Date: 1 November 2001
Originally published in: Buzz (UK)
Written by:
‘I don’t know where 80’s music will stand in the whole rock ‘n’ roll thing’, said a brunette Kim Wilde, her blonde locks long goe, stained with mud from landscape gardening. ‘But there was some good music and I enjoyed it.’
The Here and Now tour promises a night of hilarity in the company of the stars taste forget, and perhaps, should be left dead and buried. ‘It’s all a bit of laugh, really’, admitted Kim. ‘A load of 40-somethings up on stage…’
With a greatest hits album out (imaginatively titled ‘The Greatest Hits of Kim Wilde’) and this tour with T’Pau, Curiosity Killed The Cat, Paul, Young, Heaven 17 and Go West, Kim is riding high on the wave of 80’s euphoria but she’s changed since her days of belting out classics like ‘Kids in America’ and ‘You keep me hangin’ on’. Nowadays she prefers nothing better than to cavort in the earth and get her hands really dirty as she demonstrates various garden positions on BBC2’s ‘Garden invaders’.
‘I started taking some short courses at a college in Enfield then I got really hooked. That’s when I got sucked into the whole world and I’m currently doing a City and Guilds in Plants and Planting Design’, she said. This is not the first time Kim has changed career paths. In 1994 she presented ‘The Big Breakfast’ and in 1995 treaded West End boards in the Who’s musical Tommy. The tranquil and serene life as a gardener may be a far cry from the jet set lifestyle as a pop star hen she opened for Michael Jackson on the European leg of his Bad Tour.
‘I felt sorry for him really because he seemed very disconnected from reality and from people.’
