The Lister Hospital is an NHS hospital based on the outskirts of Stevenage in Hertfordshire. It is operated by the East and North Hertfordshire Teaching NHS Trust along with the New QEII Hospital in Welwyn Garden City.

Prior to 1972 there was a Lister Hospital in Hitchin. Like the present hospital, it was named in honour of Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister, a British surgeon known as the pioneer of aseptic surgery, The new hospital was opened by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in 1972.

Kim Wilde had her first job at Lister Hospital around 1978.

Kim Wilde about Lister Hospital

“Me and my best friend – I think we were about 17 when we had the job – we would go into the hospital and we’d go straight to the maintenance place, where all the cleaning products were, and we’d get straight to it with our trolleys. We’d go and clean the floors. We got on really well with the porters. My best friend she got on extremely well with one of the porters, and sometimes you’d get to meet the patients, that’s a very lovely thing. They’d get to know you and they call you by your name and you ask them how they are. You kind of get to cheer them up. So you get to be part of the staff, you know, the nursing staff almost as well as cleaning the environment. And the money was better than we thought.” (1)

Interview source

(1) Sunday Brunch. Channel 4 (UK), 2 February 2025.

Song written by Kim Wilde, Ricky Wilde, Scarlett Wilde & Steve Anderson.
Sixth track from the album Closer.

Ricky about ‘Love Is Love’

Originally I heard it as a Christmas song. (…) We have a massive gay following and sometimes it’s just nice to acknowledge them. (…) I thought that would be a really lovely thing to do. Scarlett wrote the lyrics for it. (…) My original idea was ‘At Christmas time’… that old line, and now the payoff line ‘Love Is Love’, and so it must have been hard for [Scarlett] to get it out of the Christmas theme. (1)

Credits

Drums: Jonathan Atkinson
Bass: Paul Cooper
Guitar: Ricky Wilde
Keyboards, programming: Ricky Wilde, Steve Anderson
Backing vocals: Ricky Wilde, Scarlett Wilde
Produced by Ricky Wilde & Steve Anderson

Interview source

(1) Unsung Heroes podcast, 20 December 2024

Lyrics

Oh, never be lonely
Love is love
Love is love

Love is worlds entwined
It is yours, it is mine
It’s the space in between
Love is you, love is me
In the dark it moves
It’s the dance of your life

Oh, don’t be lonely
Bring your heart into the light, let it shine

And oh, it hurts me so
When there’s still people in life
That yearn for the afterglow
(Love is love)
Oh, don’t be lonely
Where the darkness meets the sun
Light will prevail
Have faith and you will rise above
Love is love

Love is love

Love is coffee in bed
It’s his eyes when I’m scared
In the lines of their face
Love is art, love is grace

Oh, lonely heartbeat
Let your rhythm lead the way
Be the change

You know it hurts me so
The world that we live in is torn
But hope is worth fighting for
(Love is love)
Oh, don’t be lonely
Where the darkness meets the sun
Light will prevail
Yeah, yeah
Have faith and you will rise above
Love is love

(Love is love)

Oh, eight billion heartbeats
Come together, tooth and nail
Love will prevail
Sure to be rising above
Your beautiful heart is enough

(Love is love)

Song written by Kim & Ricky Wilde.
Fifth track from the album Closer.

Ricky about ‘Lighthouse’

We wrote ‘Lighthouse’, and that was going to be on Here Come the Aliens, but for various reasons it wasn’t used. But I really loved the song. When we wrote Solstice, we couldn’t really think of a really interesting way to start the song. So I was listening to ‘Lighthouse’ and I just thought, ‘how about we just sing the chorus acapella, and then go into ‘Solstice’?’. And it kind of worked. I thought it was a really interesting way of introducing the song. It’s not something you would normally do on any song really, to sing the chorus of another song, it’s a bit of a weird thing to do, but we always loved the song and it stuck with us. When we came to do this album I’d heard it a couple of weeks before. I mentioned it to KIm. I just thought this song was so beautiful and the vocal that she did on it was so lovely, I just thought it would be a lovely addition to the album. (1)

Kim about ‘Lighthouse’

