She’s tiny, a little doll with porcelain skin, man-size front teeth and a pink cardigan. Yet right now, 33-year-old Kylie Minogue is the most popular female singer in the world — except in the United States and North Korea.

That’s about to change, although maybe not in Pyongyang. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” this year’s fluffiest musical delight, has given Minogue a third career renaissance. Little wonder that, like Britney, Janet, Whitney and Mariah over here, Kylie is a one-name brand across the Atlantic. Even Madonna, the most famous of all one-name brands, has taken to wearing kylie T-shirts onstage.

“I don’t know why there’s this reservoir of affection for me,” she squeaks, settling herself down in a room in one of London’s swankiest hotel, all traces of her native Melbourne, Australia, accent long extinguished. “If you discover what the X factor is, please don’t tell me. I’ll only mess it up.”

Success in America has always been a more difficult proposition. Back in 1988, when she was just 20 and about to escape from her role on the Australian soap opera Neighbours, “I Should Be So Lucky” topped the charts of 14 nations and sneaked to number 28 in the United States. A few months later, her cover of Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” hit number 3 here. Then Kylie Minogue and America went their separate ways. Now, with the aid of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” the U.S. has a second opportunity to embrace this perfectly packaged pop star.

“I’m pretty good all around,” she trills. “No one thing stands out. I’ve struggled with this over the years, but I should give myself a break.”

In Europe, Minogue’s appeal spans many demographics. Women like her; gay men form the bedrock of her support and adore her innate sense of camp; straight men lust after her like slack-jawed fools. In fact, Minogue’s latest elevation to sex-icon status came after the publication of a bare-bottomed photo spread in the British edition of GQ.

“If I were ugly, I wouldn’t be sitting here now with you,” she concedes. “I can scrub up OK, I can be sexy in a video, I can be glamorous at a premiere, but I’m an absolute klutz most of the time at home, and people are somehow aware of that. I don’t resent being lusted after, but it makes me feel odd sometimes. If we were having our cup of tea after waking up in the morning, it wouldn’t be lust; it would be more ‘She’s a good chick.’ ”

“Good chick” isn’t far off the mark, but beneath her dizzy, actressy exterior beats a more calculating heart.

“I’m very slight,” she says, “but I have a quiet determination. I feel like an impostor sometimes. Things come easy to me, but the payback is what I’ve put up with over the years. I know the planets shine on me, though.”

Her thespian career long on the back burner, she’s been busy in the 14 years since her 1988 breakthrough. In the early ’90s, spurred on by an affair with INXS’s Michael Hutchence and in “my period of sexual awakening,” she dropped her frumpy schoolgirl-next-door threads and emerged, chrysalis-like, as a diminutive siren.

“The only thing I could get my mitts on was my image,” she says. “I was rebelling. Suddenly it was hot pants, PVC lashes, big hair and fishnets. I wanted to be a little more mature and appeal to a different audience.”

Still, in 1992, she decided to flee London’s PWL Records hit factory, where she had sung songs written (save covers like “The Loco-Motion”), produced, arranged and played by dance-pop CEOs Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman.

“I have no shame in admitting I was a puppet, but I didn’t know anything about the business,” she remembers. “They weren’t so interested in nurturing an artist, which was fair enough; that’s the way they did things. It was literally ‘Go make yourself a cup of tea; we’ll call you when we’re ready.’ ”

Reinvented as an icon of glamour, Minogue kept the dance hits coming, but she earned her rock spurs in the ’90s duetting with Nick Cave and then-popular Brits Manic Street Preachers. She even bared her lyrical soul on 1998’s Kylie Minogue, an album written in the wake of Hutchence’s death. The record, alas, didn’t even warrant an American release. Europeans deserted her in droves, and by late 1998, she was advertising cheap underwear on London subway billboards.

But a new century brought a new record deal and a new Kylie Minogue, looking more conventionally sexy and sounding as though she had reached her inevitable destiny as the Queen of Europop. This new, all-conquering Minogue even moved upmarket in underwear sponsorship, modeling lingerie for hip retailer Agent Provocateur (see sidebar) and developing her Love Kylie line in Australia.

Still, despite the recent flush of success, she would never have tried to crack America again if not for “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” a song so irresistible that it hit number 1 throughout Western Europe. Minogue, like virtually everyone who’s heard the song, was immediately besotted.

“It put me under a spell halfway through my first listen,” she says. “It’s perfect. There is justice in the world that what is virtually a demo, with spit and polish, can do so well. God, my videos cost a zillion times more than that track did.”

“Can’t Get You Out of My Head” and its parent album, Fever, have America buzzing over Kylie Minogue once again. The singer, however, approaches our shores cautiously.

“I really don’t want to spend a year explaining to people how I say my name [radio DJs, take note: It’s pronounced min-ohg] and that I started in a soap. I’ve been talking about it too long. I don’t want to do the Midwestern slog in some two-bit station in the middle of nowhere. I would rather put pins in my eyes.”

You don’t care, do you?

“I’m intrigued, not desperate. I’m 33. I’m reaching a point in my life where I’m starting to think about pursuing other interests. But now that the song is starting to take off, it would be rude of me not to go and see what happens. If it happens, I think I would be really pleased, but I’m still not entirely sure.”

The World’s Sexiest Ad!
Our not-at-all-gratuitous guide to Kylie’s Europe-only movie trailer for hip British lingerie firm Agent Provocateur

1 To prove that Agent Provocateur makes the “world’s sexiest lingerie,” Kylie strips down to her skivvies. See, science can be fun!

2 Hey, don’t blame us! This is a lingerie ad, for Chrissakes! The director had a choice of 2,791 angles on this shot. We think he chose wisely.

3 Using traditional underwear-testing techniques, Kylie mounts a mechanical bull to gauge the elasticity of her bra.

4 Too late: Kylie remembers her chiropractor’s list of do’s and don’ts.

By Thomas Beller