Date: 29 November 1983
Originally published in: La Croix (France)
Written by: Philippe Martinat
‘Girl, you’ll be a rockstar’. The little English girl would have loved to hang out a little longer in Youth Clubs, where these teenagers are kings in England. But his father, Marty Wilde, who had known his glory days as a rock singer in the early 1960s, had decided otherwise. Actually, the girl did not say no.
‘Music has always been the main point of my life and definitely my first love’, she says today. With her father, with whom she still lives at age 23, and he composes his pieces at the same time that he ‘manages’ her career with her brother Ricky, age 22, promoted to art director, Kim has not ventured by chance on her first scene. Also with its cries of frightened English, her pouts that have been compared to Brigitte Bardot, but especially her blond who approaches the great myth of Marilyn Monroe and singers of rock Blondie and Bonnie Tyler, Kim Wilde is very quickly pointed out the British public. ‘Kids in America’, her first single, was an immediate success. Her hits ‘Cambodia’ and ‘Chequered Love’, are in everyone’s head.
Her first two albums, ‘Kim Wilde’ and ‘Select’ have sold over a million copies and her latest, ‘Catch as catch can’, is on course to meet the same fate. Close enough to the variety, the music of the Wilde family is served by an excellent onstage accompaniment by Peter Blanshard (tenor sax and flute), Kevin McAlea (guitar, sax) and percussionist Boris Peter Bransby-Williams, and the exuberance and energy of Kim, who never forgets to take part in the hall of his showmanship.
Last year, she had cracked the Olympia. Sunday night, she still managed to blow the roof off the Baltard Pavilion in Paris, where her fans still had to wait for over an hour. But her fans can stand a little suffering because of the little English doll.