Kim Wilde - Like a true nature's child

She was the most successful British female artist of the 80s, notching up a string of hits including `Kids in America', `Chequered Love' and `You Came'. From the Princess of Pop to the Queen of Crops, Gary Ryan goes Ground Force Zero with the legendary Kim Wilde.

It's been twenty-one - go on, count them - years since Kim Wilde first came to the fore with `Kids in America', pouting like each lip-synched breath depended upon it. Bee stung lips, blonde hair . . . Kim wasn't just a sex symbol; she was ejaculation made flesh. Her distinctive kittenish purr secured her a constant stream of hits in the 80s including - see if you can hum along - `Cambodia', `View from a Bridge', `Four Letter Word' and `You Keep Me Hangin' On'. And then, in 1996, Kim did a Richey Manic and disappeared out of public life.

But if Kim was going to carve anything into her silky arms, it would be `I HEART MR FOTHERGILL'. Kim - stop sniggering at the back - is fanatical about gardening. Can't get enough of it, in fact. Brambles, rakes, seed catalogues . . . Oh Kim! This is not the behaviour of a pop icon. The only time pop digs something out of the ground is when they need to galvanise Cher for a new album. Or have to retrieve `a birthday gift' from Jim Morrisson's coffin. Nevertheless, Kim's loves getting back to nature, and has just returned from Thailand, where she has been filming Celebrity Detox Camp for Five.

The ringtone on my mobile phone goes - not `Kids in America', alas. The caller display reads `KIM WILDE.' Right, right . . . just avoid any conversation about flowers. The height of my gardening ability is spraying a can of Haze, you see. Maybe we can talk about Prince's `Purple Rain' instead, and if it's good for the garden. Crop rock, if you like.

Mind you, I can't help thinking this gardening lark is merely a front. Yep, Kim's actually engaged in a mass cover-up to disguise the fact she's secretly a serial killer. Well, have you seen Limahl, Vince Clark or Sinitta in years? I bet Kim knows where the bodies are buried - and that's not just a metaphor. Either that, or her plots are filled with remaindered copies of her 1995 album Now and Forever. Which, you'll agree, is far more distressing.

Fortunately, Kim has thrown in the trowel for a while. She's on the road again, belting out her hits on the Here and Now Tour, flanked by The Human League, Dollar, Altered Images and Five Star.

"I'm really looking forward to it," she giggles, "You get to be a kid again" Indeed, two minutes into the conversation, and it would seem that her idea of detox is putting ice cubes into her vodka and coke.

"I did a gig in Antwerp the other day with Tony Hadley, Belinda Carlisle and a bunch of other eighties people. And I thought, well, I'll go to the bar and just have one drink to be polite, and then go to bed. And 5 o'clock in the morning, I was still in the bar, crashed out on the tour promoter as I saw Tony Hadley zigzag off into the distance . . ."

"I don't actually remember going to bed," she says in that distinctive kittenish purr. "My brother was aiding and abetting the whole situation." Clearly, there's still life left in the Wilde tank yet. At 42 and last seen wielding a pitchfork at Carol Vorderman as horticulture expert on the series Better Gardens (where she single handedly designed 50 gardens), it's easy to falsely assume that the highlight of Kim's day is rearranging the fridge magnets.

However, Kim has two small kids to look after - say hello to Rosie, 3, and Harry, 8. "They're very sweet" googles Kim. Rosie. "requests Kylie all the time", but that's fine "because Mummy loves Kylie". Neither will find a copy of Kim Wilde: The Very Best Of slyly slipped into their stocking this year. "I sing in the car all the time," says Kim, "but my kids always tell me to shut up, so I have to stop. They plead," she adopts a kiddy voice, "No Mummy! Don't sing!'"

The youth of today. No respect. Sell them to the circus, Kim, and buy that wheel-barrow you've always wanted instead.

The thing is, Kim is supremely nice, and she rather likes being a full-time mum; having a job she can hug. "I don't exactly have a femme fatale, austere raunchy image anymore," she maintains, "I don't think I threaten people anymore in the way that maybe I did in the eighties." The way she talks - the kind of unrelenting niceness that makes you think she secretly reads to the blind and rescues abandoned greyhounds - almost disguises her achievement as the ultimate British pop princess.

As semi-legend has it, born on 18 November 1960 in Chiswick, Kim Smith was the progeny of Marty Wilde, the Brylcreemed heartthrob most famous for `Teenager in Love', and Joyce Baker, alumna of the 60s song and dance troupe the Vernons Girls. At the age of eight, Kim moved with her family to the Herefordshire village of Tewin. At 19, she completed a one-year foundation course at St Albans College of Art and Design, but her plans to stay on for the degree course were truncated when she was signed by Mickie Most's RAK records and her first single, `Kids in America', took the world by storm.

"I always to be Agnetha from ABBA or Lynsey De Paul or someone like that," she says, "I desperately wanted to be a pop star, that's all I wanted to be, so when it happened to me, I couldn't believe it. And I though, brilliant, right I'm just going to go for it now."

And boy, did she go for it. Nobody can say Kim didn't hold on for her fifteen minutes. Her worldwide hit paved the way for a recording career that yielded in excess of thirty hit singles. `Kids in America' was, like most of her hits, penned by her father and brother, Ricky.

