Kim Wilde sits next to me on the couch, a little white in the face. She drinks a lemon with sugar against a beginning cold and against the fatigue, because it’s been a long day for the brand new star who attacks the European charts with her ‘Kids in America’. ‘This is going to be another interview in a long line today’, she sighs, but her eyes are still bright: Kim loves rock ‘n’ roll after all!
The blonde singer has just visited Germany for promotion, where she could be seen in the programme ‘Musikladen’. All the attention, I was really overwhelmed’, Kim says. ‘Just imagine: spending three days between journalists and photographers! I didn’t even have time to rest, because this morning I had to get up at five to travel to Holland.’
After Kim’s debut single shot to the first place in England like a comet, she became busy, but she doesn’t mind. ‘That’s rock ‘n’ roll, it usually goes very fast and you have to go all out, otherwise you will fail’, she says. ‘All the artists who don’t want to give interviews or don’t like photo sessions; it’s nonsense. You know what’s waiting for you and if you don’t like travelling, you shouldn’t start this job!’
Kim talks as if she was in showbusiness for years, and in fact she is, because her father, Marty Wilde, was a rock ‘n’ roll idol in England in the sixties. ‘He is my big role model’, says Kim. ‘My father always kept performing and I often went along with him. At some point my mother and I were doing his backing vocals, but when my mum became pregnant, that had to end.’
Another musical Wilde is Kim’s brother Ricky. ‘He has been in music for a longer time than I am, even though he’s a year younger than me. I always dreamt of becoming a singer, but it was more or less carved in stone that Ricky would succeed Marty, so I forgot about that dream. Last year Ricky asked whether I would like to sing a song for him which he’d wrote with my father. And that song was ‘Kids in America’.
The rest of the story is wellknown: the song was recorded quickly and became a hit just as sudden. Kim is glad: her dream has been fulfilled. She is even more glad with her father and brother: ‘They are very supportive about what I’m doing. By the way, I still have to call my father, because it’s his birthday today’, Kim remembers and with that she runs off to the nearest telephone.