Kim’s masterpiece – 44 YEARS after Kids In America!

Date: 26 January 2025
Published in: The Mail on Sunday (UK)
Written by: Tim de Lisle

In the 2020s we just can’t get enough of the 1980s. Christmas now belongs to George Michael. Harry Styles had his biggest hit by paying homage to a-ha. Alison Moyet, Paul Young, Nik Kershaw and The Pogues all have tours coming up. And there are new albums this week from Kim Wilde and Gary Kemp.

Look away now if you don’t want to feel old. Kim Wilde recently turned 64. It was 44 years ago today that she released Kids In America, the song that is still her signature tune.

Soon afterwards I was working for Smash Hits and they sent me round to Rak Records in St John’s Wood to interview her. I can’t remember anything she said but I can picture her sitting on a black leather sofa in a black leather skirt, being very polite and down-to-earth.

Those qualities carried her to a second career as a TV gardener, successful enough to win a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show. But she never quite gave up the day job and now, seven years after her last album, she has made her masterpiece.

If you’re a pop star attempting a comeback, you either have to reinvent yourself or return to the sound that made your name. When these options popped up on her screen, Kim ticked the second one. This is a punchy, 1980s-style, pop-rock record – so it feels very modern.

She works, as usual, with her younger brother Ricky, himself once a cover star for Look-in magazine. The pair of them were the prototype for Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas, her musical mastermind.

Ricky has always been good at hooks, and now he has fun adding 1980s flourishes. The sound is fast and fizzy with shades of early Madonna and even Gary Numan. One track, Sorrow Replaced, is a duet with Midge Ure in his sumptuously sombre mode; another borrows the brooding drum pattern from Vienna.

The title Closer harks back to Kim’s best-selling album, Close (1988). It also reflects the lyrics, which are a long way from rhyming ‘east California’ with ‘I warn ya’. Kim is recently divorced, after 25 years, from Hal Fowler, the father of her two grown-up children, and you can hear all the stages of grief in her voice, now stronger than ever.