I’d forgotten of course that it had its previous incarnation on the Here Come the Aliens album, and then of course we sang the ‘Lighthouse’ chorus at the beginning of ‘Solstice’ live. And that was a really lovely acapella moment and I really enjoyed that. As a singer I really enjoyed that. And then to reintroduce the song – it’s almost a bit like when we had ‘Numinous’ and we put ‘Numinous’ out, I think it was on the greatest hits album, but we’d had a little snippet of it on the Here Come the Aliens album. And so it’s similar to that in a way. (1)

Credits

Drums: Jonathan Atkinson
Bass: Ricky Wilde
Guitar: Ricky Wilde, Neil Jones
Keyboards: Ricky Wilde
Backing vocals: Ricky Wilde, Scarlett Wilde

Interview source

(1) Unsung Heroes podcast, 20 December 2024

Lyrics

Watching the sailboats drift so calm and sure
Upon a pale blue sea
Just like me
Moved by the gentle breeze
The storm has past at last there’s time to breathe
I am free
I always believe that we had made a pact
But now I know I’m never coming back

Lighthouse shine for me
I’ve been drifting so far
Guide me back from the sea
To the place I was before
I’ve been losing my way
Now I can’t see the stars anymore

And now as I reach the sand my body cold
No one to take my hand
I understand
Truth harder than stone
Dark as an endless sleep
And now we know the devil and the deep

Lighthouse shine for me
I’ve been drifting so far
Guide me back from the sea
To the place I was before
I’ve been losing my way
Now I can’t see the stars

Listen to what she says
The voice inside my head
Tells me the way to go
Here in the dark I know
A lighthouse shines for me

Watching the sailboats drift so calm and sure
Upon a pale blue sea

Lighthouse shine for me
I’ve been drifting so far
Guide me back from the sea
To the place I was before
I’ve been losing my way
Now I can’t see the stars anymore

No I can’t see the stars anymore

CD box set, released on 23 February 2024 by Cherry Pop. The box set brings together Kim Wilde’s first three albums Kim Wilde, Select and Catch As Catch Can, originally released by RAK Records in 1981, 1982 and 1983, with a fourth disc entitled Special Disco Mixes, which features remix versions of ten key tracks.

Music

On the three album CD’s, a few bonus tracks are added. Kim Wilde features the bonus tracks ‘Shane’, ‘Boys’ and ‘He Will Be There’; Select features ‘Child Come Away’, ‘Bitter Is Better’, ‘Watching For Shapes’ and ‘Just Another Guy’; Catch As Catch Can adds ‘Rain On’ and ‘Back Seat Driver’.
The album Special Disco Mixes features remixes of Kim Wilde’s singles during this period. The remixes were created by Matt Pop, Project K and Luke Mornay. Six of the ten remixes were newly created in 2023 for this release.

Formats

Love Blonde – The RAK Years was released as a 4 CD box set only.
See also this page in the discography.

The Swedish band Cotton Club released their self-titled debut album in 1984.It featured cover versions of contemporary hit songs, such as Thompson Twins’ ‘Hold me now’, Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet dreams’ and Kim Wilde’s Love Blonde. That song, translated into Swedish as ‘Hon Går Rakt Fram’ was also released as a single. The band’s lead vocalist Leyla Yilbar-Norgren was credited for this single release as simply Leyla.

Leyla released two more singles, in 1985 and 1986. In 2004 she wrote ‘Lenas Sång’ for the Swedish movie Så Som I Himmelen, on which she also sang.

Letchworth Wellbeing Centre’s launch on Friday 24 February 2017 was attended by nearly 100 people, including special guests 80s pop star Kim Wilde and former manager of Cambridge United, Martin Ling. Also present were the chief executives of HPFT, Tom Cahill; Herts Mind Network, Julie Nicholson, and Paul Farmer, of Mind. The centre is on a prominent site in the old post office on Broadway, in the heart of Letchworth.

On 26 February 2009, Kim Wilde made an appearance during the Live Entertainment Awards, held at the Color Line Arena in Hamburg. She appeared on stage as part of a show by Dutch illusionist Hans Klok.

In May 2002, the London department store Harrods launched its own hi-tech version of the hit show Big Brother, by putting four members of the public in a shop window, completing certain tasks for passers by and viewers on the internet. The participants – Sarah Wooster, Carl Newman, Charlie Parker and Steve Wilson – were selected in an online vote and lived in the shop for a week from 20 May onwards.

