Proud head has learned to laugh

A hundred flashes flicker at one time over the canvas behind the stage to the Synthiebeat. Magazine pages, which show an always somewhat angry looking blondine, with undercooled sexyness, whose charms no boy in the 80’s could resist.

The biggest difference between this Kim Wilde, who looks at us from the pages of the teenage magazines and the one who strides on the stage of Stuttgart’s Longorn on Monday, is not the quarter of a century between them, but rather the fact that 46 year old Kim Wilde is tired of that angry look and laughs a lot now.

Her songs still make us breathless. While she lets her permed hair blow in the wind of a windmachine, she flirts with her musicians and her fans, she sings the songs with which she always succeeds in singing the melodies and guiding the audience into “Oho oho” choirs between bubbling synths and jagged guitars.

She greets the audience with “Chequered Love”, which is followed quickly by “View From A Bridge” and “Water on Glass”, and admits, to be very happy that there are still so many people, who appreciate her music after so many years. In the hall there are most of all men from around 40, who decorated their walls in their boy’s room with the Kim Wilde posters from the “Bravo” when they were younger. And even if they get a matured Popstar with the concert presented, then Kim Wilde’s voice has still got the girlish charm from in former times, like she proves for instance in the melancholic “Cambodia”.

Kim has also got some coversongs in the program. And it speaks for the taste of the public that it sings along louder with the rather rabiate version of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence” than with “Anyplace, Anywhere, Anytime” – which she sang four years ago with Nena and which brought her on the comeback idea, after she had provided for attention in Great Britain particularly as an authoress of garden books more recently.

“It’s completely beautiful to hop on and off stage”, admits Kim Wilde towards the end of the concert. And at the end of the concerts a quirky version of the überhit “Kids in America” follows, which proves that it would be unfortunate if the songs of Kim Wilde would be discarded into eighties nostalgia shows.