipper appreciation of how the Minogue phenomenon could be better exploited in clubs – not as disco music, in the seedy SAW sense, but as dance music, in the abstract, gay-meets-world, rave-meets-night, light-meets-dark way.”