On 21 May 2002, Kim visited the LG Internet Family as part of the celebrity challenge for today. In town for the Chelsea Flower Show, Kim showed the LG Internet Family how to make window boxes.

Results from the internet vote were counted at 12 o’clock and elected that the family would make the window boxes blindfold. In a two-hour gardening session, the family had to lay drainage gravel, cover with compost, dig in a variety of plants, and finally sprinkle with a watering can.

They might think they know the place backwards, but it got messy when they couldn’t see what they were doing. Steve and Charlie had to direct a blindfolded Carl and Sarah under the watchful eye of Kim. “They did really well,” she said, “it’s probably the oddest thing I’ve ever done, but all the same it was really good fun.”

Born as Liane Hegemann on 8 April 1969. She attended schools in Grubbenvorst and Venlo, then she studied at the School of Audio Engineers in Cologne until 1998. Her singing career began in 1987 with her first engagements on the Coconut Records label. First she belonged to the pop girl band Twenty-One. For the Euro disco project Bad Boys Blue she contributed the female vocals on the track ‘Come Back and Stay’ and also performed with the group. In 1989 and 1990 she was part of the German-language pop hit formation Xanadu, which narrowly missed qualifying for the Eurovision Song Contest in both years. In addition, she published several hit songs as a solo artist under the artist names Lyane and Lyane Hegemann. 

In 1994 she started the dance floor project E-Rotic with her former co-singer at Xanadu, now producer David Brandes. The music actually corresponded to the style that was very popular at the time, including “Marafrasi” (= man raps, woman sings, in alternating passages). However, what made E-Rotic special was its extreme focus on the subject of sex. The songs regularly contained moans from Lyane Leigh. Well-known titles of the internationally successful project include ‘Max Don’t Have Sex with Your Ex’, ‘Fred Come to Bed’ and ‘Sex on the Phone’. Although Lyane Leigh only appeared publicly for E-Rotic until 1995, she continued to sing for the recordings up to and including 1998, to which her successor Jeanette Christensen then lipsynched. The project ended in 2005.

Meanwhile, Early E-Rotic singers Lyane Leigh and Raz-Ma-Taz formed their own dancefloor project S.E.X. Appeal in 1996 (which Raz-Ma-Taz soon dropped out of). This project continued at least until 2017. 

Meanwhile, in 2008, Lyane Leigh released a solo cover version of Kids in America as a single.

In 2015, E-Rotic was revived and Leigh made a comeback as a studio singer and has since returned to public appearances. 

The Lollies were formed in the Reutlingen district in Germany in 1993. The band consists of Nicola Welsch (vocals), Andreas Welsch (drums, keyboards, bass), Martin Vogel (guitar, trumpet), Klaus Bahnmüller (keyboards, accordeon) and Ulrich Schmauder (bass).

In 1993 they released their first single ‘Feuer und Flamme’. Two years later they met the band Fools Garden, with whom they produced their second single. 

The song Wahnsinn, rewritten by the Lollies and released as a party hit, originally by Wolfgang Petry, was in the top 100 of the media control charts for five weeks under the title ‘Hölle, Hölle, Hölle’. After a few years and more singles and albums, the Lollies wrote a song for the 2008 European Football Championship entitled ‘Adler auf der Brust’, which reached number 64 in the German charts. 

In 2007 they released the album ‘Live Hits – Tour 2007’, which featured a cover version of Kids in America, recorded live.

‘La terra contro i dischi volanti’ is the Italian title of the movie ‘Earth vs. the Flying Saucers’,  an American science fiction film from 1956. It was directed by Fred F. Sears, and stars Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor. The stop-motion animation special effects were created by Ray Harryhausen. The storyline was suggested by the bestselling 1953 non-fiction book Flying Saucers from Outer Space by Maj. Donald Keyhoe. The film was released as a double feature with The Werewolf.

The film was released in Italy in the middle of the summer of 1956, dubbed by the CDC. A couple of movie posters were designed for the Italian version. One poster served as the inspiration for Scarlett Wilde to create the cover artwork of the Kim Wilde album Here Come the Aliens. Another poster was the inspiration for the cover artwork of the lead single Pop Don’t Stop.