Rijs, Marcel

Born on 31 August 1970, Marcel Rijs grew up in a very pop-oriented environment: his brother and sister were heavily into music and watched Toppop every week. Soon he was into Abba, Sparks, 10CC and Ultravox. In 1981 Kim Wilde appeared on TV and she gradually became one of his main idols. In 1983, he got the album Catch as Catch Can as a Christmas present, and this started a collection of albums, singles and 12″ singles by Kim Wilde. The first Kim Wilde concerts he attended was during the Hits Tour in 1994, in Utrecht and Tilburg.

In 1996 he was involved in the organization of the fan meeting. This was also the start of a webpage devoted to Kim Wilde, as the fan meeting was announced on the web. That page gradually became a full-blown website: in October 1998 Marcel registered the domain kimwilde.com. This website kept growing until 2006, when EMI wanted to promote the album Never Say Never. As a result, the original content of kimwilde.com moved to its current domain, wilde-life.com, and kimwilde.com became the website of various record companies, promoting the most recent albums and forthcoming live shows.

Meanwhile, Marcel became involved in various CD releases. In early 2006 he successfully managed to create a new compilation for EMI called The Hits Collection (which originally was intended to be another repackaging of The Gold Collection). For Cherry Pop he compiled track listings for the remastered reissues of Kim Wilde, Select and Catch as Catch Can in 2009 and Teases & Dares and Another Step in 2010. For Universal he provided the track listing for the expanded reissue of the album Close in 2013.

In 2020, Cherry Pop re-released Kim Wilde, Select and Catch as Catch Can again, this time in deluxe 2CD+DVD editions. For these releases, Marcel provided liner notes and compiled the track listings together with Tom Parker.

Together with photographer Katrien Vercaigne, Marcel has also created a few remarkable productions for the web, for instance the Kim Wilde in Brighton backstage report and a full digital recreation of Kim’s award-winning Cumbrian Fellside Garden.