Date: 31 March 1985
Originally published in: Haagsche Courant (Netherlands)
Written by: Aernoud Oosterholt
Congresgebouw, Den Haag: the English singer Kim Wilde and her band
As the years go by, it becomes more and more obvious that one can expect less and less of Kim Wilde. At the beginning of the eighties the on-and-off breathtaking singer climbed the charts with hits like “Kids in America” and “Chequered love”. She could, however, not hold on to that top position. Kim Wilde had to depend on hummable and highly commercial tracks and not from less hit- oriented material. With the relatively small amount of hits a concert of miss Wilde is a boring event.
The hits, which were sung along to, were of course worth listening to, but were not enough to keep hold of one’s attention during the other material that sounded rather insipid and went by like a silent river. The songs were executed rather slow and although the young visitors danced a lot, it wasn’t as danceable as it could have been.
The five musicians never lost control and made it all sound uninspired and messy. Kim Wilde couldn’t change things much with her nasal and cold sounding voice. The material of the latest album ‘Teases & dares’ made painfully obvious that she had fallen to a dramatic level musically. Only the new single, presented as encore, “Rage to love”, offered some sort of hope.
The expectation, after her previous concert, that she could take the place of Blondie without effort, has not come true and will never come true, if she keeps following the directions given by her father Marty and her brother Ricky.
