I was 10 the first year she won Queen of Pop in 1976. I posted in my TV Week entry form, and again in 1977 and 78. I still remember her singing her cover of Burt Bacharach's "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" on Countdown.

Not only did she get to hang out with my crushes Daryl Braithwaite and John Paul Young, but she was exotic and sexy, and, man, did she have a voice.

It appears not a lot has changed in the four decades since.

Now 63, Hines is lighting up the stage again in Velvet, a show that's being billed as pure variety entertainment. Combining a live disco show with jaw-dropping acrobatics, Velvet promises to be quite the night out.

It still impresses Hines even after months on the road.

"There really is something for everyone," Hines says.

"I'm in the show but each night I am still taken aback with the talent … there's a lot of circus and aerial acts and I just watching how incredibly clever they are with their bodies."

Hines herself has been clever to still be performing in an industry that's not known for longevity. She puts it down to good management and a knack of being able to find ways to keep changing things up.

Since she made her stage debut at 16, in an Australian production of Hair, and then soon after as Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar, she's appeared on stage, produced several top 10 albums and made a comeback to television screens as a judge on Australian Idol.

"Australian Idol was one of the most enjoyable things I've ever done," she says. "It was seven years of being people's living rooms, it introduced me to a whole new generation of Australians and that's a nice thing."

She says the music industry is a different gig now.

"It's changed but everything changes, you can't expect things to stay the same, you're silly if you do," she says.

"The music scene that you once knew is very different to the one the kids know now. We used to buy an album and hold the album cover and swoon over the guy on the cover, you had to buy the album or the single.

"Now the kids just buy a track, or illegally download a track, it's a completely different business. You can't say it's bad, it's just the way the business has gone."

"It's the soundtrack to a lot of people's lives, isn't it?" Hines says.

"Either you lived it, or your parents played it so much when you were growing up it drove you crazy.

"It's in all the movies, so many movies, like The Martian, so many movies have chosen to use disco songs.

"I don't think disco is dead, I don't it died, it might have taken a bit of a rest somewhere along the line, but it's still alive and kicking.

"I know if I go to a party that's the music we're going to play."

She said disco has endured because "happiness is contagious", that the decades before contained some "heavy stuff", and people needed some relief.

What she thinks is interesting now is how deep disco really was. That if you listen to the lyrics, it's not all shakin' your groove thing.

"I get to sing some really great stuff in Velvet, but it's hard in the sense that every song is a money song.

"I sing 'Boogie Wonderland', geez that's a big song, and I don't take songs in that much unless I have to retain them but when I started listening to the lyrics of 'Boogie Wonderland', wow, those guys were deep.

"Disco was deep, especially Earth, Wind and Fire, they were pretty deep about what they had to say and they were astonishingly good musicians who are still very relevant today ... I'm at an age where I can look back at it with a totally different slant."

I ask her what she thinks of her early performances, if she looks back at herself, her career with that same slant.

"I'm not that performer that listens to his or herself," she says.

"If I listen to me it's probably because I have to learn something or re-learn something.

"I know my voice has changed, of course it's changed, you change and hopefully I am a better singer than I was 20 years ago."

She listens to a lot of new music, Baby Face, Alicia Keyes, Pharrell, the trumpet players Chris Botti.

"My musical tastes are incredibly eclectic," she says, "they always have been."

She says she would have liked to work with the late George Michael.

"He was such a bright light and now the world is a little darker."

Velvet is playing at The Canberra Theatre from May 3-14. Tickets from $49.