Kylie Minogue’s famously petite feet followed in the footsteps of some pretty big names this week – Ella Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Bob Dylan and Robert Redford – as she received France’s highest cultural honour, the Order of Arts and Letters. Paris in the springtime loves Kylie, and the feeling has long been mutual. This was the city she decided to make her home in the months after her breast cancer was diagnosed. Twenty-four hours before this opening night of her world tour, Caroline Albanel, the French Culture Minister, declared that the singer was a “Midas of the international music scene who turns everything she touches into gold”.

The truth of Ms Albanel’s observation has yet to manifest itself in the fortunes of X, the album that this tour is meant to promote. Such creative misjudgments might have shunted lesser artists into the sidings, but the iconic status earned long ago by Kylie means that her pulling power cannot be gauged by record sales alone. Far from abashed by X’s sales, she emerged to Speakerphone – one of its most irksomely affected meta-pop tunes – suspended above the stage amid green wires in a gold hoop. Stepping forward from within a gold, moulded dress, the manner of her arrival was so exquisite that she might as well have been singing that day’s Nasdaq index. By starting her tour at the birthplace of cabaret, you rather suspected that Kylie would put together a show that leant heavily on it. But, perhaps conscious that she would have struggled to emulate the opulence of last year’s Showgirl tour, most of what followed leant in the opposite direction.

For much of the evening Kylie negotiated the vast space alone. True, there were the dancers attired as camp American footballers for Heartbeat Rock while the stage revealed itself to be a video screen bedecked in stars and stripes. Uncomfortable memories of Toni Basil’s Mickey were cast aside only when the music improved and the stage – for reasons known only to people who design this stuff – turned into a huge test card. Into My Arms seemed to unlock a fervour from Kylie’s muscular army of shaven-headed male couples. From the stands, the floor suddenly resembled a huge vibrating plate of beans on toast.

Going from a cappella to souped-up electropop barnstormer, Step Back In Time saw Kylie’s dance troupe seemingly reinvented as a gang of shell-suited Securicor men. Like A Drug, probably the best of the recent songs, benefited from yet another dramatic aerial display. Bedecked in red, draped over a silver skull, she delivered the song with an impressively predatory zeal.

There were brand new songs, too. Their presence suggested an awareness that perhaps the tunes from X wouldn’t quite cut it unaided. A strident power ballad, Flower, was easily the most traditional-sounding thing she has put her name to in many a year – and, oddly, it reminded you just how powerful she is when projecting plaintive vulnerability. Sometime Samurai, opening a Japanese-themed phase of the show, revealed the singer in a Kimono-style dress as petals rained down on her. But as the song modulated into Nu-Di-Ty, with its prurient images of naked Japanese women, you again wondered whether those around Kylie had any sense of what her real strengths were.

Sometimes, the best ideas are the most obvious ones. There was little that you could call edgy about the volley of Love Boat and Copacabana in which Kylie was surrounded by dancers dressed as sailors. But it’s doubtful that a soul complained.

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