There were masses of grey and black habited nuns in the foyer of Liverpool’s Holiday Inn. Upstairs Kim Wilde too is in black but she looks nothing like a nun.
She’s streaming with a cold but still her eyes are clear and there’s no red nose. If she looks this good when she gets a cold… A lucky lady, she must be one of the few females able to say no she wouldn’t want to change any of her features. But she doesn’t take it too seriously. “I think George Michael probably has more clothes than I have, certainly Boy George has, and probably more make-up.”
Her appearance has had “a positive effect” on her career she admits but “I think there’s more to it than being pretty.”
When Kim’s up on stage she’s got the rest of her famous family behind her. Dad, singer Marty Wilde, and brother Ricky produced her latest album, as they have the previous ones and Mum, a former Vernon’s Girl, is still her business adviser. Mum’s family come from Liverpool and Kim’s Gran still lives in Huyton.
“I was brought up a bit here at my Nan’s when Mum and Dad were away touring, Mum used to go with Dad and Nan looked after us. I’m very fond of Liverpool, I like coming back here.”
Although she actually lived in London as a child and then moved out to the Hertfordshire countryside with her family, she feels like the local-girl-made-good here. “I don’t know if it would have made any difference”, she says to how she has turned out if she had been brought up in Liverpool. One thing is for sure, she wouldn’t have been involved in Merseyside’s heroin epidemic. “I’ve not tried heroin or LSD or hard drugs”, she says. “I’ve always seen it as very boring and very frightening.”
Don’t feel ashamed
She did try a couple of puffs from a joint before she realised what it was – and she still isn’t sure what type of soft drug it was. When people talk drugs she says: “I just feel terribly green.” But she stresses you shouldn’t feel ashamed if you don’t know the smart nicknames or phrases.
Her parents treated the subject in the right way for her, didn’t come down so heavy-handed that it became tempting. “They said – if you want to you’re stupid – and played on my conscience.”
What does interest her is the success of her new record, “The Second Time”, her first release for more than a year. “I’m happy with it, it’s a strong single.”
Like the rest of the forthcoming album it was taken from, it was made in the new recording studio her family has built in Hertfordshire. Now 23, she no longer lives with them, preferring to move back to London where she has got a flat. She enjoys living alone. “It’s good for now. I like calling the shots.”