A weekday evening at the Palace restaurant. Little Miss Wilde had chosen to come to dinner (supper rather, some very ugly Parisian candles have extinguished already). I’d never seen that picture (yum) more than once in concert (in Brest, her left eye swollen by a bee sting). I liked almost all of her classic hits (‘Kids in America’, ‘View From A Bridge’, ‘Cambodia’) except the last, ‘Love blonde’, and I was wondering how a smart girl like that could well spend her time: after all, her natural father and respected elder set her up for her job, and she didn’t have the door open for more naughty fantasies … So? So no, Kim Wilde is not Samantha Fox: the thick and thin strokes of her body are not for sale. Even less Stephanie Grimaldi, everyone knows it’s a damn lie… And not to any third Bananarama (‘Shy Boy’, it was good and it was them, ‘Venus’ was ‘only business’). She was there, confident (too bad) and somewhat slammed by a week of intense promotion for his new album (‘Another Step’, it’s called) between trays rags and ‘zines minor (‘ The promo is a school of funny for a girl, and it’s an understatement,’ she burst out laughing.) imperturbably nipp black under a smile to crack through the nipple, saying in a sweet tone on the end: ‘oh, orgasms come and go in life !’… That she writes so vividly!
You are the daughter of Marty Wilde, one of the most famous pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll and at the same time one of the princesses of pop chart: it is a novelty in the matter of conflict of generations, right?
Bullshit! How can we be so dogmatic?! (She takes a soft drink, very suddenly in the mood!) My father (she says ‘Marty’ or ‘Dad’) Because he was just rock – he still is, believe me, he’s not a choir boy – has developed a sense that anyone the evolution of mentalities. Since a kid, I have a special language with him, with which I was able to escape much more, much more murky and worse than the traditional competition. I never felt the need, thanks to what he sent me of his experiences, to prove that I was the daughter of a rocker myself becoming ‘rock’ n ‘roll star’ (bombastic tone, grimace). What I mostly have gained as his daughter is a blessed absence of vanity…
At the epoch of Marty – the mid-Fifties – people who were really believed that rock ‘n’ roll would change the world, he was the ultimate revolutionary in a society barely post-Victorian of unbearable injustice and boredom. When in fact what happened is that the first show-biz that time, half lover, half-swindler, has him and his family, then blown up and ruined – all directions – and after that pop took over, becoming an industry … (She nibbles her warm fish, dreamy).
But the genial or Marty is that he did not stay bitter: he remembers demented concerts, an audience that was his age – eighteen / twenty years – and the same aspirations as him, of an adventure nonetheless dramatic and unique, and I said at the beginning: ‘Little one, you know nothing!’
Rockers
What he thought about the arrival of the Beatles, for example?
At the time, they were small pop idiots, silly puppets, usurpers, that kind of derogatory stuff, but certainly not the soul rockers like him anyway! And then he listened to what they created later, and he melted… Now I understand what happened in his head, and so proud for him: Marty is one of those guys who adored – adored him, literally! – Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly, who were next Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, all these monsters of rock the American homeland, trying somehow to impose this culture rebel to a local environment extremely hostile and obtuse. Like them he came from a poor background, very crude, whose principles stuck fairly well with those of the rock pioneer. And he found himself pipped at the post by young guys in suits strict! It took both he discovers that their home workers and their sounds to the bluff that Marty, a sudden starts not only to respect but also to understand the march of time in music … what my brother and I were given the force of things, since we were born in the midst of all these great events (big gulp)!
Ricki Wilde, co-author, co-producer and brother doubly traumatized …
But no, not at all (she turns down dessert) Ricki is rather the same type of English rocker, as opposed to a Lou Reed, for instance – poor Lou, with a lawyer dad! (laughs) – Rebel natural and more hautan it is very sensitive…
It is said that… We witness the emergence of a new form of British aristocracy, rocker dynasties?
Genetics is not a dictatorship – especially on two unhappy generations! – And what do you do with individual choices, circumstances?? No, what binds us is an organic love for music that spreads across three of us… for now! And as for the English rock. Marty has just finished a book precisely about it.
Women
So like that, miss writing songs now?
Euch … yeah (she is studying the digestive map, I suggest a Marie Brizard on ice, she consents) It was not easy. Just like me to solve my pervasive influences. But let me tell you about the process, conversely, I think, most singers say ‘pop’: me when I was twelve or thirteen people who impressed me were mostly strong singer-songwriters . The Stevie Wonder of ‘Innervisions’ or Carole King of ‘Tapestry’, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Ladies of the Canyon’. I knew all those albums by heart… . And of course I had an idea to be like them. Like them, above all, these women are unique, free, courageous and threw me an eyeful. But how to reach these heights? And at the same time, I had my aloscent idols like Gary Glitter, the Bay City Rollers, all you singles who daydream and make you break out… Then, little by little I’m facing this trend-there to begin with, and my father and my brother began to write for me in this, ‘Kids in America’ and one after another…
It almost seems that it upsets you …
Not at all, obviously, but I may be more difficult now to go where I really want to come, that is to say the center of the music – not in the middle, we know too well what it means (long supported grin)! – The paradox being that to achieve that exact center, it must first have visited the extreme … With this album, I think I will fill some gaps and ambiguities (not unhappy !)… Because from ‘Love blonde’, it seems to me that I had made the tour of a period: the text was too obvious, I took myself seriously in a lightweight type, he had to say goodbye to an image I was becoming restricted to, and if possible have a hit… (Shy smile). But I do not know why all these singles were so ambiguous … Basically, I think it was because of that they have so well, and I still love them…
Who chose the new one, ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’, the Supremes?
Ricki, for me to do a version totally personal, for fun, the way covers of Bowie and Ferry. One day, perhaps I will venture to attack me ‘Baby I love you’ by Aretha .. But only when I am quite happy with everything I made next!
We, the French, just go out for a sell-out tour of the Pope, who has berated many women about their rights, it seems …
I’m not religious at all, and not a penny for mystical either. I’m even those people who consider that the organised churches, whatever they are serve as auxiliaries to the political powers to control the privacy of individuals. And the Pope, I will say this: if I have a friend and learned that she took pills, divorced and often has sex, I would probably not love her more, but certainly not less. Orgasms come and go, that immortality does the same!