"The first two or three years of my career, I was still living at home. And I was working with my family, so everyone was there to wrap my knuckles if I started getting starry, which I very rarely did," she insists, "We actually always got on really well. I don't really remember one breakdown in communication or one cross word. I think the crossest I got was with Ricky once was when he was smoking. And he was smoking in the studio. He thought I was being a primadonna"

Kim says she first realised she was famous when she performed on Top of the Pops, with Madness. "I'd always been a big Madness fan," she recalls, "So I thought `Ooh, I must be doing something alright.' She was less impressed with Michael Jackson, whom she supported on his record-breaking Bad tour. "The most asked question of my life has to be: what's it like touring with Michael Jackson?' she laughs, "Everyone's always interested in that man."

Was he really that loopy Kim? "He seemed it from a distance, to me," she replies, "I mean, an amazing talent but a curiously isolated figure. I felt a bit sorry for him." Poor Michael. Reading this, he must feel so upset. I bet he can feel all the colour draining from his face.

Not that Kim was coated in Teflon when it came to criticism. She says her most vitriolic critic was none other than Blondie frontwoman Deborah, nee Debbie Harry. When Kim gained an American number one with her exuberant cover of The Supremes' `You Keep Me Hangin' On', Miss Harry couldn't wait to rip Kim to shreds.

"She was malicious," sighs Kim, "The comparison of me to Debbie bugged her more than it bugged me. I remember her having a go about me copying her which I thought was pretty needless because she had been, obviously, a great icon for that time."

"And of course, I was very influenced and impressed by her. But I never tried to be Debbie Harry. I was always a bit girl-next-door. I never had the confidence or the maturity really to carry off that overtly sexy image. I mean, I was sexy in a very un-self-conscious way.'

"I always kind of avoid her now if I'm anywhere. I just kind of think, `Hmmmn, I'll keep out of your way'"

Hoards of teenage girls had copied her haircut, and teenage boys lusted after her. The eighties had been Kim's decade, but unlucky for her, the 90s were coming up on the inside track; with a clutch of new pretenders snapping at her heels. By 1994, when Kim was guest presenting The Big Breakfast and Kylie was riding in the charts, the message was clear: Kim was still big. It was the pop stars that had got smaller.

Still, speculation about Kim's love life remained rampant. How did it feel, I ask, to open the paper each week and see a different man you were supposedly dating? They must have got some of them wrong, surely? Otherwise the only person absent from the annual `I Slept With Kim' reunion would be the Pope.

"No, it was all pretty accurate," says Kim. Oops! "I was always amazed at how spot-on it was. When they say never believe what you read in the papers, it's a load of bollocks, because it's mostly right. There's no smoke without fire." As Kim's headboard sneaks into the seven wonders of the world, knocking out those overrated pyramids (Toblerones with delusions of grandeur, I say) I ask about Chris Evans. The two briefly dated in a blaze of publicity, following Kim's tenure on The Big Breakfast. "It was all a bit too weird for me," she assures us, "I was his teenage crush. He really freaked me out. I felt most uncomfortable dating him, especially in the public eye."

"But I've always had a sense of humour. I've never taken myself too seriously" she smiles. Good job - her most infamous television appearance occurred on Chris Morris' The Day Today, where she was duped into thinking that London authorities were wheel clamping the homeless. "How moronic of me!" she giggles, "I've always had a strong streak of airhead in me."

"Although," she pauses, "It didn't sound that implausible. Especially in this country. I'm just grateful they didn't target me for CAKE, the made up drug, because they wouldn't have shut me up. I'd have been away."

In 1995, Kim made her West End debut in Tommy and met a young actor named Hal Fowler. It's only fitting that Kim fell "intensely in love" with a man who shares the name of the 2001 computer famous for singing `Daisy Daisy'. They married the following year, and retreated back to Herefordshire. Kim became pregnant with their first child Harry the year after. During her pregnancy, she enrolled for classes at the Capel Manor horticulture college.

"For me going back to college was like basically picking up the pieces," she says, "It was like going back to art college, just before `Kids in America'. You're still working with colour and design and composition.'

"It was great. It was very liberating. I let my hair go back to brown, I got big and fat and didn't worry about trying to look raunchy." Did the girl who once paraded around in a leather to `Love Blonde' ever - in her wildest dreams - envisage that she'd end up fulfilled by a potting shed?

"Well, I always had a sense that it would end one day and that something else would have to take its place. But I knew I didn't really want to end up being a pop star in my fifties. I didn't fancy being like Tina Turner or Debbie Harry so it was a huge question mark that hung over me for years."

Despite this, she's more than content to do the one-off. " A hit record's always a nice thing to have," she says, having just stormed Germany with a high-charged cover version of Steppenwolf's `Born . . .

Please, Kim, no . . .

`. . . to . . . `

I'm begging you . . .

` . . be . . . `

You still have time to pull back . . .

`. . Wild . . . '. "I'm glad I don't have to compete with Kylie's bum anymore, though" she laughs. So no hot pants for the Here and Now tour then? "Well, I've had a rather raunchy leather top custom made". Go on Kim, pull yourself up to full-icon height and show Atomic Kitten how it's done! "Well, I'll have a go" she says gamely.

And with that, Kim has to go. She's off to pick up her kids from school. Hers is a peculiarly British success story: a woman who kicked the world's ass with both feet firmly on the ground. "The transition into America never really happened," she smiles, "`Cambodia' and `Kids in America' did well, and `You Keep Me Hangin' On' was my only number one.'

"In retrospect, if I'd made an investment, I could have matched my success in Britain and Europe, which was much more consistent. I'm glad it didn't happen. If it had, I wouldn't have had the normal life that I have now, which is sacred to me.'

"Success for me isn't measured in Gold Disks: it's my husband thanking me for the flowers I've just given him or reading to my kids." Awww, bless . . . it's still fun to fantasise that the Musical Youth are pushing up her prize-winning daisies though . . .